Sarah Holliman (00:00.046)
Hello and welcome to the second episode of Headway, an official podcast of Headway School. In this episode, our head of school, Rachel Skiffer, interviews Dr. Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. At Stanford, she specializes in curriculum studies, service learning, student engagement, school reform, and qualitative research methods. Denise is also the co-founder of Challenge Success, an organization that partners with school communities to elevate student voice.

and implement research-based equity-centered strategies that improve well-being, engagement, and belonging for all K-12 students.

Rachel Skiffer (00:35.68)

Welcome to our new podcast, Denise. You are our first official guest.

I'm so honored. Thank you for having me.

I'm excited to have you here, especially on this topic about academic excellence and student well-being. And I will just dive right into our questions so we can gather your expertise. I know your research shows that traditional definitions of academic success can come at a cost to student well-being. How do you define true academic excellence in schools?

Denise Pope (01:07.374)
So at Challenge Success, we have basically a three part way to look at that. And one is wellbeing. And to some people that might have nothing to do with academic excellence, but it turns out if you are exhausted, stressed out, depressed, anxious, suffer from other mental health issues, you actually can't have academic excellence. So it's really important that you look at the whole student.

and look at the student's wellbeing. Another one that people don't usually think about that's totally related to academic excellence is belonging. If you don't feel like someone has your back, if you're worried about being bullied, the way our brains work is that our social and our emotional and our academic connections are all neurologically intertwined. So if you have what is called belonging uncertainty, it's actually taking up the space in your brain

that you cannot then have academic excellence. You just can't learn. So we talked about wellbeing, we talked about belonging, and then what most people think about academic excellence is this idea of an engaged learner. And in terms of engagement, we want the student to feel interested, excited about what they learn, see that it has purpose and meaning and value, and do the work. So when I think about academic excellence, it's hard for me just to...

to leave it in that little category, I have to look a little bit broader and say it's a much bigger picture of what we say web, wellbeing, engagement, and beli-

you

Rachel Skiffer (02:43.68)
So here's a question tied to that. And I've heard you recount this anecdote about a parent telling you that that's all well and good, but their child can be happy after they get into Stanford.

my gosh, it's true.

Our rigor, if people really want to make sure that their kids are in a challenging academic program, and I'd love your definition of rigor. Can rigor and well-being actually be compatible? If you think about some of the schools where you've done a lot of research that are independent schools, well-resourced public school systems, do you have to pull back or hit the brakes a little bit on the academic program for joy and well-being?

No, no, not at all. Academic rigor and wellbeing absolutely go together. You do not need to pull back. In fact, it's the opposite. When you have kids who are healthy, when they're engaged and excited about what they're learning, when they're not sleep deprived, when you're not overloading them with work, there's a big confusion in the field about rigor versus load.

And if I just give more work, that means I'm a more rigorous teacher. lot of parents think this, a lot of students think this, and it's actually the opposite. And it's hard for people to wrap their heads around. But when I think about rigor, I think about learning at the edge, which if you look at not to get all nerdy on you, but the zone of proximal development from a theorist named Vygotsky is really, you're trying to find that zone where it's not super easy for the student because that's going to be boring.

Denise Pope (04:21.236)
or not interesting, and it's not so hard that it's causing distress and turning off that excitement about learning. You're looking for that zone of proximal development. You might hear people say your stretch, your learning edge. That to me is rigor where you're actually getting the kid excited and interested and just at the edge so that they have that aha moment and that they are able to transfer, apply what they've learned.

into a million other things, including the real world. So real rigor is finding that right balance of challenge and making sure that the learning is purposeful and meaningful to the point where they can actually transfer what they've learned instead of just getting an A on the test and then never thinking about it again.

You talked a little bit about load, and I know Challenge Success has advocated for rethinking homework. So across the K-12 spectrum, what would you say an ideal homework policy should look?

Hmm. So interestingly for the state of California, we just passed a law. It applies only to public schools, but we would hope that all schools think it through that you have to have a homework policy that's based on the research that we know about homework. And it turns out similar to what I said about load that just time on task is not necessarily a way to gauge effective homework policies. So.

