Read the full transcript of Episode 35 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Mary Helen Immordino-Yang joining host Tim Fish to discuss findings from her work at CANDLE, the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education at the University of Southern California. Immordino-Yang and her team have spent years exploring not just the mechanics and outcomes of learning, but the emotional and neurobiological experience of learning.
Tim Fish: In today’s episode, we’re going to take a look at the inseparable relationship between learning, development, and emotion. You know, we’re going to push on this idea that the purpose of school is learning, and instead, we’re going to suggest that we need to put development in the center of the designed school experience.
Well, to get at this, I am so excited to welcome Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang to the conversation today. Mary Helen is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and founding director of CANDLE, the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education. Her research underscores the active role young people play in their own brain and psychosocial development through the narratives they construct, and the capacities teachers cultivate to support student belonging and deep learning. I am confident that this episode is going to be an episode that you play over and over again. Enjoy!
Mary Helen, it is so exciting welcoming you to New View EDU. Thank you so much for taking the time. You know, I've had listeners to our program for years telling me, when are you going to get Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on your show? You going to get her! So this is it. Well, I'm so excited to have you here.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Nice to be here. Good to see you.
Tim Fish: So your research, I mean, I've been following it for years.
I've heard you speak several times, you're constantly referenced in schools as people are talking about learning design and theory and cognition. Can you give our listeners just an overview of your research, the work you do, and the work you're doing right now?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, sure. So I'm really interested in the ways that young people grow themselves by thinking, right? So the ways in which we construct narratives and meaning and understanding of the things that we do, the things that happen, the things that we learn about, the, the things that we witness and experience.
So how is it that we come to be us? How do we come to construct a sense of that and how do we leverage the construction of that sense, right? As a source of learning, of achievement, of interaction with other people, of civic engagement? And, and so most recently we've actually been looking at the ways that adolescents in particular, so middle and high school kids, are kind of interpreting and building stories out of the stuff that they're learning about in school and outside in the world too. And the ways that they construct those stories turn out to have really important implications for their brain development over time.
So we're pulling together methods for studying the brain, methods for studying the body, and you know, what we call psychophysiological reactions in the body. So the ways your heart rate go up, the way you breathe, the way your, your skin sweats, right? When you're excited about something or scared about something.
Right? And then also in-depth methods for interviewing, for talking to kids about the ways that they feel and think about things. And then in tandem we have a, a new line of research, which we've just launched over the last several years, which we're right now really, really excited about the, the early results, in which we've been studying also the ways that really expert teachers of adolescents, middle and high school teachers who we are pointed to by their administrators saying that these are the, this is, you know, Mrs. Jones is the one that the kids go to, right? She's the one that really gets 'em to love math. She, you know, whatever it is.
So actually doing independent observations of their classroom, actually, work, you know, watching them teach, talking to the kids about how they experience that class, what they feel like in there, what they think like in there, how much they really believe their teacher believes in them, that kind of stuff. What they think the goal is, right? And then also bringing those teachers back to our lab at the University of Southern California and interviewing them in depth about what we saw and also about what we're calling their professional pedagogical orientation. So the way in which they understand their work, the way in which they understand their role in the classroom space and in young people's learning and development.
Tim Fish: So here's the thing, right? This idea of how young people grow themselves, right? One of the things that's always surprised me about your research is that there's a lot of surprises in there. There's a lot of things that we, I, as a teacher and as a parent, Think and have thought about how young people grow themselves. And the real truth, their neuroscience and the psychology of it is not what I think it is.
So what are the big surprises that you have discovered on your journey around understanding how young people develop?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. You know, I think one of the really big surprises, although actually when you stop and think about it, you know, my grandma probably could have told you this. I mean, it makes sense, right? But we in education, just don't think of it this way, is the power of young people's, you know, patterns of thinking and feeling. The way in which they experience the act of thinking is absolutely fundamental to the, to the influence of the educational curriculum, the way in which they learn, what they quote, unquote know how to do, right? On the way in which they grow their brains over time. So what we find is that when we show kids really compelling things to talk about, so one of the experimental protocols that we developed for teenagers, because you know, teenagers have an incredible, you know, BS detector.
