Read the full transcript of Episode 78 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returning to the show to share what she and her team at USC CANDLE are doing to answer deep questions about the science of teaching and learning. Her new research focuses on a cognitive process she calls “transcendent thinking.” She joins host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson to discuss why transcendent thinking may be the key to unlocking long-term developmental outcomes for students.
Debra Wilson: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is, I think, pretty well-known to our New View EDU audience. We’ve brought her on before. She’s a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and she is the founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, also known as CANDLE.
Her work pairs in-depth qualitative interviews with longitudinal brain imaging and psychophysiological recording to reveal coordinated mental, neural, and bodily processes by which adolescents and their teachers build meaning—deliberating on the abstract, systems-level, and ethical implications of complex information, social situations, and identities. Her research underscores the active role youth play in their own brain and psychosocial development through the narratives they construct, and capacities teachers cultivate to support student belonging and deep learning.
In today’s conversation, we’ll dive into her recent longitudinal work on transcendent thinking—a powerful concept that connects students’ reflections on purpose, ethics, and civic life with measurable changes in brain development. We’ll explore what this means for school leaders, how we can design learning environments that support emotional engagement and civic reasoning, and why the most meaningful learning often begins with a story, a question, or a moment of connection—or even just curiosity.
Whether you’re a head of school, a classroom teacher, or someone who cares deeply about the future of education, this episode will challenge and inspire you to think differently about how we nurture the minds—and hearts—of young people, and really consider ultimately the purpose of education.
I’m happy to call Mary Helen a longtime friend, and delighted to have her with us on New View EDU.
Mary Helen, it's so great to be with you. Welcome back to New View EDU.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: It's great to be back, Debra! Good to see you.
Debra Wilson: It's so good to see you. I just want to share with our listeners, Mary Helen and I have actually known each other for a long time, and we both ended up in education and it was so fun to connect again, I don't know, maybe 14 years ago, something like that.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh God, really? Man, you're making me feel old.
Debra Wilson: Yeah. I will, well, you know, it is, I won't get into our graduation dates from high school, but we've known each other for a long time.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: I know.
Debra Wilson: But Mary Helen, one thing I've been so impressed with in your work over the years is that you spend a lot of time really thinking about and researching and bringing to educators in really concrete ways how we serve the whole child in education.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh yeah, yeah, no, it's true.
Debra Wilson: Really what's happening in the just process of education and how to think about making that better.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yep. Yeah, for real. It's serious. Yeah, that part's serious. Yeah.
Debra Wilson: That part is very serious. And you know, I've never asked you this question, so I'm going to ask you now. Like, what sent you down that rabbit hole? I mean, in all of your education, and you have a lot of education, like, what sent you in that direction?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: I was a teacher before I went back to graduate school, which that was kind of happenstance, long story there. But I was also very interested in human beings and culture and language, how we kind of build things together, how we come to relate to one another and how we shape who we are through those processes. I mean, I wouldn't have said it that way as a college student, but that's really, you know, all the things that I was doing were kind of integrating a sort of natural biological approach together with a more humanistic kind of approach, and just trying to explore the world and relationships.
As a teacher, I just happened to be teaching in a school district south of Boston that was among the most diverse districts in the country at that time. We had 81 languages spoken in a junior, senior high school of 1,100 kids. We had first generation refugees from all over the world and
I was teaching seventh grade science, and just watching those kids use some of the concepts that I had just taken from graduating from a really great university program and try to make sense of their own lives with it, I realized that I had found an extremely interesting problem space where I could integrate these sort of studies of culture and development and the ways people understand and relate to one another and make meaning and how we become who we are.
And also study from a more systematic scientific way, the ways in which we could support and understand those processes. And all in the space of a problem that is, I would argue, amongst the most important problems facing humanity today. I mean, the ways in which we educate our young people are absolutely critical for the future of our species and our planet. And so that really hooked me. That confluence of different ways of thinking about a super complex lived problem in the space of a structural opportunity to do something constructive about what we were learning really just grabbed me.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I love the way that you frame that. And we were talking earlier about how I finally managed to find a human through trying to contact Xfinity. And you're commenting that sometimes finding humans can be rare. I mean, how are you thinking about exactly how you frame that in this time of AI, where AI feels to be just everywhere, right? Like that's—
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah, no, I was it's places we don't even know it is, right. You know. Yeah. I mean, finding a human can be rare, even when they're right there in the room with you.
