Ep 298: Maximizing Teen Potential
Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.
We're here today with Scott H. Young talking about how to help your teens get better at things.
Studies show a lot of the common beliefs that people hold about learning, about mastery, about practice and improvement in all kinds of life domains from school to sports to everyday situations aren't exactly true.
There are some things we can do as parents to make sure to help our teenagers be better learners, better practicers, and to become masters of whatever they're working on in their lives.
Scott has made himself a student of this research.
And he has packed a ton into his new book, Get Better at Anything.
Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Scott Young: I'm excited to talk to you.
Andy Earle: You've got a couple of books here. You have this Ultra Learning. Now you've got this one, Get Better At Anything. Really seems to be a fascination for you. How people learn things, how people improve at things. So talk to me a little about that. Where did that come from? How do you think that kind of fascination evolved?
Scott Young: It depends on how much time you want to talk about it, but my parents were both elementary school teachers. So I think when you grow up in a family, Where your parents teachers learning and education are impressed upon you from a young age. But beyond that, I've always really been interested in learning things.
So I don't know whether that's just my upbringing or hardwiring, but I've always been interested in learning skills, subjects, reading books about things. And then that passion grew into my career over, evolution of lots of things I started when I was in college, I had Study skills program.
So I was writing about how to study more effectively. then I did a number of big public projects learning MIT's computer science curriculum and learning multiple languages that sort of got me some attention.
that was what established me as a writer and my writing career forward. And that culminated in the 2019 book, Ultra Learning, more recently, I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of the scientific research and trying to get a deep understanding mental model of how learning works.
And I've tried to put that together in this newest book, Get Better At Anything. So yeah, it's been a love affair that's lasted a long time. My interest in learning and education.
Andy Earle: And you like reframe a lot of things or break down a lot of maybe things that I assumed about learning or believe about how learning works and you show that maybe it's a little more complicated than we believe or it doesn't necessarily work in the way that we always think it does.
And one thing that I find really interesting is I had Always felt like that. You learn something better when you figure it out for yourself. When it's not spoon fed to you. You're really forced to just get in there. It might take you longer to get to the solution or to figure it out, but now it's, Cemented in there and you're going to remember it better.
You're going to understand it more deeply, but you break this down a little bit in the book that it's not necessarily how it works.
Scott Young: It's not necessarily how it works. So I think the thing there is probably some. Ideas behind this intuition. So I talk about in the book, there's this idea of retrieval practice.
This is a well studied phenomenon that when you test someone on something, you actually improve their memory more than if you just show it to them again. However, and like all things that gets more complicated than this, it's also the case that if you give people problems to solve and you just give them problems and you get them to solve it, they tend to learn.
Better and in some cases generalize better when you show them how to solve the problem. But I think suffice to say, I think a fairly general point that most people who are in this space could agree on is that we learn when we have lots of examples we can see and we get lots of practice.
So you do need to have both. But you can see how if you're in a situation where you don't have a lot of examples to learn from, then you're going to have this deficiency in learning. And also, if you're just like, here, just look at this, you're just watching some YouTube video very passively, you're not going to learn as well.
So in the book, I talk about See, do feedback. You really want to have all three to learn effectively. there's lots of interesting research showing some of the little edge cases of this thing that like you can get scenarios, for instance, where showing people how to solve a problem, they'll learn it better and generalize it better than if they actually solve the problems themselves, even if they solve the same amount of problems, which I thought was really wild when I first heard that experiment.
Andy Earle: And it takes, it's a lot faster because like figuring it out yourself, you're wandering around in the dark a little bit, looking for the answer. And when someone shows you, hey here's how I would approach this, or here's how you might want to think about this. You can get to the solution a lot faster, I guess what's going on there is that also You're seeing how the teacher approaches it, or you're almost learning frameworks or getting a understanding of patterns and overarching principles a little bit.
