Read the full transcript of Episode 73 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Nancy Weinstein, founder of MindPrint Learning, a company devoted to finding each student’s specific learning needs so parents and educators can help empower kids to take charge of their educational journey. Nancy joins NAIS President Debra P. Wilson, along with Sumner McCallie of the McCallie School (TN), to share how MindPrint works with schools.
Debra Wilson: Hey friends, welcome back to New View EDU. I am really excited about today’s conversation. Well, I’m excited about pretty much all of our conversations, but this one is getting to the heart of an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about. As technology becomes more and more apparent not just in our daily lives, but in the way that we lead and the way that we think about education, I’ve been thinking about a lot of businesses that are helping incorporate technology in different ways to the ways that we run schools and the way we serve our students and our families. And so today on the podcast, we have Nancy Weinstein.
Nancy is the CEO and founder of MindPrint Learning, which is an educational assessment company, and basically it enables personalized instruction for every student based on their cognitive strengths and needs. It’s sort of a, it’s almost a Myers-Briggs type thing for kids, in some ways. She started the company in response to experiences she had when her own daughter was in third grade and needed special support. Prior to founding MindPrint, Nancy was an investor and business leader in companies including Goldman Sachs, Disney, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Telling us a little bit more about MindPrint and, you know, how it’s being used in schools, is Sumner McCallie, who is the Dean of Faculty and Curriculum at the McCallie School, which is an all-boys 6th-12th grade boarding day school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In his role, Sumner gets to think daily about the larger goals of the school: What is taught, how it’s taught, and who teaches it. And so I’m excited to kick off this conversation because it’s both the story of how MindPrint came to be, what the tool is, how it helps our schools, how it helps our students; but also, how a school is really using this tool in very practical ways, and since it’s a pretty new school, hopefully it’ll give us some good insight into how leaders are really thinking about technology tools like this one to help better serve our students.
Nancy, Sumner, I'm so glad you all are here. Even if we're all not quite caffeinated enough yet to have a conversation, we're going to give it a shot anyway. How are you both today?
Nancy Weinstein: Great, thanks.
Sumner McCallie: Doing great, great to be here.
Debra Wilson: So glad you're here. Nancy, I'm going to start with you, because I've followed along with your journey a little bit, but of course those listening have not. So will you kick us off? Like tell us about your journey to founding MindPrint. Like how'd you get here?
Nancy Weinstein: Thank you for asking me that question. It has been quite a journey.
My background is in industry. I worked at large Fortune 500 companies, and I was staying at home. My daughters were in third and first grade at an independent school in New Jersey. And my older daughter, I would describe as very bright and very, very challenging. And she was lucky enough to have what I would describe as the teacher's teacher in third grade, like the teacher that people said, if you could get one teacher in your child's whole career, this would be the teacher. And we were lucky enough to get that teacher.
And she, we went to parent teacher conferences in October, and she said, I would just love to have more data on this kid. There's something holding her back and I just can't pinpoint it. And as a parent, I had no idea what she was asking for. And frankly, being in an independent school, I didn't know why she was asking, suggesting it to me and not providing that data. I subsequently learned she, really what she wanted was a psych ed eval on my daughter, even though she wouldn't sort of fit the typical criteria, and that it was a process that I was going to have to undertake on my own and go privately, which I did.
And it was an emotional, expensive, and draining process for anyone who's been through it. But when I said to the psychologist, I said, what do I tell my daughter about why we're doing this? And she said, you tell your daughter that you're giving her the gift of how she learns. And it's a gift that she's going to have for the rest of her life. And I very naively said, so why aren't we doing that for every child? If we know we can do this and it exists, why aren't we?
And I also, going through the process, I have a bioengineering background. And so it was, to me, like this was something that we could definitely scale. We didn't have to do the whole full process, but the tests are really understandable, knowable and usable for every student. So anyway, that sent me on a one year journey to find an assessment that could do kind of the 80-20 rule of a psych ed evaluation. And with that, we started MindPrint and created the mission of every child could understand their learning strengths, their needs and how to support them at scale and affordably.
Debra Wilson: That “affordably” piece is a big one, right? I remember when you and I first talked about this and we just talked about, too, just how long the testing was for your third grader. It's an experience.
Nancy Weinstein: It is an experience and it typically takes anywhere from, you know, five hours to 15 hours, depending on the child. And it's emotional, and you're pulling a kid out of school.