Yeah, I think we really need to, as a species and as teachers, especially, we need to lead the way in this as educators, as parents, think about what's good for us. Right? How do we leverage new tools and new technologies in ways that benefit us, the world, society, the planet, and that are also preserving and maintaining and innovating within the social fabric that we live.
I mean, for the history of humanity, we have leveraged our new technologies in the service of both good and evil. And technologies like AI are tools, and we don't fully understand this one yet. It's a very emergent kind of a tool. And so I think what we really need to do as educators is safeguard the well-being of our small, delicate, but also incredibly robust, under certain circumstances, humans who are in our care and think about what does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we support that and how would we advocate and how would we design opportunities for young people to learn together that by virtue of having engaged in those opportunities, help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?
Debra Wilson: Yeah, it's a tough thing in education. I mean, I feel like sometimes people rightly or wrongly, they can throw rocks at us for not moving fast enough, particularly when you're talking about children and you're talking about things that we don't know a whole lot about yet. Managing the pace of change and managing the pace of adopting new technologies, it's complex.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, and the ways in which we use the technologies so that they serve us and our young people well without, you know, and while mitigating inadvertent harms or downsides, right? That takes time and effort and thoughtfulness.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about some of your more recent research. Really looking at transcendent thinking. And I know you've been sort of reflecting on the broader ethical, civic, and personal implications and how it spurs brain growth in adolescence. So tell me a little bit. I am not caught up with you on this.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, so we did a series of studies with a group of 65 teenagers from all over low SES, high crime, high immigrant areas of Los Angeles, right? Because these are kids who are awesome and they're usually not adequately represented in scientific research. So we did, what was at the time when we collected these data, the first longitudinal study of social brain development with them, you know.
So we went into neighborhood schools, high schools from across the region here and asked kids to participate in our studies with us, which entailed coming to our lab at USC, University of Southern California, and basically talking to us for a day about all kinds of topics, but we really made clear to them that what we were interested in understanding is how they understand the world. How do they make sense of the things they're witnessing? Who are they? How are they hoping for the future? How are they curious about the things they witness and understand in various ways? And what does all that mean for who they want to become and how they see the future of their communities and also the world more broadly?
And we also engaged these kids in neuroimaging. So we put them into the brain scanner while they did things like just rested, so that we could actually measure the structure of their brain and the, the spontaneous self-organization of things as they're daydreaming and just thinking about whatever they want. And we asked them, what were you thinking about, you know, in there and stuff like that. And then we also did a, a designed experiment that would be consistent across all the kids. Cause you need to, you need to have a consistent protocol in science that you can compare some things that are apples to apples, right?
And so what we did there was a very simple but remarkably powerful paradigm. So I just worked with my students to pull together 40 stories of real teenagers from around the world who were in really quite extraordinary circumstances of various sorts, right? Kids like Malala in Pakistan, who at that time was like 12, right? Who was resisting the Taliban, right? And just got real interviews with people like her, that we could find on the web. And we just put them all together into little documentary stories.
And we just, I sat with those kids one at a time for two hours. And I just made clear, look, I want to understand how you feel about this story. How do you make sense of this? So I just sat with them on video camera, right, so that we can go back and study all manner of behaviors and all kinds of things and just asked them, you know, here's this girl in this place called Pakistan. Do know where that is? OK. There's this group called the Taliban. OK. Here's what they believe. And she wants to go to school. And here's an interview with her and her dad explaining her situation. There you go. Now, how does her story make you feel?