Scott Young: Yeah. Like one of the theories that I discussed in the book is developed by the Australian psychologist, John Sweller, and then more recently some of his colleagues in the Netherlands.
this cognitive load theory argues that one of the major bottlenecks in learning Is working memory. We have this limited amount of information we can hold simultaneously in our mind at the same time. And this forms a bottleneck for learning new information, but it's less of a bottleneck for old information.
So if you already have learned some of the stuff, then it doesn't occupy the same space in the bottleneck. And so this kind of creates this asymmetry. when you're learning something for the first time, you don't have very much capacity. It's confusing. It's difficult to understand.
And problem solving, this activity that we do where we try to, okay, I don't know how to solve this problem. How do I do it? How do I figure it out? One of the things you do when you're solving problems is you break it down. You're oh I'm trying to solve for X. Okay, so I have to get X by itself.
So I got to move the variables over here and I got to do this. And you're doing these sort of like sub goals and setting up little things in your head to try to break the problem down until some action you can take right now. And the thing is that all this extra work that's used to solve the problem.
Takes up space in your working memory, but is not actually part of the pattern you need to learn at the end. So if you're trying to learn okay you've got three X equals 15. Just divide both by three. And that's the pattern you have to learn. You actually learn that better if I show you that pattern, then if I expect you to like just through trial and error, you just happened to do it.
this shows that learning from examples, learning from observation can in some cases be better than learning just only through trial and error, only through problem solving.
But it also shows that it's a different way of learning and we need to do both. So I think no one learns algebra just by watching examples, but if you don't have the examples, it's also very hard to really get that procedural fluency and see what the patterns are.
Andy Earle: Yeah, it makes me think also what we're doing here is so cool, having parents get exposed to different ideas or hear people break down situations you might come across in your family or how might you approach different things. And then you can start to see those patterns in, with your own teenager, in your own life.
Scott Young: Definitely.
Andy Earle: also makes me think, I feel like I would have a tendency more to, not want to give my kids the answer or feel like, okay we got to figure that out for yourself, but after reading your book, now I'm thinking a lot more that there is value sometime in showing them how you would arrive at a solution.
Scott Young: yeah, how would you figure out when it'd be one of the major takeaways that I took from reading a lot of this research is that. While we definitely need to get practice on particular problems in order to learn how to solve them, there is sometimes a kind of almost dismissive tone that like if you never learn to figure things out, if you never learned to do things on your own, then you're going to be independent.
If you brush your kid's teeth until they're 16 and they never do it. Then, you might be surprised. They don't just spontaneously start doing it. So you can be this kind of I'm going to do everything for my kids. I'm going to, fold their laundry, do everything, and they're not going to do it.
And yes, if you do that, they're not going to learn it because why would they you're doing it for them. But on the other hand, if you take the opposite tack and you just started to say I'm going to just let them figure it out. If it's a fairly simple problem and they're smart enough, they can figure it out.
But if it's complicated, or if you're likely to make mistakes, they'll do much better if you show them how to do it first. So I think that's one of the things that we often underrate when we're trying to teach people is how much knowledge we take for granted. How much things that we just do that are just this is obvious.
And they don't know how to do that. And they do need to actually have this kind of okay, break it down, explain it, show how it works. And so I think definitely when you're dealing with your kids, it's important to reflect on that. Not only that, yes, they can not always be the most motivated learners.
They're not always going to be wanting like eagerly to soak up the wisdom you've acquired throughout your lifetime. But at the same time, we want to try to communicate those things. So if there's something that you know how to do and they don't know how to do it, yeah, you do need to actually show them.
Andy Earle: Yeah, I love that. I found that really interesting. And just what you're talking about in terms of you write in the book about experts explaining their thought process as they're going through things and how Someone has a lot of experience solving a problem, then when they're explaining their thought process to somebody who's more junior at it, they tend to skip steps or just assume that you understand things it's almost like you didn't even realize that you did that step because it's so on autopilot at this point.
