Ep 58: How to encourage our kids to "fail", it can be a gift! with Jessica Lahey, NY Times best selling author of "The Gift of Failure"

This weeks podcast is joined by  educator, writer and speaker Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey), who holds a deep interest in exploring what motivates children to learn.  Jessica is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a J.D. concentrating on juvenile and education law from the University of North Carolina School of Law.  She has also spent many years as an English and writing teacher, a correspondent for the Atlantic, a commentator for Vermont Public Radio, and she wrote the “Parent-Teacher Conference” column for the New York Times.
She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.  She also cohosts a writing and creativity podcast, #amwriting.

Dr Jessica Hochman is a board certified pediatrician, mom to three children, and she is very passionate about the health and well being of children.  Most of her educational videos are targeted towards general pediatric topics and presented in an easy to understand manner. 

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Your Child is Normal is the trusted podcast for parents, pediatricians, and child health experts who want smart, nuanced conversations about raising healthy, resilient kids. Hosted by Dr. Jessica Hochman — a board-certified practicing pediatrician — the show combines evidence-based medicine, expert interviews, and real-world parenting advice to help listeners navigate everything from sleep struggles to mental health, nutrition, screen time, and more.

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Hello hello welcome back to ask Dr. Jessica the podcast where I strive to give you quality medical information with a goal to help you in your parenting journey. I'm your host and paediatrician Dr. Jessica Hochman. So I am thrilled to introduce you to this week's guest, Jess Leahy. Jess is a teacher, Mother podcaster author, an all around superstar. You may have heard about her from her New York Times best seller the Gift of Failure. So today we are going to talk all about her book, which I highly recommend reading. It is so well written and it has so many pearls of wisdom. So I am thankful to say the least that I had the opportunity to speak with her. Also, I just wanted to say before we get started with the interview, thank you so much to all of my podcast listeners, I am so appreciative of your support and feedback. And thank you for all of your kind podcast reviews, I do read all of them. Okay, now on to the podcast. Hi, how are you? Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, I'm so excited to chat with you. So I have to tell you, there are very few things that I read in my life where I feel like it really makes a difference in my life and your book, The Gift of Failure, I can honestly say has has positively affected the way that I parent, and I'm so appreciative of your book. And I hope that everybody listening, I really want to make a plug that everybody listening should go out and buy this book because it is it is life changing. So thank you so much. Oh, I am so grateful. That means so much to me. And it's always really weird. As a writer, you know, I work on I hack away at these words here in my office in the middle of the woods in Vermont. And then suddenly they're out there in the world. And it's always unimaginable that like they're, you know, in people's ears or you know that people are sitting, you know, on the beach reading the book, it's it's really wonderful to hear that they actually make an impact on the other side. No, absolutely. I think you really helped me take a step back and look at parenting in the big picture sense. And really think about what kind of humans do I want to raise? And what do I want them to be like, ultimately. So thank you very much. And I am so excited to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this all week. So first, I want to ask you, the title of your book is The Gift of Failure. How did you what what inspired you to write the book? And let's start there, like what what inspired you to write the book? Yes. So I was a teacher for 20 years, I've taught every grade from six to 12 I happen to love Middle School The best I just I love them. And I was teaching middle school actually had a pretty, you know, pretty high pressure, you know, professors, kid, Ivy League, Professor kids kind of thing. And, you know, there were just all of these interrupted learning moments, you know, moments when learning could have happened, it was right there, everyone was ready. And then the parent would, you know, come in and sweep away the consequences or make it so that we didn't have to have that learning opportunity. You know, not so much the classroom stuff, but the like, you know, how is it that you're forgetting your cleats every single day? How is it that that you don't have whatever it is that kind of stuff. And so as one of the problems with that is that I was getting miffed at the parents of my students. And that's never a good thing. You know, homeschool relationships have to be good. But, you know, at the same time, I found out that my kid who was nine at the time, and there's going to be there are always these moments where you're like, oh, wait, I