And the reality is, is that every student has variability. Every student has strengths and needs and we all benefit – Students themselves, the parents that are supporting them, the teachers that are supporting them – of knowing how to reach them when they struggle.
And so the ability to do that, we license an assessment out of the University of Pennsylvania's Brain Behavior Lab. The assessment takes about an hour. We do it in many cases school-wide. So literally put all your students on their devices for an hour online, self-paced, self-administered, and we get the results and we understand their variability in an hour. And it is life-changing for many students.
And for my daughter, that was really, her data and her MindPrint matched the data that was in her PsychEd eval. And once we could understand what her variability was, honestly, it was so easy to help her. But without being able to pinpoint it, her teacher, and this teacher is incredible, and just couldn't sort of narrow in on specifically what it was, because we all know when students aren't learning, they can't articulate why they're not learning. They behave in a certain way. Some of them pull back, some of them are disruptive, some of them sort of, you know, kind of shelter in place, if you will, and hide their emotions. And as parents and teachers, we can't always figure out what that is.
But if we can know this is a kid who's struggling to focus, or struggling to remember what they learned, or struggling to learn in some contexts but not others, well then we know exactly what to do. We have great teachers, but if they're playing a guessing game for all the kids, it's just impossible to do. But with the data, it is so eminently possible and makes such a difference in so many kids' lives.
Debra Wilson: So what does it do exactly? So I love that you're talking about your child on a podcast because my kids threaten me sometimes about talking about them on podcasts. So let's just say hypothetically, I could get one of my children to take MindPrint. Like what would the report show me? How does it break down? What is it spitting out at me as a parent, or if I were one of my kids, what does that report look like?
Nancy Weinstein: We look at 10 skills that are fundamental to how you learn in all different contexts. So we look at reasoning skills, how you understand and best take in new information, verbal, visual, and spatial. We look at two aspects of memory. So how easily you retain new information, whether it's with words or with pictures. We look at those executive functions. We all talk about them, but attention, short-term memory, flexible thinking, and then finally how efficiently you work in different contexts.
And so we can measure all of those objectively. So we're using puzzle-like tasks. Each task takes anywhere from two to 10 minutes, depending on the task, and we measure the results in terms of both accuracy and speed. And we can then very quickly in our reports deliver to you so you understand, is this a child that might be struggling in one skill and not another? And that's why when they're in math class, it's easy. And then in history, they're really struggling.
And so we can do that and then also provide, I think this is the most important part, it's not just about identifying the problem, it's about helping teachers and families address the challenge. And so we always pair up all of our reports with the specific strategies that will help a student in different contexts. So for example, if we have a student with really great reasoning skills, like they can understand everything we teach them, and discover that their memory skills aren't quite so good, and so what we're probably seeing when they take tests and chapter tests or end of year tests, that they understand it all, they're just forgetting it. And so we just need to give them strategies for efficient retention and memorization.
And that might be, you know, and another student might have a completely different challenge. So it's about having just, not just the knowing why, but also knowing what to do to support that student.
Debra Wilson: That's awesome. All right, so Sumner, talk to us a little bit. Like, how did you get this to McCallie? How did you find MindPrint? Because I do feel like there's a lot of different people doing all kinds of different things out there. There are a lot of different tools, solving different problems. So how did you find it for McCallie? And then, how is this fitting into what you do on campus? What does this look like in action?
Sumner McCallie: Yeah, that's a great question. And maybe some quick background. So McCallie, 6 through 12, all boys, boarding school, day school in Chattanooga Tennessee, I think we pride ourselves on really strong programs across the board, but particularly academic programs. I think we're one of the stronger in the region. And to be that, you also have to make sure you're providing support for students. It's not enough just to sort of have a rigorous program and say, we're great. I think you've got to make sure that the support's there and that it's accessible for students.
And so we have a pretty significant support network. We have a large learning center, the entire second floor of our academic building is a learning center. Guys can come in and say, hey, I didn't get this. I didn't understand this. There's a culture of asking for help. There's a culture of being willing to struggle, just not struggle alone. I guess I'd describe it that way. And then all different types of levels of support, study halls, course studies, et cetera.