Sorry for my language, but it's really true, right? You, you can't, you can't try to manipulate their emotion and see how it's changing their learning and they're going to be like, yeah, right lady, right? But so what we did was actually super compelling and the kids loved it. Teachers loved it too. I went around the world, not—virtually, right, unfortunately, but, and we, we culled together stories of teenagers. Real stories of teenagers from all over the world. And put together like a series of mini documentaries, OK. About real kids’ situations all around the world. Things kids are doing, things, kids’, situations kids are in, all kinds of stuff. You know, one example now that we used early on, now we don't anymore because she's famous now is like the early story of Malala, right? In Pakistan or, and why she wanted to go to school. We have videos of her saying they can't stop me. I'll go to school here, there, anywhere, right? We're talking to 'em about, you ever heard of this group called the Taliban, and here's what they think, and blah, blah, blah, right? And then we just ask the kid, how does that person's story make you feel?
Say whatever you want. They're on video. We're sitting there in my office for two hours. What do you think? Right? And what we find, which is mind blowing to me, it's still mind blowing to me, is that the ways in which kids build meaning out of real people's stories…So let me be clear, not what meaning they build, whether they think she's a good person or, or what, you know, like whether they agree or whether they think they would do that.
It's not that. It's how, sort of, curious are they about engaging with the bigger meaning? So what could I learn from now knowing about the situation impacts? What does it mean for me and my friends about how we go to school? What does it mean about not just, you know, her situation?
And the kids that actually try to go beyond the context of the story itself, to also think about, wait, what does it mean more broadly? What could I learn here? What does it teach me about the nature of the world or what the world could be or should be? Right? What are the ethical or historical or future implications? When kids try to understand what those might be, it's that trying to understand what those might be, that above and beyond iq, above and beyond family socioeconomic status, above and beyond parents' education level, right. Is actually predicting their brain growth over the subsequent two years.
So, so, so let me be clear, like. The holy grail of developmental science is to predict the future, right? And how are we predicting the future? We, we are measuring full scale IQ. We're measuring all these things about these kids. Those things don't predict the brain development across high school years in our study, mostly. They predict in some, some kinds of space, like for storing and retrieving memory really quickly, right?
That's predicted by IQ, but like the whole rest of the brain, the, the deeper thinking, the emotion regulation, the engaging with other people, the social meaning making, the sense of self. All of these kinds of very basic systems that are fundamental to being a good human are not predicted by, or even associated with, IQ. They are predicted by this, this what we're calling transcendent thinking. So what I mean by that, I hate jargon, but I had to come up with some word, is thinking that transcends the current story. It's not just about Malala, it's about the world, right? So how do we get kids to think that way?
If, if kids are showing these dispositions of mind to kind of get at the bigger underlying concept, the curiosity of trying to understand a powerful, big idea. Like in the, in the paper that I wrote with Doug Knecht in educational leadership, building meaning builds teens' brains, right?
We actually put in an example of a kid talking about his learning math, and he, he gets fascinated by finite and infinite, you know, and those big ideas are driving him to study fractions because he needs to understand finite and infinite, right? And he needs to understand how you cut things up if you're going to do that, right? So the ways that kids connect these sort of instrumental skills—stuff you know how to do, stuff you, you know, information that you're manipulating—with these big dispositions of mind. That's, that's where we're going next. And the, the other really key thing, I think, which goes back to answering your original question.
What's, what's really mind blowing is again, the discovery again, right? And so I'm not the first one to have shown this, but I'm showing it in development in a way that I think is really quite, like, eye-opening. The discovery that the process of thinking is itself an emotional process. You cannot separate the emotional, you know, the emotional sort of drive and interest and the ways in which people are compelled to try to understand something, from the quality of understanding they build. And we often, traditionally, in education, based in a long history of Western philosophy, basically we think of cognition and emotion as being separate in the mind, right?