And then we moved them into the MRI scanner and we just showed them again, a reminder of the story where it just said, here's that girl from Pakistan again. And here she is saying, you know, they can't stop me. I'll go to school here, there or anywhere. Right. And we just asked them to think about the story and to push a button to tell us how emotionally engaged they were with thinking about it, how meaningful they found it, that kind of thing, how emotionally poignant, right? And they could answer anything from like, my pointer finger, right? Like not very much, I'm kind of done thinking about it, right? Like not that important, not that interesting, not that emotionally engaging to me, which there were stories mixed in there on purpose so that they would have a range of reactions, all the way up to like, I'm overwhelmed with emotion thinking about this. Like I can hardly not cry in the scanner or hold still, that kind of thing and everything in between.
And then we took them back out of the scanner again and talked to them about, OK, so that girl in that place called Pakistan, right, you pushed like your ring finger. That means you were really emotionally engaged, really moved by her story. What were you thinking about? Right. And then we analyzed those interviews and then we, over time, we brought the kids back again, two years later, for another round of neuroimaging. And then we followed them into young adulthood, into their early twenties.
We're still learning from those data, right? Five years we studied those kids. So what we first found that was just absolutely astounding is that, depending on the way that a kid talked about a story in the interview, as compared to how they talked about other stories, right? So to the degree to which they engaged this thing that we're calling transcendent thinking, which by the way is not a new thing. It's just sort of a synthesis of many things that have been talked about about teenagers for a century of developmental science. Right, not even starting with Piaget, but Piaget sort of formalized the notion that, you know, in teenagers, kids spontaneously in adolescence start to extrapolate beyond the current situation to build bigger beliefs, values, ideas that what we're calling transcend situations, that move across situations, a core sense of who you are, no matter what context you are in, right?
Those sorts of stories, basically, that we begin to tell ourselves in adolescence really take on a particular kind of urgency and power. And we wanted to understand how that kind of, sort of deep agency to make meaning out of our lives in adolescence may both correspond to neural mechanisms and potentially promote healthy development over time, even healthy brain development over time.
So what we found first was that indeed, depending on the way, you know, one kid answered and described their feelings to a story like Malala versus a different story, we're talking about like the entirety of the brain, basically, is activating and deactivating in these complex networks that are systematically showing us a pattern of engagement, of activation and deactivation that was invoked specifically when kids were engaging in a transcendent kind of thinking about a story, as compared to engaging in a more concrete sort of context-dispendent, direct interpretation of a story where they might say something like, Oh, that girl in Pakistan, that's so sad. That's so hard. I feel so bad for her. You know, that I wish I could help her, right? Which is a totally legitimate response.
But like there's more to learn from her than just about her. It's about, wait a minute, you're telling me there's people in the world who aren't allowed to go to school, even though there's schools available. And the reason is somebody else decided they don't believe they should? Like that's not right. That makes me really upset, right? That makes me want to work harder to try to do something about that maybe, said one girl to me, right?
So they get all the way from one story to this grand moral pronouncement about what should be for everyone everywhere, myself included. And what's my role in trying to make that happen, right? And that's a fantastic example of a young person showing us this transcendent way of thinking.
And then what we did, that was truly—this part is like beyond belief. When we brought the kids back two years later and scanned their brains again, what we found is that we could predict the future growth of their brain, right? The growth of their brain between time one and time two, based on the way in which they reacted to those stories at time one, irrespective of IQ. Irrespective of their family's socioeconomic status in this sample, irrespective of gender, right?
The more kids grappled with trying to make deeper meaning, the more they would then go on to grow the connections between these major networks of the brain over the subsequent two years. And then, what we found that really like is astounding, is that the brain growth, not the kind of brain that you have compared to each other, but the degree of change over that time period predicted identity development in late adolescence, like 19, 20 years old.
So how much kids reported, yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of adult I want to become, the things I stand for, who I want to be. And I spend time thinking about those things with the people around me who I really trust and care about. Right? As compared to saying things like, you know, I don't really know right from wrong. I just kind of follow along with what everybody else does. I don't really try things on my own. I just go along with the crowd, right? Which we know is not good for you, right? We've known that for decades, right?
