Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

But when we reframe so that we realize that, oh, another way to understand this, which is equally correct but more useful, is that the experience of the person doing the thinking and learning, their subjective experience is the center of the solar system, and the rest of us in our learning outcomes are spinning around and watching that.

All of a sudden, the paradox is when we look up into the sky, many of them fall away because it now makes sense from this new perspective why they're moving in a direction that didn't conform to our previous expectations, right?

And so when we refocus the educational enterprise on the subjective experience of thinking, what does it feel like to me to think here?

How does thinking here

change the way in which I engage with the process of learning, when we focus on that as the core of the enterprise, that's actionable.

That helps us to make sense of why the learning outcomes are as they are and how we might change them if we're not happy with them.

In our education systems, we focus way too much on the learning outcome as the metric of the functioning of the system.

And the problem with that is it doesn't tell you what you need to know.

When kids don't meet the achievement marks you want, we don't know what to do about that.

What we need to do in tandem is go back and really analyze how are kids thinking with the material?

What does it mean to think here?

What does it feel like to think here?

What is my process when I'm tackling a problem?

And as we start to uncover that, that's actionable.

And that's what really skilled teachers hone in on.

Yeah.

So when our own daughter was in 10th grade, she had been in public school.

She was doing very well.

But she was also frustrated by the fact that she felt like her very rigorous academic curriculum in this high-performing public school limited her ability to take intellectual risks.

So I remember her expressing to me her frustration in AP biology when –