But in the real kid in real time, both of those things are actually always there. It's literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about information for which you have no emotional reason or context to engage.
Tim Fish: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. I’m going to say that again. It is literally impossible, neurobiologically impossible, to think deeply about something cognitively that you are not emotionally engaged in.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. Why would you, right?
Tim Fish: Wow. My high school, my middle school, I was sitting in desks in rows.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: I know. So was I.
Tim Fish: There was a lot of time when I was not emotionally engaged.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes. So here's the thing. What do we do about this? Right. And people say, that's not true. I studied history and I hated it. Or I studied whatever it was, fill in the blank.
Or it could be anything. I hated it. I, I didn't care a hoot about it and I managed to pass a test. Right. Lemme ask you two things. First of all, what do you remember about it? There was really no emotion in there?
Tim Fish: Oh no, actually there was a ton of emotion.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. There's a ton of emotion, that's right. So we slap the emotion on by design, when you have to motivate kids with outcome measures as the sole or primary source of reasoning for thinking about that. Why do you need to know this? Because there's a test, because it's going to be useful later, because whatever. When you have to use that, cause you're going to fail or you're going to get an A plus and people are going to love you and you're going to get into some great college, or people are going to hate you and you're not, you know, either way, what you are doing is reframing the goal of that thought process around emotion.
But now here's the kicker. Emotion organizes the thinking processes, but it's whatever you are having the emotion about, that you are learning about.
Tim Fish: So I was learning about how to hate school, how to think I'm not good at math, how to think I'm not a good writer. How to be anxious about, when my eighth grade English class, I'm not kidding you. The whole freaking thing was a grammar textbook lesson. And I'm telling you, Mary Helen, I came out of that class. I thought, I cannot write and I will never be able to write. Because I was, I didn't do well in that diagramming sentences, grammatical thing. Like, I just was like, what is this? And talk about emotion. That lasted all through high school and most of college before I actually ever could break free emotionally, the deep connection between emotion and writing.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes. And actually feel, so here's the thing you need to ask yourself, and you just kind of walked yourself right into it, Tim, because these things really are quite intuitive. Once you uncover them biologically, you're like, well, yeah, I guess I knew that, right? But the thing is, what, you know, what you are having emotion about is what you're thinking about. And what you're thinking about, you could maybe learn about, right?
And so that is the thing we have to look for in education is where, there's always emotion. There's always emotion. It's impossible not to have it unless you're dead. OK. You know, almost literally true. So, what is the emotion about? How can we shift kids' and teachers' emotions from being about outcomes, results, you know, that kind of thing, to being about the ideas that undergird the, the work that produces the outcomes and results. So it's not about not having outcomes and results. Of course, you need to accomplish concrete things, right? I mean, if you never write a paper, how are you going to learn to write a paper? Right? But what we want is for the teachers and the kids to get really emotionally engaged with the power of the process of writing and thinking.
And then the outcome is just the, you know, it's just that little icing on the cake. It's the end point. It's the big level, you know, goal at the end. But it is not the thing that is most powerfully motivating the work. And in our education system today, we so often make the outcome the result. The achievement at the end be the motivator for the work.
We do it all the time, and that is a cheat. It's basically laziness on our part. As the adults in the system, we can't make the actual information relevant enough. Right. Or actually, I shouldn't say, we can't help kids find the relevance in the information, so we just slap on some reason why they ought to care, which has entirely to do with the endpoint and nothing—and the implication in the long term—and nothing to do with the actual ideas you're learning about.
Tim Fish: Yes. And, and therefore nothing to do about, you know, the, the real emotion. Right. So two things are going through my head.