And then that in turn predicted how much kids like themselves in young adulthood in their early twenties, just like slide a little slidey bar. How much do you like the person you've become? I really love who I am now. I really hate who I am now, slide this along, right? Here's a list of people, you could have relationships in your life. Your parent, your own child, your partner, your friend, your boss at work, your teacher at school, your whoever. Go down the list and for anybody in that list that you have a person in that role in your life, slide a little slidey and tell us how much do you feel satisfied with the quality of the relationship you have with that person? And what we found was that we had this developmental cascade across the five years of data where you could not skip any indicator to get to the end.
So in other words, the way kids responded to these stories at the beginning of the study did not directly predict how happy they were at the end. They had to show us that they were grappling with big ideas at the beginning, that they grew their brain across the time, right? The more transcendent they were, there was a continuous effect.
And the degree to which kids did that, actually predicted that they were going to, we think, go out into the world over the subsequent two years, continuing to think about the things they were seeing in these more active, reflective, transcendent ways. And that in turn was exercising these networks of their brain, we think. And in so doing was physically and functionally growing the brain over time. We literally can predict the increase in the robustness of the white matter fiber tracks that are the wiring of the brain networks, the physical wiring that carries signals. And in turn, that increase, the functional one, the ways in which the brain was changing its coordination actively during just resting state scans, predicted identity development, which in turn predicted young adult outcomes.
So what we have here is this incredible suggestion that when kids dispositionally engage with complex, curious, deep thinking about big ideas. Not only are they deeply engaged by that, but they are physically and functionally growing their capacity to think in ways that over time produces a neural substrate that supports well-being. So we're actually growing a robust brain that enables us to be well, to manage in relationships, and to feel good in our own skin and to develop identities that transcend that are about big ideas and purpose and values.
Those tendencies in kids are incredibly beneficial, we think. And now here's the kicker for the education audience. Many of our, I mean, we're sort of preaching to the choir here in this podcast, but many of our most standard educational practices, especially for adolescents, are not just, you know, not supportive of the development of these dispositions of mind. But we actively punish them. We do not want our young people to come to school and ask, why are we studying it this way? Why do I need to know this? What other way could I think about this history? Whose history are we forgetting? Whose history are we privileging? What other kinds of possible futures could we dream up? And why or why not would we want to have those come true?
So when you have to switch between I'm paying attention to what's in front of me, I'm learning the details, I'm learning how to do these procedural things in math and whatever it is and chemistry, right? And then I'm also by my own accord, agentically tipping myself into a space where I'm transcending. I'm thinking about, well, why am I doing this? What is the big idea, right? Rolling this ball down this ramp in physics class isn't just about the ball and the ramp. It's about this hidden other force that I can't even see, that is the same one that's holding my feet stuck to the ground and making the moon make the tides. Wow! Right? And when you start to take your small everyday actions of calculating how balls roll down ramps, and build them into a narrative that connects to those other hidden ideas. That is first, extremely powerfully motivating to students. And second, our research suggests, may develop dispositions of mind that are beneficial for their psychosocial growth, their scholarly growth, and even their brain growth.
Debra Wilson: So years ago when you and I first talked, I think you were starting this work maybe. And you told me, you said there was no learning without emotion. And now it sounds like emotion also drives broader movement.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, it seems to really drive it. You have to ask yourself a question that in education, we generally don't think of this way. We often think about, OK, we need emotion. What emotions do we need to have? But what's more important is not what emotions are happening, but what are the emotions about?
Are the emotions here about ideas? Are they about this powerful notion of this hidden force that's holding the planet together and making this ball roll, but also sticking my feet to the ground, right? Or are the emotions about immediate, mainly about immediate outcomes, happenings, things that you can directly observe, right?
So, and you know, like how I did on this test and like, well, I get to go to college. So it's like, whatever you're having emotion about, is what you're thinking about. And whatever you're thinking about, you could possibly learn about. So we need to ask ourselves, what are the emotions about here? If they are mainly about, did I flunk this test? Am I going to do that? That is what you are learning about. You are learning about how to navigate the structural aspects of school, right? Which, you have to have some emotion about that. A little of that just keeps you on track. No problem, right?