cannot throw the cast the first stone here, because I'm doing the exact same thing. And yeah, so the nice thing is, at the time I was writing for The Atlantic, well, actually, I was writing for a couple different places. And my job is pretty cool. It's to get curious about something, do the research, find out what the research says, and then translate it for other people. And I had written an article called why parents need to let their children fail for The Atlantic, and it went bananas, it went viral. And, and then all of a sudden, I had publishers calling me, which, of course, was my dream. And luckily, my agent and I were able to sort of just get busy and get a proposal out there. And that's how that book happened. And I'm just grateful every day, unfortunately, for me, and this will, you know, sort of dovetail with our later conversation, unfortunately, right when I sold that book was right when I was at peak, drunk, I was an alcoholic as well. And I had not yet gotten that under. I don't want to say control because I can't control my drinking. But you know what I mean, I'd got hadn't gotten sober yet. So it was very exciting. It was very heavy. I was writing full time teaching full time and drinking full time and those you just can't do all the things and so alcohol had to go in that equation. So it's amazing though, that you were able to do what you did and get through and finish the book and become so well. It was like, you know, I'd wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid and so I was suddenly being given the It's incredible opportunity to be a write a book. I mean, it's like it's the dream and my father does not swear he just doesn't. And he doesn't like it when I swear. But my dad was the one who intervened on me on June 7 2013. And he basically said, I know what an alcoholic looks like you're an alcoholic, you've been given this incredible opportunity, and you're gonna fuck it up. He was totally right. Okay, because in your book, you didn't say I didn't know that it was tied to the Gift of Failure to finishing a book. It all happened at the same time. Yeah, the school year had just ended. So I'd sold the book in like, April, May. And the book was going to be due, I don't know what I was thinking the book was due that fall. And my drinking was really out of control. And it just was, yeah, at all the confluence all had at the same time. And then, actually, it turns out that the timing was also incredibly fortuitous for me because I suffered a head injury that fall in on the first of November. And if I had been drinking, while going through sort of the head injury stuff, it would have been really, really bad. So yeah, ya know, when it makes sense, I can see it's a perfect storm was stress of writing a book and guidelines and yeah, everything going around going going on in your life. So okay, so I like how you said that the article went viral. And I can see why because I think myself as a parent, and I'm so relating to what you're saying about it. I have a middle schooler now, for the first time I have a sixth grader, fourth and first grader. But I think the fear of a lot of parents is that we are over parenting and that we're not letting our kids try things. And I don't know if it's, you know, we all know it that parents had this all the time in our own childhoods. We remember playing outside playing with our friends coming in around dinnertime or parents didn't necessarily know where we are that are all the time. And it's so different now. And I think most people can feel that difference that now as we parent, it's we want to parent less and not over parent, but we don't know how I think the other the other thing is it's not like I was the first person to chart this territory, I think, you know, there's a wonderful book like free range parenting by Lenore Skenazy and duct tape parenting, and they're just wonderful books that are out there. And, you know, the blessing of a skinned knee and all that sort of stuff. But my interest was not just in sort of what happens to kids when they are either use whatever term you want, I tend to use the term directive parenting or, you know, instead of the helicopter or whatever. But I was also a teacher. And so I was really curious about how that affected Learning and Motivation. And so that corner, that little, I was able to sort of get this little niche of the confluence of education and parenting, which is how the New York Times column that ran for three years called the parent teacher conference, how that happens, because I was really interested in where we're at the intersection of sort of where parenting and education come together and what that means for kids and learning and becoming their most fulfilled selves. So it's been a really fun place to write for the past almost decade now. You know, because those things affect what each other? No, I love it, I, let's talk about it. I, I love this concept you talked about in your book called, you know, bringing out children's intrinsic motivation. So I'd love to hear from you. What, how can parents do that? I mean, how do you have any advice for parents that are listening on how they can find their child's motivation naturally? Yeah, so this to be very, very clear. This is not my research. This is Edward DC, he wrote this incredible