One is, I'm, I'm going back and thinking about my own journey as a learner, and I'm thinking about where was it that that emotional connection was made? And then, you know, the other thing is, I'm thinking about my own journey as a teacher, and I'm thinking about when was I ever that teacher that created the positive emotional connection to the content? And when was I the teacher who didn't? What have you found about the conditions of teaching that create that emotional connection or the opportunity for that emotional connection, which then leads to deep learning?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. That's a great question. So overall, what I would say is super pivotal, is how teachers construct meaning themselves, about their role in kids' lives and about the role of the work they're assigning, facilitating, orchestrating right opportunities for in kids' development. And I say development, not learning, because learning is, we think of learning as the aim of school, but actually it isn't. It shouldn't be.
The aim of school is development. It's to grow people's abilities to think and to engage with complex information and situations. Now you have to learn along the way to be able to develop.
Tim Fish: But the, but the goal, the stuff, right? The stuff is not the goal. The content is not the goal.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: We stop short. It's like we put the cart before the horse. Actually, it's like we have no horse. We just put the cart.
Tim Fish: But also what I thought I heard you just say, which totally, if I'm right on this, it answers so many questions. It's a huge like, ka-boom in my head, right? This idea that how a teacher thinks about her or his role as a teacher and how they connect and feel about that role has a huge amount to do with how that person will construct the environment that can either be successful or unsuccessful for young people.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: And of course, just like for the kids who need content to think about, right? For the teachers, they need content to think about. Teachers need to know a lot about young people's development. Right. They need to understand, I mean, how, why would we ever dream of putting a preschool teacher, you know, in a classroom of three year olds without them appreciating the developmental stages that are normative for three-year-olds, right?
But so much of the teaching we do at other grade levels, and more so the older the students are, is divorced from the development of those people. How much do our, I mean, of course there are teachers who are really phenomenally expert in youth development, right? But how, how much do our mainstream teacher professional training programs focus on what it feels like and looks like to be an adolescent who is engaging with growing themselves personally, psychologically, intellectually? What does that mean? Just the way we do this for three year olds, right? And we need teachers to have a much richer, deeper, more dynamic understanding of the developmental paths, the developmental processes that young people are engaging in as they are thinking about fill in the blank content, because they're people thinking about the content.
They're not just computers who leave their, you know, who do the X, the Y, the five paragraph essay, the math problem, while they leave their, the rest of themself at the door. That's not how human beings act. We're not installing information into a person like a squirrel, like, stashing away its nuts, right?
What we're doing is inviting a person to engage actively with an orchestrated set of materials and content in a way that will help facilitate them naturally coming to realize what matters there, and the power of those tools for understanding something important about ideas and the world. And when you reframe the education process in that way, all of a sudden the kind of outcome measures and emotional sort of trickery that we use, frankly to control kids, right?
Begins to look more and more misguided and ridiculous and actually developmentally inappropriate. And you know, just to take it one step further, I mean, we're looking around wondering why we have a mental health crisis among our youth, right? You know, the mental health crisis. When you talk to kids who are really desperately in a psychologically desperate situation, they don't tell you I'm so stressed because I have so much of this, that, that's not the root cause. What they say is, I dunno why I'm here. Who am I in this space? I have no grounded sense of who I actually am. And of course, keep in mind that it's very much like the, the South African Zulu saying, right? I am because you are. We construct our sense of self and self-awareness in the context of the communities and relationships that we, that we are part of.
So it really reframes the learning process as a much more active, co-constructive, culturally situated, dynamic process of inviting people to build knowledge together, to think about complex ideas together, to do things together and to reflect on those doings in ways that push their own understanding forward over time. That is actually the process of educating a person. But our schools too often are not designed around that process, and the deep irony is the more either ambitious the students are on the one hand, or the more in trouble they are because they're really, you know, deficient, quote unquote, behind, they have quote unquote learning loss. The more we double down on these building block pieces of semantic knowledge, which are useless outside of the context of the thinker themselves, metabolizing them in ways that help them understand something about themselves in the world.
Tim Fish: When you talk about how we've disconnected it, every classroom you walk into, the only thing that's in the room, the only, we were only design, the only thing we've designed around is the content. Right? And, and we, and really the students, and this is the other part that blows me away, is that the students who make progress with that content and do well, quote unquote, are the students who on traditional measures have been the ones that have been able to emotionally manage that situation. Right? Where, because what you said is it's disconnected from IQ. So this idea, this is why you always hear the teacher say, well, would I change that lesson up? And we did this new unit where they were discovering something or other boy, these kids that normally don't do well at all.