But the problem is we often privilege those kinds of emotions far too much. And at the expense of emotions about the actual content, the ideas, the power of understanding, you know, how quadratic equations enable you to calculate financial outcomes for you, right? And to plan ahead, right? Things that are really powerful abilities, that when you have mastered them, enable you to move through the world as a different person. You're understanding from a different place. You're noticing patterns. You're noticing potentials. You're noticing contexts and their implications in ways that you hadn't before, which makes the learning feel like a personally relevant journey.
And what we also think it's doing is really changing your disposition to engage with information in these more complex, multi-perspectival ways that enable you to not just know things and do things, but systematically query why and how you know them, and other ways they could be known. And multiple perspectives on the same information, and multiple ways of integrating or reconciling things that appear to be contradictory, and sitting in that complex, uncomfortable, potentiated space in which information is not settled. It can't be concretized too readily. It needs to stay in this place where we're grappling with it and developing dispositions, which is difficult even for adults to do, right?
To sit with that kind of uncertainty, to foster that kind of intellectual humility, that kind of disposition for engaging with multiple perspectives and for really thinking about why and how do I think the things I do, and how else could I think about these things, and what are the ways in which my own understandings, beliefs, knowledge, assumptions could be deconstructed so that I can first appreciate more effectively their implications, but also potentially rebuild them in different ways and change the way I think and understand over time?
Debra Wilson: So like in the classroom, right? So educators listening to our conversation here. I mean, how do you encourage this without making it one more thing on the teacher's log file, right? Like just, I feel like we just keep loading. I'm hoping AI takes some of the mental load off in some easy way.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Right, so there are some kinds of jobs that AI could probably do really well in order to free teachers to do the stuff that humans need to do. And we need to figure out how that needs to happen, right? But exactly.
So we also did another study, which we're just publishing now, where we went around Los Angeles again in these inner city, low SES neighborhoods, because again, those schools are, they don't get enough attention from people who really genuinely want to understand what are some of the things they're doing really well and amazingly, right? And what can we learn from them?
We went into high schools across the region and we asked their principals, who are your superstars? Right? Who are the teachers that you think are really just doing great and the kids love? And we recruited those, 40 of those amazing, awesome people. And they all said yes and came to the lab and like did this whole long study with us.
Debra Wilson: So these are all educators, these teachers.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah, these are teachers, right? These are teachers. And we said, we hear you're fabulous. Will you let us study you? And they were like, OK, you know, they were awesome.
Debra Wilson: I feel like that probably doesn't happen enough in science.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Exactly. That's exactly what they were like, really? Sure. You know, and they were so great. my God, they were so great. All of them. OK. So what do we do? So we sent a team of people that were separate from my lab, you know, from Bank Street School of Education at that time, headed by someone there into the school to actually videotape and analyze that, those teachers' practices in their classroom life.
We measured their psychophysiology. We actually had them hooked all up like Borg to like special bracelet watches that like, were measuring their vagal tone in real time and all this kind of stuff, so that we could actually analyze the way in which they kind of biologically, physiologically manage themselves in the classroom space. And then we brought those teachers to the lab and they spent an entire morning with us, a long morning with us, talking about their practices, how they understand their work, the kids.
And then also they had neuroimaging. They went into the MRI scanner while we did various things with them, asked them to do various things that were their legitimate work. So one of the tasks that we did in the scanner was, we had worked with each teacher in advance to design an assignment for their class of the form, you know, this week we've been studying about, you know, la la la, fill something in, you know, right triangles, you know, the causes of the civil war, the rules of badminton, right? Whatever it is. And, you know, why is this important? What's interesting about it? What have you learned? What would you explain to somebody else, right? Like some very open-ended questions that kids gave about the big ideas, right?
And so we had the kids do these assignments and shunt them directly to us on the internet. So the teachers had never seen them. And then we gave those to the teachers in the scanner. So we said like, OK, here is your student, Mary Helen, here's her paper, please grade her paper while we're scanning your brain. OK, here's your student, Debra, please grade her paper while you're scanning your brain. OK. And then like that all the way through. And those were really Mary Helen's and Debra's papers, right? And then we said, OK, now we're just going to give you some papers of kids that you don't know, and please grade those.
