A conversation with Dr. Todd Rose, faculty member and director of the the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Rose's book, Dark Horse, charts the paths of individuals who have learned how to harness their unique interests, abilities, and circumstances to create success and happiness - often far from the traditional path of elite universities and corporate careers.
Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment can be purchased in your local bookstore or on Amazon.
Click here to learn more about the Your Child's Learning Mojo membership, which will help you to support your child's intrinsic love of learning - a critical step for raising a Dark Horse.
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Jen: 00:01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode comes to us via a bit of a different route than they often do. A friend of mine actually heard our guests, Dr. Todd Rose on The Art of Manliness podcast and said, “Hey, you might want to listen to this because it sounds a lot like what you're trying to do with the way your daughter Carys learns”. And I listened to the episode and then I did something I've never done before. The message that I heard from Dr. Rose on the podcast made him feel like such a kindred spirit in terms of how we think about learning and work, that I reached out to him and asked him to talk with us even before I read his book. And rather than go over ground that's already been covered elsewhere, I'd really encourage you to go to this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/DarkHorse to find a link to that episode on The Art of Manliness because there's so much there to help adults discover and follow their passions if you're feeling unfulfilled in the work that you do and that you might need some help charting a different course.
Jen: 00:02:20 So, today we're going to look at the outcomes for what Dr. Rose calls dark horses, but we'll specifically focus on how we can support children in navigating their path to becoming a dark horse, which involves identifying your skills and true motivations and harnessing those to do work that you're truly passionate about. And on the related note, I wanted to let you know about a pilot program that I'm running that's open for signups right now. It's called Your Child's Learning Mojo and it will help parents to support their children's intrinsic motivation to learn. If your child is in the early preschool years right now, then you're probably inundated with their questions about the world, but research shows that by the early school years, children learn that their own questions aren't really valued anymore and what counts is whether they know the answers to questions that other people have asked and yet the ability to formulate questions and ask them and know how to find some initial answers and then circle back to a deeper level of questions and explore ideas with both depth and breadth and demonstrate that learning to communities that care about the topic is going to be a foundational set of skills for life 20 years from now and in the age of search engines, the ability to recall an answer is already pretty well obsolete.
Jen: 00:03:25 If we're worried about our children's success when they graduate from school and maybe college, then we might be tempted to teach them a skill like coding and while there are plenty of apps and afterschool clubs and summer camps that have popped up, which imply that if you aren't teaching your child to code, then you're making an error that says fundamental is not teaching them how to read. Developers tell us that coding isn't about getting the syntax of code right. It's about having an idea, proposing a solution, seeing if it works, delving deeply into an issue, developing creative solutions to problems and sticking with it when it repeatedly fails while you try different approaches and improve on them each time you take another run at it. Teaching the syntax of coding doesn't teach any of those skills, but harnessing your child's natural intrinsic motivation to learn does support the kinds of skills that will be needed to learn coding and complex problem solving and critical thinking and creativity and all of the other skills the experts know are really going to be important in the future.
Jen: 00:04:20 In their book Becoming Brilliant that we looked at way back in episode 10 psychologists, Dr. Roberta Golinkoff and Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek argued that schools are doing really well at preparing our children for the kinds of jobs that existed in 1953 and there are some places where schools are beginning to shift their approach. But in general, being in school means mostly being tested on your ability to remember facts rather than developing the critical skills. So, if we want our children to have these critical skills, it's really on us as parents to make it happen. And the good news is that children come out already prime to develop these skills. We know they have boundless curiosity and they want to delve deeply into topics that interest them, whether it's dinosaurs or beading or construction. And if we can just learn how to become their guide on the side, who connects them to resources and helps them to deepen the work they're already doing, rather than the sage on the stage who provides all the answers, then we'll be able to help our children become the profoundly fulfilled dark horses that Dr. Rose will describe.
Jen: 00:05:20 I took a career coaching course a while back and I'm still in its Facebook group and almost without fail, the people who sign up for the course and introduce themselves, give some variation of the story, “I did well in school and I got a good job and I made quite a bit of money and now I'm approaching midlife I realized I'm really unsatisfied and I'm here to discover my true passion so I can live a life that feels meaningful to me.” So, as good as that career coaching course was and it was really good, my goal with this episode and with Your Child's Learning Mojo membership is to make that course obsolete for that purpose because instead of getting to midlife and realizing they're incredibly unfulfilled, our children will engage in activities and learning that fulfill them from the very beginning and as they live their lives, they'll continually reassess their passions and whether their work is in service of their passions and have the knowledge and ability and desire to make micro adjustments as they go along.