Boy, those kids thrived in this environment, right? Because we changed the emotional context, right? We, we moved the space to something that they could see themselves in. So what, what can a teacher who's listening to this, who's like, I was a seventh grade math teacher, what can they do to get better at understanding that context of the students they're working with?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: A couple things. So there's simple things you can start with, you know what I mean? Like, these are just my ideas. So actually if listeners out there have ideas, like send them back, I can use them. I think asking yourself in a really honest way, right? In a really humble way, for each of your students in your class.
I've got this kid in my third period class, Tim Fish. What does he feel like in my class? What does it feel like to be him in my class? What is he experiencing from his own subjective perspective as he is engaging in the work here? And ask yourself that for each kid. And if you really don't have a good sense of what kids are experiencing, that tells you something.
But also, none of us are, you know, are, are complete mind readers, right? So the other thing it helps you know, what to do is to go talk with the kids. Say, Tim, how are you feeling? Like, what, what are you thinking about here? What, what, what is it like for you to think about this? What, where are you on this trajectory of math?
Right? And engaging the kids in a way that you really start to honor their experience of the learning process, because it's the experiencing process that is going to organize the development that I said was the main aim, right? You can always go back and learn about x content, but developing yourself as a thinker, I mean, not that you can't always go back and do it, but that you take with you at any content, right?
So the thing is, how do I, as a teacher, really stop and recognize that what I am here to do is not just convey content, it's, I'm here to orchestrate a mini world in which the kids and I together are discovering the meaning, the power, in deep understanding of this content. What would I do to help them feel fascinated and empowered by thinking about it?
Tim Fish: It's funny, my father told me, I remember when we were taking a walk before I went to college, and he said, look, you're going to take a lot of different classes. He was a college professor. He said, you're going to take a lot of different classes. He said, here's the key. And it's so funny, he's, it's like you said about your grandmother, here's the key.
He said, you're going to just go into every class and you're going to just say, how can I create an environment where I love learning about this thing? He said, just, just make it, figure out how you can tell yourself, you know. European history, you know, art history, whatever it is. Just like figure out how you can like, be like, I'm going to be excited about that.
He said, because he said when I did it, every time I did it, I just learned a ton and I really enjoyed it.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: It works. You learn a ton. Yeah. That's the thing. And, and let me also say that, that in and of itself, practicing pulling together the wherewithal to make yourself care about something. To deep dive into something for the sake of understanding it and for the sake of the power of knowing, right? That—we need schools and parents and, and communities that set that up. But that is a skill. That is a developmental skill we need to support kids in, in acquiring, right? It's not like your job as a teacher is to entertain.
Tim Fish: Right?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: It is not to fascinate or to wow or to, you know, overwhelm the kids with your amazing, you know, chemistry explosion experiment to the point where they're like, all eyes are on you. And that is, quote unquote engagement. That is also a cheap trick, right? Your job, I mean, it's ok, once in a while, that's fine, but the, your real job is to help kids build the wherewithal within themselves to search, dispositionally, for the meaning in content and situations. And another way to say that is lifelong learner, but that doesn't do justice.
Tim Fish: Yes, to care about chemistry when I leave the room. Right? And so it's less about me.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes, very much not about you.
Tim Fish: It's not about me at all as the teacher, right? It's about them, which is obvious, but we've always said that. But it's, it's, it's in this design of this micro world, right? Where, where I need to really do it. So I'm, I'm curious, when, what does it look like when you are in an environment, when you're in a school environment where it's really going well? Like what are the characteristics that you see when you're in a classroom or you're in a space where the mini world has been designed in a way that's created the, really, the conditions for, and I love your, your thing.