It's not how long kids are spending each night, although that's definitely something that we are worried about. It's what the purpose of the homework is. So if you look at the research on homework, you want to make it very clear why you're assigning extra work for someone to do outside of school that you couldn't do well in school might be one reason. As an English teacher, when I taught high school English, it didn't make sense for me to read all of the great Gatsby.

Denise Pope (06:21.142)
out loud with the kids in class, that would take an enormous amount of time. So I felt it was okay and purposeful to assign them to do some reading to prepare for class. Using homework to prepare for class, that seems to be a valid purpose. In the research, it became very clear that when you send someone home and they don't know how to do something, that is not a useful bit of homework. Then they have to either teach themselves or look on ChatGPT or ask a parent or not everybody has all those resources.

So you have to look at equity when it comes to homework. You have to look at what the kids are able to do by themselves and do they have the resources. You have to look at the purpose. Is this something that is so important that I need them to do outside of class time? A lot of people think of practice, like, I'm going to send them home and practice the math problems. Well, if kid A can't even do the first one and kid B does all the math problems that you've assigned in two seconds flat, right? Like that's not a good assignment for either kid.

So it's actually a very challenging thing to design homework well in a way that's appropriate. And the last thing I'll say about this is bring the kids into the equation. They know how long they're spending on it. Watch them do it in class, assign 15, 20 minutes of class to just get started on homework and you will see who has questions, who doesn't understand how long it's taking them and what the issues are. Have them keep some homework diaries or logs, right? If they're little kids, maybe the parents also keep that and the teacher keeps it.

So it's actually a very complicated thing. And a lot of teachers never get taught how to design effective homework. We do know from studies in elementary school that there's almost no connection between homework and academic success in the early grades, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, with the exception of reading for pleasure. So I would say to all of those teachers, really rethink if you're giving homework in the early grades, because there's really not research to support that besides reading for pleasure.

That's a good one. I'm nodding as a parent of younger kids because I'm like, wouldn't it be good for them to just do a few math problems? And you're saying, no, just have them read.

Denise Pope (08:28.898)
The math problems you can do in class. There's nothing magical about sending the math problems home versus doing them in class, right? We want delivered practice, which means you have someone there helping you and guiding you as you're practicing.

Rachel Skiffer (08:44.546)
What advice do you have for parents who want to support their children academically but without adding pressure?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I feel for parents, I'm a parent. The window that we have into school is typically only what we ask the kid, Hey, what'd you do at school today? Nothing, right? We get very little or the grades that they get sent home, whether that's a transcript at the end or whatever. Occasionally you might get a newsletter from a teacher or a note. So I had a phrase that I used in my house where I would ask not what did you earn, but what did you learn?

And so if parents can get away from this grades and sorting and ranking and talking about what the kids earn and really train themselves instead to say, Hey, tell me something exciting that you learned today. What are you curious about? Did you ask any questions today? What's the topic that you're learning about? And let's talk about it together as a family, but really not ask the first thing when you walk in the door, how'd you do on the history test?

Cause you're sending a message that the only thing that matters to you academically or actually anything about what happened to your kid that day has to do with a grade on a test or a quiz or an assessment. That's not the message that you want to send as a parent. You want to send a message about a much broader notion of how we define success, right? Did you make a friend today? What is one kind deed that you did today? What are you concerned about in the world that is going on? Let's talk about that, right? Anything but.

did you want the history test or I checked your grades and what happened? Why did you get this grade or you haven't even started your homework yet? You know, my, my, my, my, my, my.

Rachel Skiffer (10:22.584)
Related to that, you wrote Doing School, how we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic, and miseducated students, exposing the pressure students face that cause them to achieve in schools without engagement and even compromise their values. And by that we mean cheating to get ahead. In the time since you wrote that book, has the situation improved, worsened, or has it just changed?