Scott Young: You might even have this experience yourself or someone who listening to this has had this experience. Take a skill that you practiced very well. Like it could be learning to drive. Another one is learning to read is a good example. When you learn to read the actual stuff that has to go on in your brain to make sense of those little black squiggles on the page and hear words out of it.
You need to recognize the letters. What sounds the letters make, except in English, sometimes they don't make the sounds you think they should. So you need to like, learn these kinds of fragments of words and know that G H can sometimes be a sound and sometimes it's a good sound, whether it's ghost or enough.
And so these are all little pieces of knowledge that get practiced and they get automated so that they're not something you're consciously thinking about when you're reading, you just see. The whole sentence, it's like a stream of consciousness is coming into your brain. You're not trying to deduce, okay, it's a when you're trying to spell enough in your head, you're not doing that anymore.
And so I think it's this. Familiarity with things, this feeling of this is obvious. This is common sense. It's because the knowledge is receded from our awareness that it actually takes some skill to bring it back to the level of someone who is still trying to understand it, who is still trying to learn it.
And that's true for something like learning to read. It's true for learning to tie your shoes. It's true for any skill that you have done to the point where you don't even think about it. And sometimes the way you do it is also not the most appropriate for someone who, is just starting off.
You maybe have to find a different way that can break down some of the difficulty. And so I think these are some of the things that are very important to becoming a good teacher. But certainly, in our role as parents. We are always teaching a little bit. And so even if we're not going to be, a professional educator, we have to have that mindset of what are the things that this person doesn't actually understand that is important in order to have this thing that I think to be common sense.
Andy Earle: Pretty interesting. Something else we talk about in the book. is how importance of letting your kids fail. And, you need to give them more challenges and they need to just not always be doing things that are just so easy for them.
But you also talk in the book about the importance of success and. how that factors in as in classrooms in a lot of classrooms where there's so much focus on starting to quiz the students on things really early in the semester or test people on things early in the semester and have that factor into their final grade.
Why is that? Problematic sometimes.
Scott Young: Yeah. So let's talk about the second thing first. So this idea that I talk about in the book is an idea called mastery learning. And so the idea of mastery learning is that you want to have these frequent cycles of I'm going to teach a concept. I'm going to do a little like quiz or exercise or homework, and we're going to get feedback on what did you learn?
What did you not learn? And then we're going to use that to tailor the instruction. if you did not understand something, we'll give another explanation. If you're not performing something adequately yet, we'll give you more practice, this kind of thing. And the thing is that in a typical classroom, one of the approaches that we use, the sort of carrots and sticks to motivate students is that we have all these like interim assignments for grades.
And I understand why teachers do this. It's a kind of almost a truism. If the homework is optional, the kids don't do it, right? They only do it when it's for grades. But the problem is that this can also create this situation. Whereas if you're struggling early on in the class and you're failing the quizzes, you're failing the midterm exams.
if you got. 70 percent on the final, then you know, 70%. If you needed to have 50 percent to pass, then that should be enough.
Whereas if you need to get this sort of really high score in order to make up for your past errors, then really what we're saying is that we don't care that you're learning. We don't care that you've learned from, your failures at unit one until now, you understand the concept. We're going to still punish you.
Cause you didn't understand it right off the bat. And how you implement this in the classroom, I think depends on exactly where you're teaching or where you're doing things. I know a lot of mastery times you're doing these quizzes in the class. It's not like the student is taking it home and then having to do it.
And they have to like, you can see classical do these like little short quizzes or something like this. Or maybe you give credit in such a way that like, if you completed the assignment, you get credit, which is different from scoring you on whether you got it right.
But the idea is that these frequent assessments. Not only help the students know whether they're learning or not and that helps them pay attention, but it also really helps the teacher understand like, oh, wow, nobody got this concept that I tried to teach. And so that's very important for teaching. So that's the rationale behind that approach to teaching is to be quite specific about what you want kids to learn and set up conditions so that everyone can learn it.