It's not about the learning, it's about the development.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Well, one thing that you see is if you go up to kids and ask 'em, what are you doing, right? They can actually tell you what they're doing and what they tell you is grounded in—or if you say, well, why are you doing that? Right? Right. What's the purpose of doing this? They can explain to you that the reason they're doing it is related to some idea or skill that gives you leverage to understand some dimension of the either real or imagined world, right? They are very aware of the reasons why they're doing what they're doing, and they are curious about the fundamental ideas. Whatever developmentally that looks like, it's going to look different in three year olds than seven year olds, than 15 year-olds and 22 year-olds, right? But they are there doing that work because they need to understand something about the world, broadly construed, and they appreciate that what they're doing now, even if it's boring instrumental practicing of algebra two equations or something, is actually a system of ways of, of understanding the world.
There's a bunch of tools that are incredibly interesting and cool because they allow you to figure things out about the world that you wouldn't otherwise be able to know. So to what degree do kids, and what I'm actually saying here is think transcendently about the purpose of their work. Right. To what degree do kids appreciate that there is a, that there is something here of value and that value is not simply tied to an instrumental outcome.
Like, I'm going to get to college, I'm going to get to do this, I'm going to get an a, I'm going to get a pizza party, you know, or I'm going to not get in trouble. I'm going to not have to do summer school. I'm going to not, right, right. Something of value that pertains to the ideas behind the work itself, whatever that work is.
Tim Fish: Yeah, so, so what I'm thinking of as I'm thinking of my, all my experience of many places where I've been in schools, right? I think there, I think those things do happen. I do see them.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh, there are schools that do this. Yes.
Tim Fish: I, and I do also see them in lots of different, but you know, where I see them in a lot of schools, I see them in the afterschool stuff.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh, I know.
Tim Fish: Right? I see 'em in robotics club, I see them in the Rocket Club. I see them in the theater stage. I see that on the athletics field. I see it in the, you know, all these different places. I see it in the kids who are doing art club and they're making things after. Like, it's like, why can't we? Like, why is it that the majority of the day that, you know what I mean, is often that not mini world that we want and it's all this other stuff that kids love and they remember.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes. And you're building all kinds of knowledge that goes beyond robots, right? That you know, and I don't need to–
Tim Fish: Yes. But if you walk in that space and they're building a thing or they're making the documentary film…
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes. You ask 'em, why are you doing this? They have a reason for doing this, right? Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, here's the thing.
I mean, and I should say Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine wrote about that in their book, right? But, but I think the real reason is because we are shackled by our allegiance to the wrong outcome measures, the wrong accountability measures. And I'm certainly not the first person to say that, you know?
I mean, it really, really got, you know, the nails in the coffin with no child left behind, right? But I mean, even in subtle ways before that, and, and right? It's the fact that we are in the end, at the end of the day, in the mainstream school class, beholden to these accountability measures that do not capture development.
They're measuring the wrong things.
Tim Fish: Yes.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: And there are schools that have systematically built alternative kinds of accountability measures that aim specifically to capture the dynamics of the development of the thinking that went into the work. And of course, you need to also have the work, but the work is not the proof, it's the engagement with the thinking processes that is the proof, you know? And the thing here, about that, is to be able to enact that kind of teaching and assessment and the, and to be able to support kids in, you know, owning their own process in that way. you must understand the nature of the developmental processes. The kids are engaging and, and, and we don't spend nearly enough time and effort, you know, helping teachers appreciate and understand and know what to look for in the development of, of their youth and their thinking.
So they don't have the skills to notice. They don't know what that would look like. And, and so they're not equipped to be able to manage that kind of work because it, it, it takes a huge amount of expertise. Teachers who do this well, districts and, and systems that have built out these alternative kinds of assessment project portfolios and things, but really done well, they can be done poorly also, right? When that's done really well, those teachers are experts on human development. They are experts on teenager learning. They're experts on middle school social dynamics and how those play out through the art making process. You really, we have shortchanged our teachers and not provided them the, it's like we've tricked them and pulled the rug out a little bit.