Fascinating question. Okay. So 20 over 20 years ago, the US surgeon general at the time, not the current one, but the one at the time, Vivek Murthy asked challenge success to do a longitudinal report because we have 15 years of data. So we could actually see if things getting worse or things getting better. There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that some things are very stable over time. Students were very stressed years ago. Students are very stressed now. What they're stressed about might be different.

Right. Social media was not as big of a thing 20 years ago as it is now. The fact that we get pinged on our phones about breaking news that isn't really breaking or that is breaking. And that is very stressful and all that's going on in the world. Social media has really changed what kids are stressed about. Although again, very stable. The number one stressor for kids was back then and continues to be workload, quizzes, tests, grades, assessments. So.

That's stayed pretty stable over time. Sleep deprivation has stayed very stable over time. And this is a bit of an issue because we know that sleep and mental health go together. When you're sleep deprived, you're more likely to be, depressed or anxious and vice versa. And we know that when you sleep is actually when you're learning and cementing the knowledge that you're learning in school, that that has to happen through sleep.

So that's been very stable. think the average has been under seven hours for high school students for years and years, and they need eight to 10 hours of sleep every night. Kids who are under the age of 13 need nine to 11 hours of sleep every night. None of those people are getting it. So some good news is I think people are more aware of mental health issues, of kids under pressure, of how can we make some changes to benefit kids? I think the pandemic put a lot of that in a spotlight as well.

Denise Pope (12:45.344)
I think we're more aware of inequities and we're working on that. I think we're more aware of how we learn. put people into MRI machines and watch them do math problems, right? We weren't doing that 20 years ago. So there's some good, but there's also just at a baseline, the basics were not where we need to be in terms of mental health and wellbeing and engagement with learning.

Rachel Skiffer (13:09.868)
So in terms of engagement and pressure for students, I know you've done a lot of work with schools around assessment, test quizzes, papers, projects, and then grading. So how should educators and parents be thinking about how assessments and grading reflect true learning? Should we still be giving grades?

In an ideal world, we would not have to rank and sort our students. In an ideal world, a student could learn at the pace that they are meant to learn with a lot of guidance and help and scaffolding in a way that we know how. And I want you to think about this even in terms of something crazy like the DMV, right? They give you so many chances to take that test. And that is because they want

Safe drivers on the street. want everybody to get to that level of mastery. Right. And it's a pretty low bar. So in an ideal world, you would not have this push to sort and rank and this idea of time and speed where if you don't learn it by this day, what we have the test on, forget it. And then we never go back. What we do is we work with schools to really help them understand what is called performance assessments. And I wish it was a different name because everyone thinks, are you doing a dance about math? No.

But you are performing in some way and showing your knowledge through that performance. Cause we can't just open up your head and look inside and see what you know. We have to ask you. So they can be process-based performance assessments. Show what you know. Think out loud. The Latin root of the word assess is assidere, which means to sit beside. It doesn't mean give the hardest test and say, gotcha. So this idea of process-based assessment.

A product, maybe you are writing an essay, maybe it's a lab report, maybe you're doing a concept map to show your thinking or a performance, a debate, um, Harkness table, Socratic method. There's all sorts of ways that you can show what you know that are more equitable and accurate than what we necessarily see on your typical test and quiz.

Denise Pope (15:22.486)
in a school and it takes some work for teachers to get used to that and think about how am I aligning this with my learning goals and how will I know the student has really learned this and has really obtained mastery. And that takes a lot of professional development, but also understanding on the parts of parents and kids. I'll tell a super quick story. If tomorrow your boss said to you, you're going to have a test or a quiz at work tomorrow. I'm not going to tell you what's on it. It's going to be timed. You can't use any of the resources that you normally use. can't use your computer.

You can't use the internet. You can't ask a colleague, I'm going to be the sole assessor and your next bonus depends on how you do. Good luck, go home and study. I mean, it's ludicrous. People would be quitting in droves and yet we do this day after day after day to kids. So we really do need to rethink assessment in a way that's much more like the real world, which is very much mastery based and performance oriented.