Right before COVID, we had sort of the normal process and normal conversations, et cetera. But post-COVID, we were finding a significant number more students coming in to the Learning Center, coming in and asking teachers questions. We had teachers coming to us saying, this is different, something's different here, and I'm trying to figure out, I love these guys, but they're not getting it. They're remembering as much. Or it's taking me more to get across.
And so we were trying to figure this out and happened to stumble across, and it was incredibly fortunate, to stumble across Nancy and her group on MindPrint. And what they were saying was exactly what we were running into. And they were saying it in a way that made sense. Not only did they have the reasoning and the understanding that I could share with teachers, their resource, the strategies, it's page after page of try this, try that. And they understood students. It wasn't just here's one strategy that better apply to all. It was the concept that every single one of these students is different. We've got to figure out how to understand them as a learner. So they can, as MindPrint uses it, they can study smarter, not harder. I mean, that phrase is really important to me.
And so we kind of stumbled across it, and we did a trial run with some of our students that are a bit more challenged in terms of executive functioning. And that was great. We did about, I guess, 25 or 30 of those that spring. And we began to realize this is making a difference. It wasn't just grades that were moving up. You could see it in their confidence. When they finally understood what was the struggle and why they weren't necessarily understanding something, it wasn't that they were not smart. It was that they needed to do some things and that the friend across the table didn't have to do those types of things, but had to do different types of things because of where their brain works. And all the brains were working, but they weren't working the same way. And that's true with all of us.
So the next year, that next fall, we gave MindPrint to all of our freshmen. So we have a class of about 150 to 170, depending on the year, and every single freshman. And we then went over their results. We take a retreat the third or fourth weekend of school. I also asked teachers, as many teachers as could to take it, and we invited Nancy down to share some background. And so we began to get the school moving in the way of understanding that students have these unique combinations, and if we can help the student know how to advocate for themselves, if we can let teachers realize that there are these ranges, it wasn't a matter of trying to ask the teachers to completely revamp their classes. That's not a great ask. Teachers need the structure. But I needed them to think about who was in their class and how they might begin to adapt.
And so we're beginning to move towards this sense that if a student is struggling, what I'm encouraging teachers to do is the first question, the very first question they ask when they see a student struggling, a student comes to them is, what's your MindPrint? And get that vocabulary in and amongst the students and faculty.
Because we have strategies. It's just reminding the student, wait a minute. You don't have to wait for a teacher to change what they're doing. You have the ability. You know who you are. You can figure this out, you can move forward on it. And for us as adults, parents, and educators to remind them that they have strengths relative to other areas of the brain, let's use those strengths.
Debra Wilson: So when the students get their report, is it the same as the report the teachers see?
Sumner McCallie: No, there are two different levels of report. There's one that students see that has no percentiles attached to it. It is entirely relevant to who they are. That's really critical, because this isn't about students comparing to each other. It's about a student understanding for himself or herself these are my strengths, these are my areas.
The school-facing side does have those, and I will say that's been very useful for me as an educator when I sit down with a student to sort of think about, OK, here's the background. I'm not necessarily going to share that. Sometimes I do depending on the student, sometimes particularly if they have strengths, they don't think that they're very strong as a student academically. They've kind of told themselves, hey I'm not a great student. And I can say,
well, right now what seems to be happening in your classes is it's really most classes are really pushing the areas that are harder for you. But you actually have strengths. Look, here are the strengths, and in fact they're not just strengths, they're top 16 percent top 5 percent, right? That's the type of way that the school can use it, but I do appreciate the fact there are differences.
The other thing I will say that's really useful that’s on that that school facing side report, the reason it's helpful to have those differences in percentages is because we can actually make some really interesting distinctions. One student that I've been with this past year had come in. He's an exceptional student. He does really, really well. He had done well in seventh and eighth grade. I'm going to call him Adam for the sake of the conversation.
Adam ran into a really challenging honors biology class. And it was challenging because in fact, it was asking him to do a lot more than previous schools had asked him to. It was asking him to analyze, to think. It wasn't just memorization. It wasn't just spitting back what he knew. It was truly on a test, in fact, or on an assessment – there would be lab assessments. There would be tests that were asking him to do something in a completely new environment with the skills he had learned. But he had never been asked to do that. And he was really struggling. He was used to getting As. This was a C, C+.