We've not provided them with the kind of information or skills to really be developmental researchers in their own classrooms. I mean, I think back to Piaget, everybody's heard of Piaget, right? You know, and he really was one of the first developmental scientists in the modern ish era of science. Of course, there were like people back for thousands of years who did the indigenous scholars and all kinds of things.
But, you know, he comes to mind as a, as a modern scholar of, of development who, who showed the power of actually sitting down and watching a child struggling to figure something out. And then by interjecting small questions and things in developmentally appropriate ways and watching where they made mistakes and what they got right, and how their reactions to each word and stuff, he tried to infer the, the, the thinking processes of the child as they were trying to build understanding of the world. And that is what we need to be doing. Our assessments, our dialogues in the course space, our interactions with kids around their work, need to be focused on lifting out the ways in which they are making sense of things, the ways in which they are appreciating the content, the skills, and its meaning in the world, and focusing around supporting them in enriching those, in growing the complexity of those appreciations.
And to do that, of course, you need to have access to resources and content. Right. But the, but you have to have a reason to need that content and, and that's the reason.
Tim Fish: Knowing what we know, there's an awful lot that we need to be doing, need to be doing a lot better. Like, like this is not, again, and this is some of the other conversations this year, this has come up. This is not a tweak thing. This is not like, OK, everything's really great, but you know, we just need a tweak around the edges.
Like we, we are doing harm.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, we are.
Tim Fish: We are. And that's not overstating.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: No, it's not overstating.
Tim Fish: There are many places where, in the sort of global education space, where we are doing harm to young people. And so we have to understand that we going to stand up and we going to be willing and able to understand that and, and take it on.
So as we go, as we go forward I'm just curious because one of the things for me is I think about where we've been, where teachers have been. As we think about the connection of emotion, we think about how we think about ourselves and how we think about the learner, and I think about learners and then I think about the last three years of COVID and everything we've been through, and how we're in this place we're in.
And so, to your point, I think all these conversations about learning loss, right? And all these conversations about kids having covered as much content because the, the thing like that is just a perfect example of how far we have to go with really understanding and also understanding what's happened developmentally.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: That's the thing.
Tim Fish: When the emotional world has been really–
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: –So upset and skewed.
Tim Fish: Upset and skewed. We've got, and this is why school heads are saying to me, and teachers are saying to me when I visit schools, like they're saying, we're seeing kids in a place we've never seen them here before. It's never looked like this before. Kids are struggling in ways that we've never seen before, and that's a lot because of where we've been.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. There's a lot of layers to that phenomenon. OK. So, so, and we should also acknowledge that for some kids who really felt unsafe at school or who really felt like they could not be their authentic selves at school, you know, COVID was, was a blessed relief for them to be able to stay home and learn on their own.
Right. So it's, it, it really is about the, the way in which, again, it comes back to the subjective experience of the person in context. One thing that we know unequivocally about human development is that we are deeply social and cultural creatures. There is no such thing as a person without a culture shaping how they are that person self, right. It, it, it's impossible. We don't raise, you know, you know, stick two babies on an island by themselves with a nurse to feed them. They do not grow up speaking Latin. They don't grow up at all. You know, not to make light of it, but there's, you know, there's, there's really heartbreaking, you know, documentation of kids, for example, in, raised in institutions in Romania, things like that where, you know, it's not just that kids become sort of you know, socially dysregulated or emotionally kind of you know, underdeveloped and, and cognitively sort of stunted.
They, they actually don't even physically grow their bodies and their brains in the absence of, of adequate tight social relationships. You know, you get, you get 17 year old kids who are three feet tall, right, in those situations. Right. And their brains are a third the size of kids who were raised in foster families.
Our biology is triggered, literally our genes to grow our brain and our bodies are turned on and off by the way we feel subjectively in social interactions. That is a major force in development. The way we make sense out of things, the way we experience things, is teaching our biology what kind of human to grow.