Rachel Skiffer (16:17.602)
Well, so the real world now, certainly and forever has included different technologies. We've moved from pencils to computers, if you consider that technology, but artificial intelligence and AI, how can we ensure that students are doing their own learning? How can we think about AI as a tool versus an enemy? And how does it help students develop learning skills?

Great question. So we, we have developed some workshops on this at challenge success because we're sort of in the right place at the right time. We've been studying cheating forever because cheating is a symptom of disengagement of a lack of wellbeing. Often it's actually a lack of belonging. You don't feel a relationship with the person. So you might as well cheat. And it turns out that AI is really good at what we call doing school. So going back to the title of the book, AI can pretty much

spit back a paper when a teacher has asked for a compare and contrast or can do the math problems for you or can code, right? boy. What does this mean now for all the teachers out there who know the kids who have access to it, at least are finding out ways to use large language models like chat GPT to get their homework done and to turn in things. And I own grad students are using it and.

This is an issue because in the real world, people are using AI for these very things. So it doesn't make sense to say to students, do not use AI at all. That's like saying, don't use your calculators. We have this technology, but what we have to help them understand is some of the real drawbacks of the technology. It hallucinates, it makes mistakes, it is biased, how it works. It is an algorithm that's spitting out

old tropes and often full of racist words and bigotry and incorrect pictures. It can be used for cyber bullying. could be used in really immoral and inappropriate ways. Nevermind that it takes up a lot of energy if you're worried about the climate. So there's a lot of issues that I want the kids to understand. And I want them to understand that this is a tool that does amazing things. I mean, we've just discovered new things at Stanford, thanks to AI that we would have never been able to do.

Denise Pope (18:41.666)
because of the time that it can actually look and analyze and sort through large amounts of data that humans would never be able to do it. So I want them to understand that. And I want them to be the human in the loop. So what does that mean in my class? I say to them, if you're going to use AI, feel free, but you have to cite it. And I want to see how you're using it. And I want to see how you've been the human in the loop. Show me when you stick the paper assignment into chat GPT, how you

make whatever it sends out better. And we have a little mnemonic that we use at Challenge Success, which is, this harmful for learning or helpful for learning? Is it harmful for you to use AI as a tutor or helpful? Well, it depends. Did you try to do the problem first or did you just go straight to AI? If you just went straight to AI, how do you know that you learned or understood anything? Right. So to really go deep into those conversations in classes for every assignment,

When is it useful to use AI? When would it maybe not be useful to use AI and make it really clear because what we're hearing from kids is they have no idea what they're allowed to do. A teacher says, don't use AI at all. But if you stick something into Google, Google uses AI, pops right up. does that mean they're cheating? They don't know. And uncertainty breeds anxiety and we don't need more anxiety. Hear, hear.

Rachel Skiffer (20:06.446)
So speaking of anxiety, and maybe we actually have been talking about that this whole time, we are looking at how we use time. And we're looking at schedules, and we're looking at them across the divisions, so lower, middle, upper. Just how important is a school schedule for students and for the professional community that works with them and supports them?

So you're hitting on all of these buckets that we work in in Challenge Success. So we have this framework that's called space and it's schedule, pedagogy, assessment, climate of care, and educating all the stakeholders. And so we've hit a little bit of that already in this podcast and the S is really important. The schedule affects everybody, not just.

the teachers and the students, but the parents and the coaches and the extracurricular providers and the orthodontists, right? It really affects everybody. And there is no such thing as a perfect schedule, but we absolutely work with schools to align their values with their schedule. In fact, it's a workshop that we just put on at NAAS. And this idea is you say that you value relationships, but if you look at your schedule, we're in the course of the day or the semester.

Are kids and adults having time to connect outside of literally just delivering the classroom? You say you value wellbeing, but as an example, how early does your school start? We use challenge success data to pass another law in California, which is the late start law that no public middle school can start before 8 a.m. and no public high school can start before 8 30 a.m. And other states are starting to look at that. That's major.