book called Why We do what we do the science of self motivation. Dan Pink covers some of this, some of this stuff in his work. You know, according to Edward DC, the intrinsic motivation, really requires three things from us. And that's we have to give kids more autonomy, we have to make them feel more competent, and we can't make them feel competent, we have to help them feel more competent. And not just confident, like parents are pretty good at that whole confidence thing, like making them feel all you know, puffed up and optimistic, but not necessarily competent, which is confidence based on actual experience, and then also have a really close connection with the kids and for Edward DC. He talks mostly about interpersonal connections. But you know, when I get to go talk to teachers about what this connection means it's about engagement in school relevance, connecting what we're teaching in the classroom to things that are actually out there in the world like ways we can use that knowledge ways you individually as a kid can maybe grow up and use that knowledge to like, make the world a better place. There's all kinds of that's the secret sauce of teaching, but really, for parents, it's it's a much simpler equation. It's really and I say this really clearly it's one Loving the kids you have not the kids you wish you had. And not just loving them based on their performance. And so, autonomy, which is, you know, really about giving kids control over their lives competence and connection, those three things, if we do those three things, and back off of the extrinsic motivators like grades, point scores, surveillance, threats, you know, all the stuff that we try to do to get kids to do the things we want them to do, which, in the end, actually undermine their motivation, not boost it, you know, we get closer to the, the chance that that will happen, we up the chances that that intrinsic motivation will kick in. And, you know, at its highest level, it's that me Hi, Chick sent me high state of flow, you know, that I get to have when I'm cross country skiing, or riding or doing something that's hard, but not too hard that I'm totally sucked into mind and body and spirit. And you know, you look up and like three hours have gone by, that's what intrinsic motivation looks like. And it's important, because that's where the deepest learning happens. No, and I took your advice to heart in your book, you were saying, ask your kids to make goals. And oftentimes, those goals aren't going to involve the parents. Right? So So I asked my kids, I said, What are your goals? And they had, they had goals that I actually, you know, we talked about them, and we want to make them happen. My daughter has gotten into Rubik's Cubes. She said, I want to enter a competition. And I said, Alright, it was neat that I asked her and I appreciated that, that that advice from you, and my son wants to get better at skateboarding. And I said, oh, cool, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna let go my he the first time we did it, well, the first time we did it, it was so surprising the stuff that my kids came up with, I think there were like nine, and I don't know, 14 at the time, they're five years apart. And they came up with things like, you know, I really need to expand my friend circle, I have a couple of really good friends. But I really need to get to know other people. And I was just shocked, I had no idea that was even a thing. And so it's really cool. And you know, the fun thing is, especially if you're making goals over like a season, which sets itself up nicely to be a good period of time. And if one of those goals is always is something that's a little bit of a stretch, a little scary, a little bit intimidating, a little bit beyond what you, you know, might have thought you could do even just a couple of months ago, then, you know, you're all sort of encouraging each other to take these risks. And then we as parents are modelling it, and it's really, it's been fun, we still do it. In fact, when everybody convenes for Thanksgiving, when everyone comes home for Thanksgiving, or the holiday, whatever holiday they're next all here, we'll do it again. I still have all the index, I keep the index cards to that we all write our goals on. Yeah, that's amazing. No, and I love it. Because it's, it's so true that that's the way to really grow it for personal growth, so much more value in that over thinking about grades. Yeah, I mean, in our house, the grades thing. You know, we talk about grades periodically, mainly when the kids and they're not kids anymore. I don't even know why I'm saying that they're 23 and 18. Now, mainly when they want to talk about the grades, in fact, my older kid, you know, what is like come on, can't I just can't wait, just revel for a second in my report card and look at the grades. But for me, the question always comes back to Okay, but what have you learned? What are you going to do differently next time? You know, if you're not happy with your performance in this class, what do you do differently to change the outcome next time. And, you know, from my perspective, that's been really important too. And, you know, I talked about this head injury, I got one after I turned in gift to failure. It was really, really rough, especially since