And so he'd taken MindPrint as a freshman. I asked him to come in and Adam and I sat down and we looked at it, and it wasn't necessarily that there were significant things that were weak. It was that what was weak for him, which came in the moderate level for most students, was what he was using to study. He was not a strong verbal memory person, right? And when I asked him what he was doing, he was writing lists out, he was memorizing lists, he was looking at words, he was going back over it. And that's not what he needed to do. And it wouldn't have come out in any other setting, because relative to a lot of students he was doing pretty well. In fact, you would think he was actually relatively strong in memory, but by using the school-facing side report, I could make the distinction between that was the lower piece, and what was really strong was his visual memory, and what was really strong was his abstract reasoning ability.
And so what he needed to do in terms of studying was to talk himself through by thinking, OK, I'm going to do almost like a virtual reality walkthrough of the cell, right? I'm going to think about myself in this cell. I'm going to, note cards, I'm going to move them around on the table. I need the visual stuff, right? It’s not that he’s not using words, but he's using a much more, much better for him. And I could show that to him. And I could also show that his processing speed, one of the executive functioning tasks that the assessment looks at, was moderate, but it was much lower compared to his verbal reasoning and his spatial reasoning.
That's really frustrating to a student, right? When they know that they're getting a lot of things, they're talking about it a lot, and they're asking questions in class, and yet it's not quite sinking in, right? I have this myself.
Debra Wilson: That sounds familiar to me too.
Sumner McCallie: It's incredibly frustrating, right? But the point to say to him is, and I could show this to him, was it wasn't about, I relative this was lower for him, but it was, This is why this is happening. This is, it was almost like magic for him. If you say to him, this is what I think is going on in your brain. Here's what, here's some strategies to affect it. I mean, it changed how he was looking at the course. It was a great course, but it was a really tough course.
He's now doing really well on the course. And grades aren't everything, right? Grades are a nice sort of thing, but he's feeling what the course is meant to be about. Not just doing well, not just getting an A, but he's figured out this is a way that he can survive. And this is a way he can not just survive but thrive in the course. That's exciting.
Debra Wilson: I remember when I was in law school, in law school, you only have one final, you don't have anything else. You might have a final paper, but there's no class participation, there's no nothing, like it is, it just is. And that's a little nerve wracking, particularly your first semester. And then sort of once you figure out your thing, you just know what it is.
I mean, a friend of mine was number one in my class. He would hand write the outline and he could just memorize it that way. And it was, it was actually kind of wild to watch, but that was just his way. That would never ever work for me.
So, Sumner, how are you thinking about this at McCallie, and then Nancy, what have you seen at other schools in terms of like, are they tackling it that way? So it's almost like a little bit removed from the classroom about how you're encouraging kids to tackle their work and to recognize sort of their strengths and relative weaknesses. Like how is that impacting how you're talking with kids generally about, you know, how they study and how they learn?
Sumner McCallie: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think it has to be connected with what they're doing. Students have so much time and they've got to be engaged. And a quick story of that, several years ago, 10 or 15 years ago, we had a study skills class we specifically had, right? And a student was in there, went to his history class, didn't do very well at all in the history test. Came back to us and so the study skills proctor said, what about this? Did you try this? He said, well why would I try that? This is study skills, that was in history.
I just want to, this, well that's the whole point right? So in that sense it has to be connected with what they're doing. But it is this idea that when they walk into a class to help students recognize that the subject matter and the way in which it's being taught, it's not a monolith, right? They can actually affect how they come to that.
So instead of sitting as passive recipients of whatever great teaching is happening, and great teaching is going to happen and they're going to try a lot of different things, a lot of different techniques, because in fact great teaching involves recognizing we have a lot of different type of learners in our class, right? I mean, that's how that works. But for a student himself or herself, themselves, to say I have agency here. I actually have an ability to take what's being given to me, in whatever format is being given to me, and begin to maneuver myself and maneuver the content into a way that I can best absorb it, or into a way I can best remember it and process it. That's pretty powerful.
And so in that sense, yes, it is a matter of saying, I happen to be doing this content, let me figure out how to do the skills. I mean, it reminds me of kind of what we talk about at McCallie is we teach boys, we happen to teach physics, right? We teach boys, we happen to teach English. And so there's a core sense of this is how I'm operating. These are the things we want. We have relationships with these people. And I happen to bring my subject matter to the content that’s there. It's asking students to sort of do the same. Bring yourself to that content, whatever the content happens, whatever the teaching style happens to be.