We know that kids can't learn when they're exhausted. We know that teens are pretty much nocturnal and have a different circadian rhythm than the adults. So the schedule becomes very important. How many classes can you squeeze in a day? There's research on how long someone can actually concentrate at a time. And it changes with age span. Even as adults, we need breaks. can't do something very, very intensely for more than about an hour, an hour and a half.

Denise Pope (22:14.828)
before our brain actually needs a break. need to get up and physically walk around or do something and get some food and hydration. Imagine now body's going through puberty. You have to really look at how much time is allotted in the day to get through the lunch line. What do we do about homework and sports and extracurriculars and are there breaks in between for that? It's huge. The schedule is huge.

Rachel Skiffer (22:40.084)
If you could give one piece of advice to students around academic pressure, what would it be?

Well, we're called challenge success for a reason. And what we are doing is we're challenging this really narrow notion of success that somehow is out there in the ether that you have to get the grades to get into the best middle school and high school and test scores and whatnot, to get into the best college, to get the best job, to make a lot of money, to be happy. Right. And we know that it's not linear.

That there's lots and lots of ways for kids and adults to be successful. That may be one path, but very few people march on that very linear path. And if whatever happens and you don't get the grades or the test scores, or you don't get into XYZ school, it does not mean that you can't be successful because especially in the United States, you can reinvent yourself in so many ways and you don't need any grades and you can go to college. It's called a community college.

It's free and you walk in and you learn and you try hard and then you can transfer to the university of California. look at transfer students first. So what I would say to kids is really challenge this narrow notion of success. And I know that's hard really do your research. We have a whole paper written on this called a healthy approach to college admissions. it's called a fit over rankings. So I would say really challenge that notion of success. And then I would also say, go to bed because you absolutely need sleep.

And so many students are sleep deprived and they think if I just stay up a few hours more, I'll do better on the test. I've got to finish this. I'm so busy or I want to have a life. I've worked so hard all day. I want to be on social media at night. And yet we know that sleep is very much connected to mental health and wellbeing. It's connected to athletic success. It's connected to academic success. It's connected to so many things. So challenge success and go to bed.

Rachel Skiffer (24:40.076)
And that's for the adults as well. No doom scrolling.

100 % No, it keeps you up at night, let alone the light of the phone, what you're reading and seeing, it's going to just become part of your dreams, not healthy.

Not healthy.

Rachel Skiffer (24:58.306)
What are some things that schools should be thinking about or prioritizing if they're thinking we need to mix this up or there are some changes we need to make? Where should schools...

The number one thing that I would say to schools as a start is you have to understand the student experience and the way to understand the student experience at your school is to center the student voice. And we have lots of ways that challenge success that we tell people to do that. Surveys are one way that we do that. Focus groups, fish bowls, shadowing a student. It's so powerful. Meet them at the bus stop, ride that bus, go to all of their classes, go to the locker, carry a backpack, sit.

really feel what it is like to be them and experience what they're experiencing every day, it will be mind-blowing and life-changing. We ask schools to get subs so that everyone has a chance to do that at some point. We have I Wish campaigns where you say to the students, fill out anonymously. You could do it on index cards. You can do it during advisory. You can do it electronically. I wish my teachers knew. I wish my parents knew. I wish my peers knew. We have faculty say, I wish my colleagues knew.

really powerful ways to figure out what is actually going on. What are the experiences that people experience take themselves, the experts, and then include them in the conversations about the changes. And that's the other part that people tend to forget. Maybe they'll do the listening part, but then the adults kind of get together and solve the problem. And sometimes let's say the schedule is an example of that, because we'll say, we can't get through the lunch line in that amount of time you designed without asking us.

And often because they live it, they have great ideas. But even more than that, the act of doing a root cause analysis, looking at all the things going on and getting down to the roots of what are the core issues and then coming up with solutions that in its very essence is an academic skill that we want our students to know how to do. So we're not just saying, listen to the students because it's lip service. We're actually saying.

