Damon Munchus is now a leader in JP Morgan’s machine-intelligence unit, but earlier in his career, he worked as a manager in JP Morgan’s home-mortgage division. Munchus’s team analysed market trends to help the bank set the right price for a mortgage. It’s detail-oriented work, mostly carried out by 22 to 25-year-old analysts, right out of college. “People were cranking hard-core on spreadsheets, grinding, working long hours,” Munchus told me.
The stakes were high: Imagine a family sitting down to close on a house thinking they would pay 4% interest and instead being told they have to pay 6%. That interest-rate jump would significantly raise monthly payments, and people plan their entire financial situations around their rates. Munchus’s fact-checkers for home purchase loan applications had to be 100% accurate. How could he motivate his employees to take every single application seriously, without coming across as an authoritarian jerk?
Parents (me included) often face a version of this problem. We sit at the dinner table, trying to get our kids to do any of their homework – let alone dedicate themselves to perfecting their English essays or social studies projects. Teenagers have a way of looking fiercely into our eyes and saying, What’s the point of this? They turn us into babbling, unconvincing idiots who come up with lame rationales like, Because I said so, or Because your teacher said so. Can we do better?
If you applied all the lessons in the book so far, the young people in your life would know that they could meet high standards with the right support. But they still might ask, Why should I meet your high standards? After all, growth is hard. As we’ve seen, it can be stressful. If we don’t help them discover a satisfying answer to this question, they could say the stress or discomfort of growth aren’t worth it. They could end up disengaged or disillusioned. Can we develop mentor-mindset practices that give young people a deeper, more meaningful reason to grow and learn from our mentorship?
Pearla faces this challenge in her math classroom. She teaches eighth-grade Algebra I in a small town in northeast Texas, population forty-two hundred, located halfway between Tyler, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana. I met her six weeks before the state’s Algebra I test. She had six weeks left to prove to her principal, her community, and herself that this year’s students would perform even better than last year’s.
Though she wears large pink glasses and decorates her classroom with pink-patterned curtains, no one would call Pearla soft. “I’m a military wife. If you ever ask me a question, you better be prepared to hear the truth,” she told me. She knew that too much of her self-worth was wrapped up in how a few dozen eighth graders would score on the state test, but she couldn’t help it. She loved her students and knew the stakes; her community was socioeconomically challenged, with just 14% of adults receiving four-year college degrees.
Success in her Algebra I class represented a critical fork in the road for students. If they didn’t do well in Algebra I, they wouldn’t get admitted to rigorous high school courses (e.g., advanced sciences or math tracks ending in precalculus or calculus). A rigorous high school curriculum, in turn, predicts who will go on to earn college degrees. Unfortunately, in her community, only about 10% of eighth graders pass state tests at or above grade level. The test served as more than an assessment – it determined whether she had created a future rich in opportunity for the 13 and 14th-year-olds in her classes. And she didn’t know how it would turn out.
Pearla hoped that she could sustain the gains she had made the previous year, when her working-class students, especially those learning English as a second language, had performed the best they had in years. She attributed the previous year’s success in part to the transformation in her classroom culture that came from her participation in the inaugural cohort of our program, called FUSE (Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement). This was a program we developed to scale the mentor-mindset practices from expert teachers like Sergio Estrada. She loved the program because it helped her change kids’ minds about hating math.
“I’m not a touchy-feely person by nature,” she told me, but the mentor-mindset program emboldened her to start valuing her students’ perspectives. She let them talk about their confusion and mistakes in class. That’s something she never would have done before because she was afraid of ceding the floor to a gaggle of eighth graders. Pearla even asked for students’ opinions on how the class was going and how she could support them to meet her high standards. These changes represented small but important steps for someone like her who was previously disinclined to take them. They contributed to her best classroom culture ever.
But as the test date approached for her second cohort of students, a problem remained. Students seemed to be forgetting concepts they were taught earlier in the year – proportions, ratios, exponential functions, polynomials. She suspected that the kids had sometimes memorised a set of algorithms for solving problems on autopilot and then forgotten them after each unit test. Pearla needed to motivate students to master the deeper meaning behind the math concepts, not just plug and play.
Why were Pearla’s students stuck at the surface level? They “don’t see the purpose of math,” she told me. Although her mentor-mindset culture had succeeded in convincing her students that they could learn, they still didn’t know why they should learn. Pearla had tried everything she could think of. She told them how valuable the tests were for her, for the school, and for their future. She hosted her own career day, inviting local adults to explain how they use math at work. And, like most teachers, she generously distributed candy. She could motivate students to turn in homework, but not to deepen their learning. Time was running out. Exasperated, Pearla asked me for my advice as a developmental psychologist: “How do you create the idea that math is meaningful?” She exhaled, on the verge of tears. “They just don’t see a use for math at all.” And the kids at her school weren’t alone. “I’ve taught in ten schools in ten states. It’s the same thing everywhere.”
Even exceptional teachers struggle to support students who haven’t identified their purposes for learning yet. Recall the bright-spot teachers that we located (the group from which we identified Sergio Estrada). When we surveyed their students, we saw a strong mentor-mindset culture. Fully 83% of students agreed that “it’s okay for us to make mistakes and get confused,” and 76% agreed that their teachers “motivate me to keep persisting and trying hard even when I’m confused or discouraged.” But when we asked about a deeper purpose for learning and remembering the hardest content, not just the easy stuff, the numbers dropped. They ranged from just 51% to 57%. In even the best classrooms, just under half of students failed to see the purpose of learning.
As adults, we recognise that learning Algebra I taught us logical reasoning, which became important in realising our ultimate career goals. But making that connection takes a cognitively sophisticated leap of abstraction. A person has to jump from factoring polynomials to logical reasoning. That’s a big leap. Do young people naturally make that leap?
Excerpted with permission from 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, David Yeager, Penguin Books.