And we told them we've pulled those off the internet. They were things kids have put up, thinking about these ideas on the internet. Well, what we actually did was we wrote those, to be equivalently complex answers as Mary Helen's and Debra’s, right? But they're not Mary Helen’s and Debra’s. There's something some lab technician wrote. One of my students wrote, right? And we said, OK, this isn't a kid you know, great. And what we found again is just amazing, right?
So the first thing we found there was that the teachers, when they were grading their own students' work as compared to work of kids they don't know, they gave the same grade to the matched papers. So Debra got a B over here. The person who was the fake Debra over there got a B, right? If Mary Helen got a C over here, fake Mary Helen got a C over there. But the brain activity that they showed to their real students as compared to the students they didn't know was massively more. In all these regions that are the same networks, that were involved in adolescent brain growth, right? Consciousness, self-awareness, memory, thinking about transcendent things that are beyond the here and now, attention, emotion, social kinds of processing, all of that.
And then here's the part that I think really speaks to your question. We also asked those teachers to do some tasks, one of which was we asked them to give open-ended feedback to their real students. We said, OK, here's your student, Mary Helen, one minute. What would you say to Mary Helen if you had a meeting with her about how she's doing? OK, here's your student Debra. What would you say to Debra if you had a meeting with her about what she's doing? And they provided feedback to their students that was just open-ended. And then we went and looked intensely at that feedback and coded it for the degree of what we're calling social cognitive complexity, which is really, you can think about this as the degree to which they engaged in helping the student grow themselves as a human being, as a thinker, as a scholar in the space of this feedback, as compared to helping the human being just instrumentally complete the tasks they need to do.
First thing I want to say, across the teachers who were in the study, every single one of them was super dedicated, super hardworking, loved those kids, but they had a vast range of knowledge about human development in the school context. How do you actually support the development of young people across these opportunities to learn in school?
Teachers said things, some of the teachers said things like, you know, Mary Helen, you're really a great student. You're a model student. You always do your work. You advocate for yourself. I do wish you'd push yourself more, but overall you're doing just fine. Keep going at what you're doing. Or, I'm almost paraphrasing these teachers. I'm almost saying what they said. Mary Helen, I just can't chase you around. I beg, I plead, please do the, I can't help you. You don't do your homework. There's only so much I can do and you really aren't fulfilling your potential because I can't chase you around all the time.
As compared to teachers who said things like, Mary Helen, you've got amazing ideas, but I want to see you really develop your sense of intellectual courage. How are you going to start to bring those ideas into the classroom space so that you can really reflect upon them and use them with other people? So let me give you some ideas, something you can do. Start speaking when you have an idea, explain it, and then take the time to stop and listen to other people's reactions and then listen to their ideas, and bring them back and reflect on those and think about how could I re-understand what I'm thinking about here in a more complex way? What do I think about their reactions? And then you start going from there.
Or Mary Helen, this is the kid who never does their work. Like, I think your problem is you get to a point where you just run out of things to think about and you just think I'm done, right? And so how are we going to really begin to get past that? You need to teach yourself. It's a skill really. You need to teach yourself how to have more ideas. Here's how you start. Start listening to other people. And then when they have an idea, you think, well, why do I think about that? And then you answer. And then meanwhile, you're… right? So those teachers were thinking, they're not doing more work. They're doing different work. They're thinking about the opportunity to teach as an opportunity to help young people develop their dispositions of mind in the intellectual space.
And now, right, let's step back and look at those chemistry equations. Let me show you again how to balance them. Cause you're going to need them if you want to understand about this big idea, right? So what we found was that that complexity in the interviews that we did about these teachers' feedback actually explained statistically the difference in the brain activity when they were grading their own students. In other words, the effect in the brain was driven by the degree to which teachers were giving this kind of complex developmental feedback.