Denise Pope (27:04.076)
This is actually critical for the kind of changes that we know will make their lives better and the whole school better. But it's also an academic piece that we want students to learn, which is how to break down a thorny problem, gather data, come up with solutions, work on a team with other stakeholders, try it out, gather more data, and follow that continuous improvement process. That's what people do in real life.

And I think when we talk about preparation for kids, as much as we would like to hold them forever, we know that once they leave here, they're going out into the real world. And we also know that the world is changing at a pace we cannot imagine. And so thinking about what are the foundational and fundamental skills that they will need when we send them out into a world we can't yet imagine.

A lot of people are doing portraits of a graduate. It's a very hot, buzzy thing. What do we want our graduates to know when they get out? The people who did the portrait of a graduate 10 years ago had no idea that AI was going to come on full force. Maybe a few very techie savvy people. I would say what we know developmentally over time is let's double down on the things that we absolutely know kids need. They need sleep. They need to feel like they're in relationship with adults and people who have their back. We have to spark their curiosity.

They need skills to decide what is truth and what are facts and what are opinions, how to weigh nuanced, complex issues, how to communicate well with others. If you look at schools and missions of Portsmouth graduate, they're all kind of saying this, but then are they really doing it and how? And there's this notion that we have to do this in school and then we prepare them for the real world.

There's a line with John Dewey, I love, school is the real world. Let's use it as such and model how we do these things that we want the kids to be able to do when they graduate.

Rachel Skiffer (28:58.168)
tastes of the real world, letting them off campus. I think about internships and experiential learning and to really apply what they're learning or there are things we're not going to be able to teach on campus. And so those moments where we get out of their way.

And I'd love that, you know, getting off campus and getting out of their way, even in classrooms, instead of making the chemistry experiment a fake experiment, let's do some real tests on the real water in our water fountains at the school. Let's make it as authentic as possible when we're designing these projects to help kids learn. They need to see that it is authentic. It's going to up engagement and it's going to make them feel like they have agency, which we know is really good for kids. It's what they crave. And it also helps.

them retain the learning.

Rachel Skiffer (29:50.326)
Any parting words on this topic or anything that we haven't covered that you want to make sure are listed?

I would say this, I just taught this in class yesterday to my grad students. There's an article by Carol Lee about what schools should be and what schools should look like. And I juxtapose it with an article written 20 years ago by Elliott Eisner, who was my advisor, the kind of schools we need. And they're both saying the same thing, which is double down on relationships. Because no learning can take place if you don't feel like you are connected and in relationship.

to your peers, to the adults. People have to feel like they are seen, that they are valued for who they are. They see themselves reflected in the learning, in the curriculum, at a time where everything is so political and folks are othering so many people. If we double down on relationships in school, if we model what it means to really listen and care for and give agency to and work together in teams, not only will the learning happen more, we're gonna be making a better world.

And in the long run, that's what we're after. We want a better world for our kids. They want it. We want it. Everybody wants it. So I would say double down on relationships. Relationships matter maybe even more than homework and quizzes and tests and ranking and sorting. Relationships really matter. teachers change lives every day.

Three weeks ago, I saw my lower school art teacher, who I think is 93. I still call her Miss Swope. I told her every time I hold scissors, I think of her, because she taught us the safe way and the unsafe way. She will always be Miss Swope, even though I'm a middle-aged woman. She really did change lives. There's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who talked about the perspective that she gained through art class, and that's why she became a writer.

Rachel Skiffer (31:44.75)
And we were fortunate that Ms. Swope was there to hear.

I love that. And I love that she could get thanked because that's another thing that doesn't happen a lot is that we don't realize how much someone made a difference to us until it's much later. Do we cause that collateral learning? And then you want to go back and say, thank you so much. my gosh, I can never look at this the same way again. And that's the point.

That was a beautiful way to end. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Denise Pope. We really appreciate that you're our first guest.

I'm honored to be the first guest. I think it's awesome. So thank you and let me know if you need anything else.

Thank you.