So we're actively adapting to our circumstances, which are mainly social circumstances, and our relationships and our ways of being with one another, and our ways of thinking and feeling are literally the triggers that are turning our biological instructions to grow brains in particular ways, and, and healthy bodies too, by the way, along particular trajectories. And so what that really brings home to us is that we can't pretend that the experience of the person is not like, and by that I mean their subjective feeling of having been there, right? Is not a fundamental piece of how the having been there is shaping them.
And so the thing about the pandemic is we have, you know, you know, for health reasons, massively disrupted, curtailed, the nature of the social community in which kids were growing themselves. And what that really meant is we were outsourcing this onto a hugely impoverished, two-dimensional, you know, interface. Which was better than nothing and, and is better for some people than for others, right. But is in anybody's, you know, world a, a really very thin version of real, real interactions with other people.
So what we've done is outsourced on the learners, the ability to conjure a social context from just the two-dimensional screen interaction. Which, you know, as a really a developed adult with many other social resources around me and a family, I could learn on, on Zoom, right? Perfectly. What, because I'm bringing to it all the rest of what I don't get.
But we can't expect that from 13 year olds. They do not have the maturity of social, you know, of sort of social awareness yet to be able to bring to that context all that they're not getting from it. You know what I mean? It would be like, you know, us, us shushing a baby over a, over a phone, right? You can't do that. You'll actually have to put 'em on your real heart and they have to be part of the real physically connected right context in order for them to sort of co-regulate with you. You know, it become, you become less and less dependent on the real physical and real world social interaction the older you get to a degree, although it's not really true, elderly people still need social relationships and interactions that are in person.
But, but you know, but in strategic ways, you can learn to leverage these coming from a place of more developmental maturity. But children aren't in a position to do that. And so we have really, really sort of stripped away all the sort of, you know, situated social support for the work they're doing in school, which leaves them, their brain basically searching for it, right? What has it taught their brain? They're at, they're not stopped developing, right? That's not that they haven't been learning either. It's just the stuff they're learning isn't what we had hoped they would be learning. They've learned a bunch of other stuff, which might or might not be beneficial lessons for the long run.
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: And so what happens is the kids' brain is left growing itself to look for things in the world that might be, right and, and that can quickly turn into anxiety, which is what we're seeing. Alternatively, you get this very dysregulated sort of switch, you know, sort of switching where they get stuck alternatively in a place where they're all alone.
And so they're building in their mind these ruminative narratives and feelings which never get actually tested in the real world, against other people. And that alternatively can produce depression, right? So, so we've really kind of, you know, adapt—our kids, as they adapted themselves to the circumstances facing them, have come, have become, you know, have grown into these patterns of thinking and feeling that are maladaptive in the real world and at a, in a, in a and in a and in a broader developmental context.
And now we need to help them rework those patterns. And the thing is, you can't do that just in some esoteric, like, let me tell you how to do it way. You actually have to relive the experience of constructing a cultural space for, for trusting and for being in community together and heal through the reliving. So now more than ever, our kids need the, the sort of to be well known in school, to be agentic in school, to feel they belong by virtue of the fact that they are a human member of that community. Right. And that they're also responsible to that community for, because they, it's in part through their contribution that others have a community.
And that kind of civic orientation is what is really, I mean, we've always needed it, but now it's very clear that we are desperately, we are desperately in need of it.
Tim Fish: Now more than ever.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Now more than ever. Mm-hmm. And that same brain that's doing these things is also thinking about math or not, right. Thinking about reading. Right. Right. It's not like you got a separate brain that does the academics and then you've also got your feelings over on the side.
Tim Fish: They're completely connected.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Right. Yeah.
Tim Fish: Mary Helen, this has been an unbelievable conversation, as I knew it would be. It was–
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: –It's always fun. Yeah.
Tim Fish: What a gift. What a gift to spend time with you. I know that our listeners are going to, this is going to be one of those episodes that I'm going to listen to again and again again because there is so much packed in there.
I'm going to use that ten second rewind button on my phone to go back and be like, wait, what did she just say? Because like, there is so much good stuff in here.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Thank you. Yep. Take good care.