Bring that, yourself to that, and understand that you have agency here.
Debra Wilson: I love that answer in part because I live with a 15 year old who occasionally will tell me that some particular teacher, well, they just don't teach the thing. And I'm like, well, maybe you're just not absorbing it in a way that they're teaching it. So that idea of agency, and also, I mean, I think all three of us, as parents and people spend a lot of time with kids, either way, you have to get through that class. It actually doesn't matter.
We want teachers to meet kids where they are to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, but sometimes that's just not happening for whatever reason. And as a student, whether it's in middle school or high school or getting into college, you also need to understand how do you tackle this information and how do you own it?
Nancy, what are you seeing in other schools? Because I know – how many schools are you working with now?
Nancy Weinstein: Oh gosh, we're probably in about 300 schools across the country. And it's magic to me to hear Sumner talk about it, because we're offering really deep insight into students that I don't think you can get anywhere else. But that insight doesn't do much if it's not in the hands of amazing educators that can empower students to use it, are willing to talk to them about it.
Of course, some students would look at our reports and figure it out, but that's going to be a small percent. And so, like, to your question about personalized learning, like, and when everybody talks about personalized learning, you know, they talk about it being personalized and really, honestly, I think their minds go to like, I'm on a computer and it's adapting to me.
Debra Wilson: Right, right. No, it's very much like a spa menu as opposed to you personally understanding your learning, right? And being able to take ownership over that. I mean, to me, whenever I hear personalized learning, it's not that it feels lazy to me, but it feels like somebody's giving me something as opposed to me having some more ownership over it.
Nancy Weinstein: Right. And knowing and teaching students what they need to ask for and what they need to advocate for, as you were both just saying, rather than the teacher delivering it and the student processing it.
So I do think that MindPrint truly delivers on the hope of personalized learning, but it doesn't, like a lot of other programs, ask us to push the educator aside, the educator's at the core of it. And so the goal would be, by the time our students graduate from high school, they have understood themselves as learners in so many different contexts that they could personalize any learning situation for themselves to be in an optimal situation and know that they could overcome any obstacle. That would be my dream.
We start with students as young as third grade. And we don't expect them to have that level of agency that Sumner’s high school students are having. So in third, fourth, fifth grade, it is far more teacher-led and parent, teacher, student together, where the teacher's leading and handing over the strategy and then supporting the parent when a student's home doing homework. How do I support my student with homework?
It's not doing the math problem for them, but it might be making sure they understand better with the picture and saying, I don't see a picture on your homework sheet. Let me see the picture and then we can talk about it. In elementary, lower school, that's how it tends to work. In middle school, we start to get this bridge between students taking ownership and the teachers still sort of leading that, that teaching and learning process.
We offer a course where we actually empower teachers to teach students about their profile. And so it is a kind of an executive function, study skills course. And we're normalizing this idea that we all learn differently. We all have strengths. We all have needs, and you need the picture, and I need the words. And if I write out my notes, I'm going to remember every word, and for other people that would never work.
And so that course, I think, is transformative in a lot of ways, especially for our highest performing students, because it allows them to say, I am not perfect in everything, and I don't need to be, even if I'm a straight A student. And I think that is such a release for our students in this environment, in this era.
And so that's how a lot of our schools, where they're not doing the type of conferencing and leadership that maybe a school like McCallie can offer. We're giving the teachers the materials to talk to their students, to present the profiles and to use the strategies and then pull in, again to Sumner's point...Let's not just talk theoretically about how you do homework. I want everybody in the class, pull out your math homework that's due tomorrow and we're going to try this strategy. You might not all be using the same strategy, but we're going to use your own variation of it and we're going to get the math homework done.
And, oh, that was effective. All right, maybe I'll do that again. And so that's when they start to, the student starts to buy in and use the strategies because they see that it works for them. As we all know, telling a teenager what they should do is not an effective strategy.
Sumner McCallie: That's right, that's not on the list of executive functioning points. But to that point, one of the things we actually found in our first two years is for the students that used it, that really delved into it, and we were doing one on one or one on two or three, it stuck, it worked. We found that a number of students, they did a mind print, we talked about it, but then because we then didn't do a follow-up, and this is speaking to Nancy's thought process there, we didn't do the job we needed to.