the first draft of the Gift of Failure was terrible. And my editor came back to me and said, you know, this in its current state is just not publishable. And, you know, for me what I had to go through in order to get the book to a place where it was ready. That was great. And I was really proud of that. And then I was really proud when the book came out. And then of course, I was super proud when I hit the New York Times bestseller list, but I can tell you right now, the thing I'm most proud of, of my entire writing career is the I took that list of what not to do and what to do based on all the mistakes I made with Gift of Failure. And when my first draft, my first edits came back for the addiction inoculation. My editor was like, there's just very little to fix here. It's great. And for me, that has been the biggest triumph of my entire writing career is just the idea that I was able to learn from my mistakes and do better next time and my kids know that. You know, when we talk about the successes of my career, they don't I don't think they would go to the bestseller list first either. I think they would talk about you know, not having as many edits on the second books, they know that's what I'm most proud of. I'm curious as As a parent, so I really want to do this, you know, foster their own motivation and let them sort of self direct their interests. But there's also some things that I know are good for them that they might not want to do. And so I struggle with that. You know, like my mom and my dad, they had me take piano lessons. When I was a kid, I didn't particularly like it very much. But now I'm grateful that I took piano lessons. Or my mom wanted me to learn Spanish and take Spanish classes. And at the time, it was a struggle, and now I'm glad that I did. So how would you? Do you think that's okay, like, do you think parents pushing a little bit on what kids aren't interested in? Is okay. Yeah, I mean, it all comes down to family priorities. And actually, it's funny you bring up piano because the, one of the more common questions I get is, you know, can I should I let them quit? If they hate it, like practising piano, that kind of thing. And as you well know, early on, it's not too fun. Because once you get past the honeymoon phase, and then you're into the grind of just having to practice and you're not good yet. So it's not play yet? Yes, that's really tough. This happened in our house. So we, our next door neighbour had a piano, they were getting rid of, luckily, they were up hill, we wheeled the piano down the hill into our house. My kid, my older son, Ben took piano for, you know, a little while. And what I learned during that, and what would definitely come to pass over time, as my kids are not lessons. Kids, they hate it. They hate lessons, they hate group lessons, they hate individual lessons. They are they would rather learn either on their own or, you know, thank goodness for YouTube and jamplay places where they can take lessons online without actual interaction. And God, we sound like real indirect. But we're not I swear. And so I said, Well, let's stick with it for I think I said another couple of weeks, and then we'll revisit this, but let's get over the hump. And, you know, let's come back to it. And then it really started interfere with our relationship. I mean, all we did was argue over playing over practising piano. And so after he got to a certain point, he had stuck with it for a certain amount of time. I said, How do you How are you feeling about this, and he's like, I just, I really, I don't like it. I don't like anything about it. And so we got the sucker down the road, who was also downhill to take the piano and we wheeled the piano out of the house, and we'll the dumb Hill. Here's where it gets interesting, because I think he was like, I don't know, eight or nine or something at the time, maybe 10. He picked up guitar on his own, actually a couple months later, and learned on his own through jamplay. And then after he had gotten pretty good at guitar he came to me was a little sheepish. And he said, Okay, this is a little embarrassing, but if anyone is selling a keyboard, I might be interested in learning, continuing with the piano on his own, though, and he did. And so now I have this is crazy to me, because I'm not, you know, I like to sing along with radio and stuff. But I'm not terribly musical. And my husband plays a little guitar. I have two musician, children. So my oldest, who's actually an economist, plays the guitar really well really enjoys playing the guitar can play keyboard, but didn't really stick with it. My youngest, who also didn't take any lessons, because she hates less suggests, like a brother does, now is actually studying music in college. So, you know, for knowing what I know now about my children, that was the right way to go. But if my if my husband and I were concert pianists, and that was really important in our home, or like music was incredibly important, then maybe we would have stuck with the music lessons. But it came down to our priorities, and in the end their own intrinsic motivation to learn or not learn, you know, piano, and now actually, my youngest, I think, plays like, five instruments or something like that. All because she chose to learn them herself. And, you know, that's where, like I said, the best learning happens. And that's, you know, I'm, I'm happy that I know that about my children, and maybe my children, you know, maybe your children are not the same as my children. And that's really the point is we know our children best and we have structure instinct for who they are. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's really well said that. You know, I always like to introduce things to my kids, like, I'll show them soccer, we'll write some sports, and we'll try it out. And if they really don't like it, then yeah, I mean, I think the most common advice I give out is, you know, if you've committed to something for one season, stick it out for the season, you know, and but the argument I hear a lot is, oh, but we have so much invested. She's been playing soccer since she was six and now she's 18. And she hates soccer. And the kid is, you know, begging to quit soccer, you know, at a certain point. Childhood is when you're supposed to try new things and If you're doing only one thing because that's quote, what you're invested in, you know, think about all the other things your kid could be trying out, that might just be the things that really light them up from the inside. Absolutely. So a little gentle persuasion and encouragement is good. But I think it also if it gets in the way of your relationship with your child, if it's a lot of fighting, that's not that can't be worth it. Yeah, and there is something to be said, you know, lots of people toss back the whole commitment to the team, blah, blah, blah, and I get that too. So find a season stick with it first season. I love that story about your son, though, how you introduced him to piano and that, I think that exposure to music still went a long way. It sounds like yeah, he really, he's the kind of kid when he decides to do something, he'll just continue to do it until his fingers bleed and figure it out. But in the anti stuck with guitar, because that was his that was his favourite instrument. But my daughter, she does a lot of sound design and music production, digital music production using the computer. But she's also does guitar electric and acoustic and mandolin. And she took ukulele to school. I mean, so she's, it's been some great kids, some evolve. They're, they're really interesting, very, two very different human beings from each other. Yeah. So now just to talk about homework, we were talking about grit, we're talking about grades. Homework is something that comes up a lot, because I think it can lead to a lot of battling between parents and kids. And I don't know, it's it's tricky, because we want to teach our children to prioritise following tasks, listening to their teachers doing their assignments. But it also can be a source of fights and disagreements and families. It's essentially, starting in middle school, especially, you really want your kid to be the conduit of information between home and school, and you want your kid to start managing their, you know, their plan, book, their calendar, their homework, and, you know, from in terms of giving kids more autonomy as part of that whole intrinsic motivation thing. Homework is a great place to start and what's from it as from a teacher's perspective, if a parent was to come to me and say, Look, I've been doing too much for my kids, I've been sitting over them while they do their homework, I've been nagging, nagging, nagging, and I just, this is not going well, and we need to back off. Can you join forces with us and sort of help us support our kid and so we're gonna back off on our end, and give our kids more autonomy, let our kids have more control over how and where and why they do their homework. So things might be a little rocky there in the in the interim, and, and that's cool. I would rather know that as a teacher information, you know, homework is supposed to be about information. And that's really important to me. And I used to have to do this every year with my kids, teachers, I used to have to say, I do not use the Parent Portal period, if things start to circle the drain with my kids just know I'm not hovering or not logging in over the in the parent portal. So here's the best way to reach me. And I trust you to you know, teach them and get in touch with me if you need me, but I trust you to do your job. And if you need me, you know where to find me, it's really important that we sort of cover it from all sides. So it's not like you're giving your kids a lot more control suddenly in middle school, and then just like walking away, it's called being what's called an autonomy supportive parent. And the important thing about being an autonomy supportive parent is in this wonderful research that I talked about in the Gift of Failure. Kids who have autonomy, supportive parents are far more likely to be able to complete tasks on their own that frustrate them. Whereas the children of parents who hover control direct, those kids are a lot less likely to be able to complete tasks that are frustrating for them when the parent is not around. from a teaching perspective, some of the best teaching tools I have require kids to get frustrated to sort of be pushed to the edges of their ability level. There's just one thing called desirable difficulties that I need kids to be able to stick