And what that taught us is that this is a little glimpse into what the really effective teachers know how to do. And I should also say the teachers who are talking that way were also the ones who independently, without knowing what they said in the lab, were the ones who were rated as promoting the most depth of knowledge, richness of content, equity of access to the content in their classroom by a separate team of observers, right? You know, all the true framework from Berkeley, like the big stuff, formative assessment, right? Like equity, all these things that we really care about that we know are important in school. They were the ones who were also most effectively enacting those, by another team's judgment.
So what we show is that teaching well is not more work, it's different work. It's work in which you really engage with the thought patterns, what it feels like for these students to be thinking. What are their emotions about here? Are they having emotions about, you know, the amazing power of right triangles to help us, you know, sort of understand the geometry of the world and how powerful it feels to really engage in that kind of mathematical thinking? Or are they having emotions about, yay, I did it, I'm done. Or, boo, I didn't, and now I'm freaking out because I'm going to flunk, right? Because when the emotions are mainly about those outcomes, what we're finding is that the school is not promotive of development in the same way. It may be promoting quote unquote learning, maybe, but in the service of what? What are you going to use that learning for?
If you go out into the world after this, are you moving through the world with a sense of curiosity, with a sense of empowerment that comes from understanding in these dispositionally more complex ways? And that takes us back to the original study of the teenagers, where the kids who were moving around through the world, thinking about things in complex ways and trying to grapple with what they were really noticing and seeing were the ones who were growing themselves more.
You need to ask yourself, how do I design project opportunities, lessons, content that really potentiates young people to deeply dive into big, powerful, important ideas and to emotionally experience the power of those ideas. Because when you do that, you are unleashing a whole different level of what we would call in psychology, construal, a different way of making meaning out of the world, a different way of viewing and understanding information that can be applied across any domain, right? And that is, our other data suggest, potentially really healthy for brain development and personal development.
Debra Wilson: So given what you just described with these teachers, if you were a head of school and you're designing professional development for teachers, what would that look like? And then two, because I might forget this one related to AI, you know, there are all these tools now. So AI tools can grade papers or mark them up, right? But when I'm listening to you talk, it strikes me that there is an element of, it's almost conversational, right?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yes, it is conversational.
Debra Wilson: You know, like when you're getting students’ assignments and you're reading, I mean, there's the, you know, comma splice, run-on sentence, whatever, and if you're in humanities world. But then there's also this sort of bigger picture notion of like, where is the student? What is, who is the student? Like, where is their brain? How are they understanding these as bigger concepts? How are they engaging in the classroom? What am I seeing? Because it's not just what are you witnessing in the classroom. It's like, what work product are you getting? Like, what does that look like?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: We have a program called CoLabs, which is part community of practice, part research laboratory, which you can learn more about at our website. And we're going to be putting out a lot more materials about this soon. And we're producing professional development materials that schools can freely access and use to be able to have these conversations.
But here's what I would say is the not so short answer. What you really want to do in your professional development is two things. First, and this one comes first, we need to understand adolescent and young people's development, child and adolescent development. We need to understand it in terms of the intellectual, scholarly, personal, emotional capacities, the capacities of mind that young people are developing as they are engaging with the curriculum and the opportunities we're providing. Ask yourself, how does having learned this here, with these people, in this way, change the way in which a young person now shows up in the world ready to do more, ready to think? How does the opportunity to have thought about these things here changed who they are? And we really need to design that way.
And then, part two, and this is the part where I think maybe AI could be useful. How could we break down and rebuild potential different opportunities and orchestrate different kinds of contexts in which young people can be invited to strategically leverage the affordances of that environment in order to build for themselves these ways of knowing and understanding. So rather than thinking about us giving things to kids, us doing things to kids, which is implicitly the metaphor in most of our professional development, right? How do I deliver this content is how we talk about it. And then how do we measure learning outcomes?
OK, learning outcomes matter and delivery is a piece. Like you have to show up with some stuff, right? But those are step one. Those are what you're putting in your cart. Who's the horse, right? What kind of horse do we have pulling the cart? Is it a willing horse? Is it a horse that is afraid of wind and that's freaking out because it's walking under trees, right? Is the horse motivated, right?