I have an advisory group of eight freshmen. We've gone back, we've looked at it. We had a session where we talked specifically about here, the sort of baseline, what are some of the things. And then this coming week, in fact, this, yeah, this coming week, we're going to look at memory, because that's what they chose to focus on.
And they're all, they have different approaches to memory, verbal memory or visual memory particularly. But my goal for this coming year is to then have all the teachers understand that in this advisory group with ninth graders and ninth and 10th graders probably, that what we might be doing is focusing on memory, say. And so over the next two or three weeks in the classes, they might highlight and just happen to mention, just drop in that note saying, hey, I know some of you all are working on memory, particularly this week. You might think about this. Not to change the teaching, not to specifically suddenly have a memory required thing, but that happens most of the time in classes, but to begin to get it to be a school-wide thing, right?
I mean, this is this idea that this is what we do at school. We understand learning. We help you figure out your own learning process. We happen to do it through the curriculum we have. That's the reason we have a curriculum. It's not to know stuff in the long run. For me at least, it's about the skills that one has to become a really strong learner so that you can know things.
Debra Wilson: So you get a little, you get it to coalesce a little bit. So particularly like advisory in the classroom to get those two things working together.
Sumner McCallie: That's right.
Debra Wilson: Do you have kids take it a couple of times? Like, so Nancy, you said like, you you can start like third or fourth grade. Is there much difference? So like if a student takes some, takes the mind print and gets their report in like third or fourth grade and then does it again as a junior, does it shift at all? I'm not sure I've ever asked you that question.
Nancy Weinstein: So we have adopted the phrase malleable but stable. So the skills change. Science is very clear that we can change our neural networks and grow and improve. Environment matters. Adolescence matters. There are chemical changes in the brain during adolescence. But in general, we don't expect to see major swings.
So for example, if you were that very verbal student and learned best with words and pictures didn't make much of a difference for you, then we would expect if that was one way and if that's how you were in third grade on your MindPrint, your verbal skills are probably going to stay stronger in high school. The variation between them might change, but the idea that the strategies that worked for you in third grade very likely will work for you, in a more detailed way, but will work for you in high school.
And that's the beauty of it, is that if we can get students thinking about this, how they learn, and what works best for them as early as elementary and lower school, that can stick with them all the way through. And that is, like when that psychologist said to me about my daughter, you're giving her the gift of how she learns and it's a gift she'll have for the rest of her life. That is what we're doing. Like you will know.
So we do hope that students take it, our model in most of our schools is they take it once in lower, once in middle and once in high school. And that supports, one, if there is variability and things have changed, because particularly executive functions probably does change a little bit more than the other areas. But also a big part of this is the student buy-in. And so if a student took MindPrint in third grade and then in sixth grade we pulled it out and said, remember your MindPrint? They might not buy in.
Debra Wilson: Right.
Nancy Weinstein: But having that new one and refreshed and you just took it, I think it sort of solves that, that's what we're solving for. Yeah.
Debra Wilson: That sort of gap. Sumner, what have been some of the obstacles or like surprising pleasantries, like as you've kind of brought this, you whenever you bring a new tool to a school, right, particularly, you know, one, like as many of our schools are steeped in tradition, steeped in a lot of history. And you're like, hey, like, we're going to bring in this new tool and we're going to learn strengths and needs about kids. And we’re going to talk about how do we incorporate this and support kids using this. People are not always enthusiastic about bringing in bright, shiny objects.
Sumner McCallie: I think the key is to very quickly help them realize that it may seem bright and shiny, but it's incredibly useful. It's one of those bright, shiny things that really, really works. That's a key.
The second is reminding teachers in particular that I'm not asking them to fundamentally shift everything they're doing in their classroom. That's not what teachers need to hear. It is a matter of saying, OK, you have a variety of individual students who we know have different learning styles, just like you do, just like when I'm thinking about teacher, professional development or conversation, I need to think about who's in the room and how they're coming to the topic and have a variety of things. So think about how your topic could be picked up by a variety of abstract reasoners or verbal reasoners. I mean, think about that when you're presenting or when you're designing a class.
A lot of it was trying to say, it's not just another random, hey, here's another fad, here's another way to teach. It's, what are you really trying to do in your classes? Let's go back to the core of how we connect with students and what we're trying to do for students and with students. This allows them to help you do that. You're giving the students an insight, be open with what you're trying to do, and then you're giving the students an insight to actually be able to apply that.