with something that's a little bit frustrating for them, because some of the most amazing, most durable most in depth learning happens by way of desirable difficulties. And if kids and if you think about it, if kids are less likely to be able to complete those tasks, they're just not going to learn as much. So we don't control and direct our kids because we don't love them. We do it because we love them. And we don't want to see them get frustrated and my kid couldn't tie his own shoes because I didn't like seeing him frustrated. But what I was doing by not allowing him to sort of experience that feeling of frustration and learn to be able to cope with it is I was undermining his ability to learn and telling him PS in the meantime, Hey, sweetie, I don't really think you're competent to do this yourself. Let mommy do it. And so what he heard from me over and over again was yeah, I'll just do that for you because I don't think you're capable of doing it yourself. I have To tell you, I'm fortunate after reading this chapter in your book, and when you talk about, you know, letting kids feel this frustration, especially when it comes to household chores and doing mundane things like filling out forms. It's definitely changed. We it's been a week, but my kids have been, and I know you don't call it not chores, we call it household duties, household duties solely. That's right. But they've been making their beds. And they've been doing, they've been doing their dishes, and I even had my son, fill out a school form by himself. Oh, excellent. And it was great. So So I appreciate if you think about it, who sprouts what's so this is what's so crazy to me, they need to know their addresses they need to know, you know, you can write down who their debt, the two pieces of information that kids generally don't know are the dentist and the doctor thing and maybe who their insurance provider is. So put that on a little piece of paper, stick it on the refrigerator, because who knows, you might need it anyway. But kids need to learn all the other parts. And I cannot tell you how many high school and middle school students I've had in my classroom, like maybe writing a thank you note to someone who came to see us in class or something, and not knowing their own zip code or not knowing where on the envelope to put their address and where to put the other person's address. I've had them reverse it. So like knowing those things, it's kind of important. So why we're waiting until you know, it's important, like their want them to fly the coop something right, exactly. You want to get them you want to get them on their own. Plus, I hate filling out forms. So anytime I can hand that stuff off to my children. And they you know, and it's stuff they need to know anyway, why not? It's great. Absolutely. No, my son's a fourth grader and he wanted to get picture like pay for pictures for picture day at school. And he asked me to fill it out. I said, Why don't you Why don't you do it. And he was frustrated with me at first. And then he was actually really proud that he did it on his own. So there's a lot there's a lot in there. And I mentioned the differences in competence and confidence. That competence, no one can take that away from them like confidence. Yeah, that can be punctured. That can you can, you know, but when a kid knows how to do something, they know how to do it. And you can't take that away from them. It's like this thing they've earned. It's it's so cool to see kids build these skills, and know that no one can take that away from them. Another thing that struck me from your book was talking about unsupervised play. I think that's a really interesting concept. Because you gave me permission to let my kids play unsupervised. To be honest, I felt guilty a lot like when my kids have playdates should I be the mom that has these fun art projects and creates things for them and helps helps direct fair play. But you really made me feel that it was, you know, feel good about letting them be independent on their own. I mean, I think there's a bunch of there's so many different reasons that go together for why that's important. You know, from a learning perspective, free play is so important, not just for things like creativity and stuff like that. And I don't mean to toss those aside as if they're not important they are. But they also let kids build what's called self directed executive function, which is coming up with a thing they want to do having a goal and then having to prioritise the tasks in the intermediate tasks in order to achieve that goal. That's something that is you have to build those skills, this is not just something that magically happens. And on top of that, there's like, you know, the, there's the effect of the creative effect of boredom. There's the fact that during boredom, like I know, as a writer that some of the most important writing time I spend is not actually at the keyboard writing, it's when I'm outside, you know, weeding or mowing the lawn or something. And I'm letting those ideas kind of percolate in my head. And then I have to run inside really fast and write stuff down because I finally figured something out about a plot point or how I'm going to organise a chapter that's called that default network in our brain doesn't. It gets activated