So what we really need to think about is how do we leverage tools to design opportunities to provide kids with the information and the invitation they need to enter into a context in which they are likely to discover for themselves the ideas and skills you need them to have moving forward. And that's how I would think about professional development.
Debra Wilson: That's really complex, right? Like education is a stream. People love to ask me about the best school and the best college and the best this. And I'm like, all the data is going to show you is what happened however many years ago that person was in that. You know what I mean? All of the kids are different. And the way kids are experiencing adolescence and childhood and everything now is different than what we experienced when we were in school and elementary school.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Of course. Yeah. And then there's core similarities though. There are core pieces of being a human being, which don't change, you know, right?
We need relationships. We, we thrive on experience. We are biological beings at our core. And according to my colleague and good friend, Carol Lee, right? We ignore that at our peril. And I think we need to come back to that. Yeah.
Debra Wilson: So tell me about the AI piece, right? And that conversation between the educator and the student in terms of what they turn in. Like, can we bifurcate? So if AI can grade, I don't know, a 10-page paper on Hamlet, right? And it can catch comma splices and whatnot. When we're thinking about AI reducing mental load for teachers, and I routinely say this to schools, right? The relationship always has to be at the center of education.
And so when you're thinking about AI, the first time I ever talked to heads about AI, it was really fun. I was showing them what Dali could do and we were messing around with stuff. And so we got into that question, would you let teachers use AI to grade papers? And immediately it was like a split, like a bunch of heads were like, absolutely not, not under any circumstances. And other heads were like, well, it depends. And I can see where that would make sense or save some time or whatever.
But I think we don't want to lose the relationship piece in that feedback loop either, right? Because otherwise they get separate from that classroom.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Otherwise, how does the teacher understand the kid?
So I would really treat AI like any other tool. What does the teacher need to accomplish in this space? They need to understand and notice things about the dispositions of mind that that young person is developing in that disciplinary space, right? So how are they coming to understand mathematical ideas, right? What does it feel like to them as they think through mathematical ideas?
And there's, we did this really cool studies with a woman named Solange de Nervaux who did part of her PhD dissertation in my lab around, for example, the brain activity that eight to 12 year old kids in Montessori schools versus traditional schools in Geneva, Switzerland engaged when they did math, and the kids got the same scores on our math exam thing in the scanner, right? They got the same number of problems, right? But they got far more wrong in the Montessori group because they didn't skip things they didn't know. Turns out they were figuring out in real time and we could see that in their brain. Whoa, you mean that's wrong? Oh, cool, let me see why. Let me see if can figure that out. Oh, and then the next time they were more likely to get it right. Whereas the traditional school kids kept getting the same things wrong over and over again.
And even more so if you put a little picture of an adult in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, just a nice friendly adult face, just sitting there watching you do your task, all of a sudden they really freaked out and learned nothing, right? We are teaching kids that learning is about producing outcomes, where what we need to do is reframe so that the outcomes are processes, they're information. So in the degree to which an AI could help you design an opportunity or help a young person really dissect their misconceptions in a mathematical context or something like that, if it could be useful as a tutor in that way, but the problem is, when we substitute knowing how to do this thing that it just taught you how to do for the actual purpose of school, which again is not learning, right? Learning is the means, the purpose ultimately is human development. How have you changed who you're able to become next for having experienced this learning? That is the ultimate thing.
So when we can use AI to help kids access content, skills, ideas in a more nuanced, structured way, then it seems to me that could be helpful. When it starts to take the place of your ability to notice the ways in which young kids are experiencing subjectively the thought processes, the way in which they are developing their abilities to make arguments, to care about things, to think about complex information, to move from the mathematical equation solving to the big idea of infinity, right? Whatever it is, that's where teachers will never be replaced by machines, I think.
Debra Wilson: I love that. And that is a perfect note for us to end on today. Mary Helen, it is always such a pleasure to get to catch up with you. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Yeah. My pleasure.