In terms of student, parent feedback, it's incredible. There's no pushback at all from parents. They are excited to have someone coming. When you have students, it's a matter of getting them to recognize the use of it. That's the key. And that's true with any of it, right? Any class we're teaching is, what is the relevance? How does this work?
So it's a matter of thinking through who is your student body? How do the faculty understand their role at the school and what they're trying to do? And then making sure to introduce MindPrint in a way that ties into both of those goals.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I can't help but think, particularly as college admissions has shifted so dramatically and sometimes students find themselves in much bigger environments when they move on, to have that understanding about yourself the first time you walk into a classroom of 250 kids, right? What do you know about yourself as a learner before you tackle what can often be, frankly, like a weed out class in college?
And in a class that size, you're not getting that McCallie level attention in terms of student-teacher ratio, right? Like that understanding has gotta be pretty profound. Have you heard that from some of your recent graduates?
Sumner McCallie: Yeah, because we had ninth and tenth graders mainly take it so that we haven't seen that yet. But yes, the few 11th and 12th graders that have, yeah, they get it. They get what they're doing.
And the other piece I think that's really critical is, I think we went through a period in education probably 10 to 15 years ago, and this was when learning style was really important. And what we began to hear in classes is exactly what we didn't want, which was, the teacher's not teaching to my learning style.
I mean, I'm a visual learner and they're not doing that, or I'm a kinesthetic learner and they're not getting it. And that doesn't help.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sumner McCallie: And so the key there was because this is so student-focused and student-agency-focused, it allowed us to get away from that issue and to say, yeah, so the teacher is going to tend to do more visual stuff, so how are you going to take that and put it into a style that works? That's one piece, and so that's the sort of high school beyond. The flip side of that, I'll say, is it's the confidence piece. Part of what we're trying to do with, I think, with our teenagers today is to help them realize that they're not helpless.
There is such an interesting set of issues right now, I think, where students are sort of used to having things be taken care of for them. Not all, but there's a little bit of that, actually a lot of that. And part of it is because we as schools are trying to do the best we can for them. We're trying to be supportive of them. And what that sometimes can do is if it doesn't work initially, or if we're trying to figure it out, the student just sort of says, well, I'll just kind of wait around and work.
And I saw this a lot after COVID, where I think even that short time of screens, entering a conversation, stepping into a discussion, moving out. They didn't have to for a little bit and they just kind of retreated. And so part of what we're trying to do is get them to step out and see themselves as having agency and moving forward.
If we can give that confidence, that open door for confidence, they have to put the work in, right? They have to do it. It's not just you can't give confidence to people, but if you can open the door to that level of confidence, we've done something for our students that is so much more than teaching them what this particular force is, what this equation is. Those are important, but that deeper level of confidence, that's a lot of what's going on here.
Debra Wilson: Nancy, so I have to say, because Sumner brought up the pandemic. And you started MindPrint, what year did you start MindPrint? Remind me.
Nancy Weinstein: 2014.
Debra Wilson: Yeah. So, I mean, now you're looking at a lot of data. Like, have you seen any shifts in the data over the last, I don't know, seven years or so? Like, just like pre-pandemic data to now?
Nancy Weinstein: So we were hearing a lot of what Sumner talked about earlier, which is, kids just seem different. It's just different. And there was…a lot of assumptions about why they were different. Was it screens? Was it just a lack of engagement? Was it mental health?
And so we said, let's look at our data of just the general student population before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and then subsequent to the pandemic. Have any of these skills changed so significantly that it would suggest why students seem to be behaving differently?
Not just what we're observing, but the real root cause of why. And when we looked at the data, it was surprising at first glance. And then honestly, kind of makes perfect sense as you look back about why that would be the case.
So there were a lot of thoughts that executive functions had changed a lot during the pandemic, particularly attention. In fact, attention and short-term memory, which is another executive function, they didn't change very much at all. In fact, attention had kind of gone up a little bit. That's a whole other conversation, but it had already been down. So I think that is to say that there probably were some impacts of social media that had occurred prior to the pandemic and that was already baked in.
So when teachers are saying in, you know, kids are different from when they were in school, like in 2018, 2019, they weren't, in that sense. Whatever had happened, had already happened. Where we were seeing really large changes were with memory.