when we're sort of idle. Mary, Helen, Mr. Dino Yang, has a wonderful study called Oh, shoot, something is not idleness I can't rest is not idleness or something like that. I can't remember anyway, it's about the fact that we really need to give our brain the ability to engage in that default network. And that requires boredom or you know, just time to let the mind wander. There's so many reasons that it's important for kids to have free play time and to not necessarily be supervised. I feel like I could talk to you about this for hours and hours. Talking about this dietary, you know, it's like I said, I have the coolest job ever. I do I I want to ask you, I'm just sort of just kind of picking your brain as an expert on education and, and kids. If you could pick the perfect school for kids to foster motivation learning, what would it look like to you? It's funny you ask ask that. So we moved to Vermont from New Hampshire four years ago, and my daughter was just about was just about to start high school. And we had to figure out where we were going to live, we were moving from my husband's job. And we had just moved away from the school that she would have been attending is very grade driven, very high, high octane, high pressure, blah, blah, blah. And knowing what I know about education, and what actually works for learning, as opposed to what is easiest for teachers, or what's easiest for parents, or the way we've always done it, because there's so many things we do in education, that's just the way we've always done it, I was able to do a lot of research on all the school districts and figure out who was doing sort of the things that actually work for learning. And we stumbled onto the see the CVU High School, which is where my daughter went, where they use standards based assessments, and these thing called for these things called formative assessments. And that really is my dream scenario. And I'll explain what those things are. But what we know is that, you know, for example, grades points and scores, those are extrinsic motivators, and they don't always work best to motivate kids. And I'm not saying we can't use them at all, I'm just saying they're a fairly blunt instrument. They're also they reward a lot of game playing and stuff like that. What I'm actually curious about is what my kid knows, and what my kid doesn't know. So, as a teacher, if I get a transfer student who has been English, okay, well, what do they know? And what do they don't know? Do they know what a noun is? Do they know what a verb is? Can they you know, that kind of stuff? I need more information than that isn't a parent, as a parent, I should, you should want more information than that. So, as a parent, if my kid is struggling in school, I want to know, the skills they do and don't know. And that's what standards based assessments is it, you can think of it as like, maybe a list of skills that kids the kid needs to know, in order to great graduate from, you know, geometry class, cat, do they know what acute and acute angle is? Can they figure out what you know, can they use pie to, you know, all that sort of stuff. So they do that. And then they also don't give, they really rely on these things called formative assessments, which are like frequent low stakes quizzes, so that the kids are constantly having to figure out where they are with the knowledge and the teachers always know where the kids are with the knowledge. And let's say the kid bombs a formative assessment. A lot of times, they don't count, they are for the kid to know what they do and don't know which is called metacognition, which is what we as human beings are terrible at, like, knowing what we do, and don't know, we're so bad at that. But formative assessments, and especially that when used, right, and when use the way they do at the school, a kid asked to fill out a form basically saying, Here's what I thought I knew, here's what I was missing. Here's what I need help with, here's how I'm going to go about go about getting help for this. And it means that when they do get to a big summative, or cumulative, like those big end of unit tests, the teacher pretty much already knows how everyone's going to do and the kid pretty much knows how they're going to do. And it's more focused on the process and less on the end product. What do you know, what don't you know? How are we going to get you there? And it's, it's about the learning and not about the testing. And, you know, I think that if we can realise that if we're focusing more on the process and less on the end product, we're not only upping the chances, they're going to be motivated for the sake of the learning itself. We also are making better choices about what works for learning as opposed to what works for teaching. But we're also teaching self advocacy, kids have to speak up for themselves. There's just so many reasons that standards based classrooms and there's a book called The standards based classroom, that's really fantastic. And that formative over cumulative and summative assessments are really important. And you can still use grades. That's cool. I just want to know what kids do and don't know and how to get them to where they need to be. In the meantime. And from a teacher's perspective, I imagine those those frequent check ins and those frequent Yeah, assessments. It probably really helps guide you on what a child needs to know or is mastering because it's not really about like, you know, how many points can I put down in my gradebook about this is this is about are we actually learning the material? That's stuff that's it's all about implementation, but when we implement formative assessments really well and standards based grading or standards based assessment really well, it can work so so well. I totally agree with everything you're saying. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I do have to say, though, there's a part of me that does, you know, when I was growing up or when I was in school, I definitely did like seeing an a comeback. It didn't, it didn't motivate me. So I have to see like, there's something proud about studying really hard and getting that A. And even though I know that it doesn't signify a whole lot, it didn't make me feel good to see an A, well, because there's a very fuzzy grey line between someone dangling an a in front of you and saying here, this is your end reward if you'll just jump through these hoops, and you saying, I really want to learn this stuff and get that A and that being something that you a goal that you're setting for yourself. So intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is not like a black and white thing. It's not like we can never use extrinsic motivators. It's not like we always have to use intra, you know, strive for intrinsic motivation. It's that we have to shift the balance from what has for a very long time, then 100% About extrinsic motivators. And I love in a myself, my son brought him a quiz this week, and he goes, Look, Mom, I got you know, I got a good score on it. And I said, Well, did you learn something? Well, even better here to tell me I can do you one better. So kid comes home with an A kid comes home with an F, our response, maybe not emotionally. But our response in terms of our practical response can be very similar, which is, what did you do to get that grade? What are you going to replicate? Like, what worked and what didn't work? You know, if your friend got an A, and you got an F, well, what did your friend do that you didn't do? And what did you do that your friend didn't do? And did you get enough sleep the night before? Did you have a good break? You know, all of these things are a part of focusing on the process and less on the end product. Because the our entire society has trained children to think about the end product and solely the end product. And if we can just pull some of that back to the process, because for everything, not just school, but like practising piano and becoming a better soccer player and learning how to write, you know, if you're going to start looking at every single thing you write in order to determine whether or not you're a good writer, you're going to just stop writing, because, frankly, you know, Anne Lamott jokes that people she's always really worried that she says she's going to be out and get hit by a bus and people are going to find her rough drafts and are light and be like, Oh, my gosh, she's awful. What were we thinking? Well, of course, they're awful. They're rough drafts. But I have students that are afraid to write rough drafts, because they're afraid to write anything that's not perfect. And so that whole process process process over product is so important for every aspect of becoming learning all that stuff, which is why I'm so grateful for your message about the Gift of Failure so that we can hopefully, hopefully everybody reads it and that we can, we can reframe the way we think about failure, that it's really a really good thing. So much fun to think about how you know, the learning process, because it's really complicated. And we've sort of I think we've been doing it just sort of the way we were taught to do it for so long. It's fun to think about the possibilities when you let your brain sort of go from the rules. I listened to you on the Rich Roll podcast. And you had recommended on that on that podcast, the documentary, most likely to succeed. And I watched it with my children, and it's all about that school in San Diego, High Tech High. And they're a project based school, no grades, no books, and my kids watched and they they really want to go to the school now. My kids, my kids said lectures are boring. Yeah, I think in the end, the answer is a little bit of this. And a little bit of that, like all High Tech High may not be great for all kids. But all lecture format is also not going to be great for kids either. So you know, there's figuring out what works and then figuring out how to bring it all together. But that last shot in that documentary, to me is an ode to intrinsic motivation. That last tracking shot as they're pulling out watching this kid working on the stuff he's working on. I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone. That right there is just, it's a thing of beauty. Really is a lovely, lovely shot. No, it gave me a lot to think about. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Ask Dr. Jessica. Next week just lay he will return again and we will talk about her second book, the addiction inoculation, which reviews how to prevent substance abuse in children. We'll see you next Monday.