I think we have this sort of inherited attitude. About like grading on a curve and treating classes as a sort of like an intelligence or aptitude test that like what we're trying to do is filter out the best students. And you know what? If that's your goal, I think that's okay.
It's probably the case that okay, you can only let a certain number of people get a particular kind of training. Maybe we do need to filter it. But for most of the school classes, certainly all of public education, we are trying to just raise the boats. We're trying to raise the water level of
People's understanding. And so I think this kind of attitude can be pernicious, The other thing you were talking about, the first point was about the importance of success. And I think here it's very important to have the right mental model of how people's motivation works, because it's certainly the case that if you just have everything easy for you in life and you never get a challenge and then you face a challenge, it's very often the case that, you just, give up because everything has been too easy.
So people who argue that we need to challenge ourselves and do these things, they're not wrong, but that can sometimes go into a sort of. A reversal of this attitude that like we need to make things maximally difficult from the beginning. And then if you don't stick through it, that's because you don't have like mental toughness or grit or this kind of thing, but the way our motivation works is that we very often, when we experience a lot of early failures in a domain, it's just rational for us not To spend a lot of time doing it.
So if you keep trying to do something and you keep failing over and over again, it's I'm just not good at this. I should go do something else. And that is a very rational response to that situation. So if you don't want people to do this situation, you need to build from success.
You need to start off so that you're able to get some small wins. You're able to start building successes. And once you're doing well, once you have this confidence, then it's time to introduce the challenges so that, you have this period where you struggled and then you succeeded. And then that's maybe a better experience to learn from than when you only succeed when it's easy.
But I think if you are at the phase of learning or the phase of a new skill where it's very difficult and it's frustrating. It seems to me clearly the case that a lot of situations we don't learn skills. We don't learn subjects. Because there was this sort of demotivating failure experience early on, and we just got turned off from it.
a lot more people would be better off, not if things were harder, but if there were more encouragement, there were more smooth ramps up to skills rather than these sort of like jarring barriers where you have to hurdle over them.
Andy Earle: I love that because it strikes me that some of the biggest learning moments or learning experiences happen when, yeah you've been getting it right.
And then all of a sudden, you don't. It's something solid. It's not working. And then you have to figure it out or adjust your approach or question. Okay, actually, maybe it's a little more complicated than I thought. And then figure it out. And then get it right.
And then also having to figure it out or figure out what went wrong or adjust your approach and then get it right. That is where it starts to click. And I think that's important. And yeah, it's really struck me with the testing that it's like we're setting up our classes in a way that we're penalizing kids for not just learning at the exact same rate as everybody else or something like that.
Oh, if you haven't got it by week two, because that's the quiz. So if you're not at an A level by then you're already starting class with a bad grade trying to dig out of a hole. What do you think?
Anything that we could do to recognize that as parents or to make sure we're teaching things or communicating things to our kids in way That they can
Scott Young: It's difficult. I think particularly if you're not a teacher.
Just trying to show someone a skill that you've learned really well. It can be quite hard. Like I can think of an experience I had a number of years ago. I was swimming somewhere and I used to, when I was in high school, I used to be a lifeguard. So I'm not like, Olympic swimmer by any means, but I'm a decent swimmer.
And my friend never learned to swim. at this point he had not taken swimming lessons and, he was quite bad and he was a little bit afraid of the water Because of that, if you're thinking if I get up beyond my neck, I can't swim it is a little bit nerve wracking.
And so I was trying to show him in a fairly shallow area, how to tread water. And it felt almost impossible to try to communicate what are you doing with your hands that cause you to move in one direction versus another, because it is a kind of complicated sort of rhythmic motion. And depending on the right way you do it, you go in one direction or you go in the other.
It required a lot of thinking, but it was just something that was like, how do you explain how you walk? So I think certainly with motor skills, with physical skills, this is very much the case that like, it's very difficult to communicate.
If you haven't really thought about how the skill is taught. And so if I were in that position again, for instance, I'm like, I have to teach someone how to swim. One of the things that's good to do is to like, look at people who teach swimming lessons and what are the ways that they teach beginners swimmers?
