In his new book, “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People,” David Yeager, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a FutureEd research advisor, promotes a new leadership style for working with young people, what he calls “the mentor mindset.” Combining an extensive literature review with years of Yeager’s own psychology research, the book asks us to rethink our assumptions about young people and how we interact with them. Given Yeager’s particular focus on teachers and education, FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen spoke with Yeager about how teachers should think differently about adolescent students, and what his work reveals about how to support both students and teachers in the nation’s classrooms.
You argue in the book that we need a different framework for thinking about young people ages 10 to 25, that we’re wrong to believe, as we have for generations, that 10 to 25 is a developmental phase marked by immaturity and irrational behavior. What’s the evidence behind abandoning the incompetence framing for young people?
I start the book with an argument about young people’s competence because I think the root cause of the poor outcomes of many students is that we just accept a neurobiological incompetence model for young people without really questioning it. It doesn’t make sense to say, “You know what? We’re going to hide you in a closet until you’re 29, and then you’re allowed to speak up in our culture and our society.” I found again and again that the most successful organizations were ones who thought of their young employees as amazing resources who do great work.
If you have bought into the idea that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex, that they’re impulsive and short-sighted, that they don’t think about what they should be doing in the future, then you won’t support young people in meeting high standards because you believe they are unlikely to meet those standards. But what the exemplary educators I found and followed, like Sergio Estrada, the great physics teacher working in a challenging school, and Uri Treisman, the world’s greatest calculus professor, all have in common is a high-standard, high-support instructional approach I call “mentor mindset.” I argue that we need to think differently about young people in order to change how we teach, parent, and manage them.
Almost any program designed to address an adolescent misbehavior has disappointing results. For example, we keep reinventing health class again and again, and it’s still, from a kid’s perspective, “Thanks for this long list of drugs I should now try.” We never get to, “I understand my body now and I’m ready to make excellent choices.” And yet we keep acting as though it’s the only way to go. Skim the abstracts of NIH-funded studies of how to promote health behavior or look at any guidance coming out of the Centers for Disease Control. It’s very much just telling people what to do, and we know that’s not effective.
So, what is the mentor-mindset that you suggest as a different way of working with young people?
When you have authority, influence, or power over anyone, you have a choice about how you interact with them, especially when you need to correct their behavior or their performance.
Imagine a teacher like me giving critical feedback on an essay to my students, or a law partner giving feedback on a brief to a junior associate, or a surgeon giving feedback to the residents at the teaching hospital. If I’m honest and tough and critical and point out all the things that you are doing wrong, I am potentially helping them improve the work, but I’m also potentially crushing their spirit.
The alternative is to lower your standards, withhold feedback, don’t be honest with them, but be very nice, caring and complimentary. That doesn’t feel good either. You’re either crushing people or you’re lying to them.
And what our research has suggested is that there’s a third way, and the third way is to maintain exceptionally high standards but accompany those standards with enough supports that they could meet them.
This third way is the mentor mindset. The theory underlying the mentor mindset is that young people can accomplish great things. They can make contributions if they have sufficient support.
My book has five chapters on mentor-mindset practices, including transparency, questioning, stress, purpose, and belonging. In transparency, for example, one important lesson is making sure the mentee knows that you want to be helpful. I lead with the example of the teacher, the new teacher, where the principal shows up and is in the back of the room stone-faced with a checklist listing all the things that the teacher is getting wrong. Only at the very end of the year when the teacher attends the principal’s retirement party, and hears all these people say wonderful things, that he realizes the principal thought he was being super supportive. The principal, on the other hand, thought it was obvious. It’s not whether you, the mentor, think that you’ve been clear—it’s whether the other person in a vulnerable position thinks that you’ve been clear. That’s the perspective that matters. And that’s why my punchline takeaway for transparency is you probably have to say things about three or four times more than you think you need to.
What led you to your new paradigm for working with young people?
These ideas come from my experience as a teacher and wishing I had better guidance on how to motivate my students. I worked in a low-income school, and I found it very difficult to engage students in the hardest work. I wasn’t given concrete advice about what I was supposed to be doing [to motivate students], or even about what was possible. I probably did a lot of things that were ineffective as a mediocre early teacher. And then when I looked back over 80 years of research, a lot of individual researchers had concluded that a high-standards, high-support approach is ideal. If anything, that makes it weird that the approach is not already our default.
Another source of the mindset model were teachers I met through a project I was doing to identify 20 Texas teachers who display strong growth mindsets in their classrooms. I write a lot about one of those teachers, Sergio Estrada, a high school physics instructor, in the book. The idea behind bringing the 20 teachers together was to create a teacher-training program based on the mindset teachers’ practices and their views on things like grading. We’re now studying the program, looking at 200 teachers and about 20,000 students in 6th to 9th grades in a double-blind, randomized trial where teachers are taught the mindset practices I outline in the book. I want to know if we can change teacher behavior in a way that helps kids.
What gets in the way of teachers adopting these practices? If it were as easy as it sounds, it seems like many more people would already try to incorporate these suggestions.
As part of our research, we ask teachers, “What’s getting in your way of doing these mentor mindset practices?” That includes things like the “wise feedback” I describe in the book—when teachers add a note that says “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know you can reach them”—or letting students correct mistakes on exams as part of a reteaching strategy. Teachers often say they’re in a race to cover content and they can’t go back and reteach anything. It’s a lot of bureaucratic pressure with either formal or informal accountability that gets in the way of teachers carrying out mentor mindset practices.
Furthermore, teachers feel isolated. For years, the other physics teacher at Sergio’s school was his best friend, Javier. They would co-teach everything, plan together, talk about their classes every morning. When Javier left to go to a different school, Sergio became an instructional coach. You can’t even ask Sergio to be Sergio in isolation. Thinking about pods of teachers who can collaborate in networks is the next phase of this work.
There are other adults besides the classroom teacher who interact with students and could provide that mentor mindset to students. For example, tutoring has exploded since the pandemic, so now thousands of students are working with tutors during the school day. Could we also think about using other adults like tutors to better motivate students?
One of the initial studies that sparked the book idea was Mark Lepper’s study of expert tutors from the 1990s. He started following the best one-on-one tutors in the Bay Area, and he compared them to mediocre tutors. And there are a lot of differences, but one of the biggest things was that the best tutors ask questions 95 percent of the time, and the mediocre people spend all their time on explanations.
What I’m wondering about tutoring is whether it’s opening people’s eyes to the fact that, “Oh, wait a second, the regular classroom teachers should sometimes be reteaching material to students that they didn’t master the first time?” One thing Sergio does is allow students to retake any test in his class and get all the points back. He wants students to interrogate their mistakes. But to do that, they have to come in during office hours, before school, during lunch, during an off period. To teachers like Sergio, individual tutoring is just a logical consequence of having a truly growth-oriented classroom.
Of all the research you did for the book, and the research studies you’ve led on these topics, what’s been the most surprising finding?
The part about stress is always surprising. People are convinced that a kid’s level of stress is always a bad thing. Especially if you are an equity person or you wake up every day saying, “I care about kids,” the idea of causing them stress, and making them cry or have anxiety is really unsettling.
But every single mentor-mindset leader I interviewed, when I spoke to them or their direct reports or their students, they talked about crying a lot. We have a flawed perception that if you’re leading correctly, there’s no negative emotion and no stress. Sometimes being a mentor means being tough and causing distress—and helping the child interpret that stress as a sign that they’re doing something important and meaningful.