Jen: 00:06:09 So, they never reach that breaking point and instead they'll become dark horses who were truly connected to work that they find meaningful throughout their lives. So, if you'd like to learn more about how to do this, please do go to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo to see how I will support you in this work. I'll teach you what's going on in children's minds when they learn and why the kinds of strewing activities that you see all over Pinterest are really just the very beginning of that process and don't help your children to learn much that's meaningful or connected to their own interests. We'll begin a learning journal that you can use to identify your child's interests and passions and then engage with these in a way that supports your child in developing the critical skills of the future. And we'll understand how to use nature as inspiration for developing questions and ideas and a sense of wonder.
Jen: 00:06:52 You'll become a member of a learning community of parents who will support each other in developing our own skills so we can help our children. And of course you'll get my guidance as well. So if you're interested in participating, please head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo for all the details and just sign up. The group is currently accepting new members through January 31st and we'll get started on February 1st. So to make a formal introduction to our guests today, Dr. Rose is a lecturer on education and leads the Laboratory for the Science of the Individual at Harvard University. His work is focused on the intersection of individuality and personalization applied to help people learn, work and live. He's the author of the books, The End of Average and most recently Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment. Welcome Dr. Rose.
Dr. Rose: 00:07:36 Thanks for having me.
Jen: 00:07:37 And so before we kind of dig into the real meat here, I wonder if you can set the stage by telling us what is a dark horse?
Dr. Rose: 00:07:45 Yeah. So from our work, we've found that sort of the traditional definition is really there are people who end up being successful that nobody saw coming, right? And that can be because they were viewed as failures early and then succeeded or because they end up being successful in one domain, but then make these pivots and ended up doing stuff that's completely different. And again, nobody sees them coming.
Jen: 00:08:09 And in some ways this resonated with me so much when I read it because in a way I think of myself as a dark horse. You know, I got degrees from Berkeley and Yale and a job at a prestigious consulting company and I really did enjoy what I was doing for a while in sustainability consulting. But the work that I find really so fulfilling came after I got a Master's in Psychology, which was focused on Child Development and then another in Education and sharing this through the podcast with other people that, I mean it just keeps me going, keeps me getting up in the morning and I would never have seen that coming.
Dr. Rose: 00:08:43 You're hitting on something really important, which is like, you know, ever since the term dark horse was created quite a while ago to talk about things that are successful that no one sees coming, in our research in the dark horse project, this is exactly what we found, right? ‘Cause we were interested in why do these folks get off the beaten path and yet still end up surprising us and to a person, the thing that kept emerging was the way they thought about success in life. And rather than playing by sort of society's definition of success or somebody else's view, they were deeply focused on pursuing personal fulfillment. And given that it's so personal, it’s so individual, the things that light you up, it's not surprising in a standardized society that it often requires getting off the beaten path to make it happen.
Jen: 00:09:29 Yeah. And okay, so let's talk about that standardization because I mean this is a question that seems like it should be really simple, but of course it isn't and it has so much to do with learning and how we think about school. And so how do children, and we're thinking about children, but of course it's applicable to all people as well, how do they learn best?
Dr. Rose: 00:09:48 Yeah. It's funny, right? Because that seems like something that is so obvious, but in many ways it runs so counter to the way we actually educate. So if you think about some of the basics like it won't sound like rocket science, right? Not surprisingly, kids that are learning in ways that are engaging to them are going to learn better. That sounds almost silly, silly obvious, but it is surprising how much we neglect that. So if you're engaged, if you're motivated, which I think are related at the same thing, if the learning is contextualized in a relevant way, right? So it's not just abstracted away from your real life but deeply embedded into it when people are more active rather than passively learning. And one of the things that's really important is the extent to which students are, have more autonomy and agency in the learning. And it's funny, my grandma would have said, you didn't need science to tell us that. But I feel like given how far down the rabbit hole of standardization we've gotten in our education system, it's good to remind people about just how much we know about what makes for good learning.