I'll give an example. Cause I know that a lot of the people who are listening to this have older children, but I have younger children. So I have a four year old and the process of teaching them to dress themselves.
There's all these tricks that you learn from the daycare teachers of okay, put the shirt on the ground and then they can go one motion, put it over their head because the thing they struggle with doing that, or the jacket trick where you've put it upside down and the neck is facing them.
So they can just flip it over their head, which is not how you put on your jacket. You hold it out and you put one arm in and then you put the other, but that's hard for them to do. So this is a different technique. It's easier for them to learn. if I were teaching someone a skill, looking at how other people teach it would be the first step, because it might be impossible for me to break down exactly how I'm doing something.
So certainly if you were teaching some athletic skill, that'd be like that. But even intellectual skills, I think. We often skip over the basics and I'll give an example of this as well. And maybe you can, if you're listening right now, you can reflect on an experience when this has happened to you.
But have you ever been in a class where the teacher starts going into some topic and they're like as this, and you're like, I don't know that. What are you talking about? the issue is that they've assumed that, you've taken this as a prerequisite class, you should have learned this already.
And we don't realize that, you know what? Yeah, maybe in some idealized world, we would have fully mastered every single prerequisite before we get to this class. But in reality, maybe we have shaky knowledge or we don't, but maybe we know about it. If you explain it to us again, we'd remember, but we forget.
And so I think when we are trying to teach things a useful heuristic is to imagine going one step more pedantic and obvious and simpler than we think we need. So if you think you need to explain it to this level, do one level dumber than that. And that's probably closer to the level that's actually in the middle as opposed to being, this is too simplified, this is too dumbed down.
And so that's been as a writer, I'm not in classrooms teaching students, but as a writer, that's been something that has often been The thing going back to me is that like you talk to people and you think however simple you need to make it, you need to make it one level simpler.
Otherwise you're going to be confusing people. And so you have conversations with your editor where you're like can you explain this again? Try doing this another time. And I think that's a useful exercise.
Say the things that you think don't need to be said, say them anyways, because there's probably going to be half the people who it isn't obvious for them where they require a reminder.
Andy Earle: I love that. Yeah. Because a lot of times the way you do something when you're really good at it is not the same as the way you learned it originally.
And you forget that you just think, Oh no, it's just like this. You just do it like this. But if you actually think back to how you actually learned it. it is not the way you approach it now.
Scott Young: Absolutely.
Andy Earle: Thank you so much for coming on the show today and speaking with us about the 12 maxims for mastery and all your work on learning and improvement. It's been really enlightening and fascinating discussion.
Scott Young: Thank you so much for having me.
Andy Earle: Where can we send listeners to find out more about you and follow what you're up to?
Scott Young: You can definitely check out my website, scotthyoung. com. I have lots of free articles and then there's all these links to Get Better and my previous book, Ultra Learning
I even have a podcast. So if you're interested in any of these ideas, I highly recommend checking it out.
Andy Earle: We're here today with Scott H. Young, talking about how to help our teens master whatever they're working on. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.
Scott Young: So for anyone who is creating works, you can look at their notable works, their groundbreaking works, and then you can compare that to their less groundbreaking works. You can come up with a hit ratio. And one of the things he finds, and this is also a surprising fact that I don't think would have been obvious to me in the outset, is that this hit ratio is relatively flat throughout the career.
That means that it's not the case that, this model of like ever improving performance where the quality is going up and up and up and up and up over time. It's also not the case that there's this sort of like creative spark.
It's still the case that if, you make another work, do you have about the same chance of having a breakthrough when you're 80 as when you're 20
There's this concept from cognitive psychology called the power law of practice, which shows that as you continue to do something, it follows this kind of power law curve where you're getting better at it and better at it.
It's more efficient. It's faster, but it just, gets better continuously, but by smaller increments over time.
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