So kids cannot remember as easily as they used to. So I kind of say it's kind of like we moved the goal line on teachers and didn't tell them. So the rule of thumb, and it's just a rule of thumb, it's the average student, but you need to repeat something for the average student to retain it for the long term, three to seven, three to 10 times, depending on the student.
Coming out of the pandemic, memory changed significantly. So now it's more like for the average student, seven to 15 times for them to remember it. Yeah. And so from a teacher's perspective, if I go over some, I went over it four, five, six times, they should know it. And then, and they don't. So the teacher's like, they're not trying, they're not engaged, they're not working hard. And it's like, No, we either need to very deliberately teach them strategies for memorization that we didn't need to before. Or we as teachers need to build in that repetition.
Or perhaps acknowledge the fact that, yeah, they can look up a lot more in Google than we were able to do when we were students. And so I'm going to prioritize my content differently when I'm asking them to memorize. But all of that is, it's not on the student.
I mean, the students really are different. And what we as educators need to do is really rethink what we want them to memorize. And if we want them to know it and have automaticity with it, how we're going to make sure that that develops, because we're going to have to put more time and effort into it than they did before the pandemic.
So that was one thing that changed. The other thing that changed, and we've been kind of dancing around without using the term, is flexible thinking. So students’ ability to really take feedback and adapt. And so it is almost like during the pandemic, we sort of develop learned helplessness in our students, right? So that if I can't do it, I'll sit back and wait for someone to show me how, as opposed to I'll pause, reconsider, go through some productive struggle and know how to do it, and then sort of get to the other side.
And so that is something that both impacted students and teachers. And so that's a whole other piece that we can unpack in schools and just even being conscious about it and being aware of it and thinking about it goes a long way to addressing that challenge. But I think what our data can really do is not just give us permission to throw up our hands and say, kids are different and we still have the same amount of time and they're different and I don't know what to do. We can know what to do. We can sort of pinpoint those differences and start to support teachers and faculty in how we get to the goal line in supporting students.
Debra Wilson: That's really interesting. So really shifting, and Sumner have you, I mean, you're probably looking at this sort of systemically, right? Because that data gives you that bird's eye view.
Sumner McCallie: Right. That's, that last one, the memory piece, are definitely skills or strategies. The last one is really interesting because it is actually how people feel. This is when you're talking to a student and you're getting this response. I have this with my current son, who's wonderful, 11 years old.
He has his way. This is what he's doing. And if you make it say, when you're doing a sport, the sport's going to work itself out, right? I mean, if he doesn't figure out to do a one-handed shot for his basketball, he's not going to get it in as well. I mean, he's going to go as far as he can with what he's done so far. But at some point, other folks are going to pass by him because in fact, that's how the, I mean, he just doesn't, he's not responding to the best method there. OK. So that's one thing. And he'll figure that out because that's going to be very important. Basketball is important. So he'll do that. OK.
But if you already have this sense in a student that academics may or may not be as relevant, I'm not particularly good, and you don't have the motivation that you might have because I want to play on the team, I want to get this type of thing, et cetera, then you're really in danger of losing those kids. They just sort of fall out, and they decide they're not worth it. And then you have other issues that are going on that are much, much more significant. And so that flexible thinking is fascinating.
To try and figure out how to, just by saying that to a student, saying, this is sort of an objective test. This isn't saying bad or good about you. That's not what this is. But it is suggesting how you sort of respond to things. You might be wanting to be aware that your typical response is going to be one where you don't really like other sort of new suggestions. You're going to stick with what you have.
Just by saying that, just by having that be something that comes out of a document can be really helpful. Let's pause, let's recognize it, and let's take the step saying, OK, maybe I want to try this one thing that they are suggesting. That doesn't mean I'm going to change who I am. It doesn't mean that I'm going to not be thoughtful and strong at all. It just means that I'm actually going to be flexible and see what this is.
So the whole point is how do we identify the struggles? How do we help verbalize it a little bit more? And once that's done, gosh, the sky's the limit. You can break through those pieces in such wonderful ways. The data is really useful.
Debra Wilson: That's fabulous. Well, friends, we are out of time for this episode of New View EDU. Thank you both for coming on. This has been a fascinating conversation.
Sumner McCallie: Really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Nancy Weinstein: Thanks for having us.