Jen: 00:10:58 Okay. So you said a lot of things there and you sort of skimmed over a number of things and I want to pick those apart a little bit. You talked about how learners need to be engaged, the learning needs to be relevant, the learner needs to be autonomous. And when I think about school, I think about the way that some bureaucrats and hopefully some teachers, but probably administrators sit off in a room somewhere and determine what is the curriculum and this is the list of things that a child must know. And of course there's no way that it can be relevant to any individual child's interests. It seems like it's difficult to engage them. You really can't give them any autonomy when you are determining in advance what they're going to learn. They might get to pick, and I know this is a theme in your work as well, the idea of picking versus choosing. They may get to pick one exercise versus another, but they don't actually get to make real decisions about their learning. Right?
Dr. Rose: 00:11:53 No, I mean like it's exactly right. So it's interesting when you think about who decides the curriculum. And from my perspective, I am not opposed to standards, but it matters a great deal who gets to determine them, right? So, let me give you an example, so if you think about the last major, major sort of transformation in public education, it was probably the high school movement where we went from having common schools that only went to like sixth, seventh, eighth grade to suddenly saying, wait a minute, we need to mass educate the American public all the way through high school in a way that would no one had ever done in human history. Well, when you think about how you could have accomplished that, and we did, we built a high school a day for 22 straight years in the US you would imagine, wait a minute for us to be able to have done that, it must've required some central planning and some bureaucrats who decided the curriculum.
Dr. Rose: 00:12:47 And then we kind of like impose that on everyone and we got some uniformity, but it's not true. So actually there was no federal involvement for most of the high school movement. And what happened was community by community, there was a lot of conversation about the changing economy, about what people needed to know. And they tax themselves to build the schools. And what you found was that it turned out across the entire country, some things they did have in common. For example, everybody thought it was important for kids to learn to read. You didn't need them to tell you that, right? Parents knew. Communities knew that if the kids were not literate at a pretty high level, they couldn't be good citizens. They couldn't access the newer higher tech jobs that were available. But at the same time there was incredible amounts of variation in terms of particulars.
Dr. Rose: 00:13:35 So for example, in Kansas, most of the high schools taught animal husbandry, which cause of course, right? In the Bronx, not so much. So what was so fascinating to me is one of the biggest mass movements in education ever in human history was done by paying deep attention and respect to the community and allowing them to have a deep say in what was worth teaching and how. And so I feel like we've gotten so far away from that that we're almost afraid. We don't remember that you can actually get scale this way. And so we think, unless somebody decides what's worth learning and it has to be an expert in their office somewhere in a conference room, then it probably won't go well. Right? Well I would also say, how's it going right now? Like even by that standard, how are we doing? And I think from a philosophical standpoint, I think if you're going to commit to a system that understands and develops individual kids in a way that's good for them and good for the community, you have to put the power at the level of the community to make these decisions, not some bureaucrat that's abstracted away from the kid.
Jen: 00:14:43 Yeah, and you used a phrase in the book that really stuck with me. It was pervasive variability in human development and the idea that we sort of have this idea that there will be a standard way of learning and everybody will learn that way and anyone who deviates from that way is abnormal in some way. And they get a diagnosis and they get some kind of individualized education plan instead of acknowledging that there is inherent variability in the way that everybody learns. And if we can accommodate that and adjust to it, then we're going to serve our students and our children so much better.
Dr. Rose: 00:15:18 Right. And so my background is actually in this new science of individuality, which has come out of medicine and genetics and neuroscience where once we have the tools and the capability of seeing individuals rather than studying groups of people, what we found was just what you said, I mean, just the unbelievable pervasive individuality of human beings. Now in the past, we've just decided it was either noise to ignore or what we could do is some variability is better than other variability, right? And what we've seen is actually like, in fact the variability matters, individuality really matters. It doesn't mean selfishness, but it means you can build more effective and even more efficient systems that take that into account. I’ll give you a concrete example outside of education. So one of my favorite things, one of the bigger breakthroughs besides things like cancer research comes in in the form of personalized nutrition and my colleagues in Israel.
Dr. Rose: 00:16:17 So, you know, the glycemic index, which is supposed to tell us, you know, this kind of food elevates your blood sugar this way, right? Well that entire index is based on group averages and my colleagues using this new science studied like how many people like actually respond the way the glycemic index does. Literally nobody, nobody. And what they were able to do now that sounds like chaos. It's like well wait a minute, if we're so individual, like what do you do? Well, what they were able to show was that if you actually like modeled the individuality took it seriously. They were able to create the ability to make incredibly precise personalized predictions of exactly how I will respond to any type of food. And they've had so much success that they even created an app called DayTwo and I use it and it is shockingly good. So for example, for me the glycemic index...
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