Rebecca Winthrop
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 17 Jan
Rebecca Winthrop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The skills that I think are going to be most important are how motivated and engaged kids are to be able to learn new things. That is maybe one of the most important skills in a time of uncertainty, that they are go-getters, they're going to be wayfinders, things are going to shift and change, and they're going to be able to
navigate and constantly learn new things and be excited to learn new things. Because when kids are motivated, that's actually a huge predictor of how they do. And we're going to want kids absolutely to know enough content so that they can be a judge of what is real and what is fake. But we're also going to want them to have experiences where they're
learning and testing how to come up with creative new solutions to things, which is not really what traditional public education has been about.
We can't be super instrumental. So we have to come up with a new plan. I mean, we did not know, collectively, us, the world, that we would have generative AI that could basically write every seventh grade essay or college essay to get into university or the whole host of exams that are being administered and are being passed by AI just as well or better than kids.
So we have to come up with a new plan. That is not the plan for success. And I wanna push back on something you said. You said, I don't know if kids just enjoy what they're learning. It's gonna help or people are really gonna benefit from that. Engagement is very powerful. It's basically how motivated you are to really dig in and learn. And it relates to what you do. Do you show up?
Do you participate? Do you do your homework? It relates to how you feel. Do you find school interesting? Is it exciting? Do you feel you belong at school? It relates to how you think. Are you cognitively engaged? Are you looking at what you learn in one class, applying it to what it might mean in your life outside or other classes? And it's also how proactive you are. about your learning.
And all those dimensions really work together in education that's a very powerful construct to predict better achievement, better grades, better mental health, more enrollment in college, better understanding of content, and lots of other benefits to boot. And we need to have kids build that
muscle of doing hard things, because I worry greatly that AI will basically make a frictionless world for young people. It's great for me. I'm loving generative AI, but I have said several decades of brain development where I know how to do hard things. But kids are developing their brains. They're literally being neurobiologically wired to
for how to attend, how to focus, how to try, how to connect ideas, how to relate to other people. And all of those are not easy things.
Absolutely. So we found after three years of research that kids engage in four different ways. They're passenger mode, kids are coasting, achiever mode, they're trying to get perfect outcomes, resistor mode, they're avoiding and disrupting, and explorer mode is when they really love what they're learning and they dig in and they're super proactive. So that's the high level framework.
What part do you want to dig in on?
So passenger mode is difficult to spot often. for parents and sometimes teachers, because many kids in passenger mode get really good grades, but are just bored to tears. They show up to school, they do the homework, they have dropped out of learning. So passenger mode is when kids are really coasting, doing the bare minimum.
Some signs of this are your kid comes home and they do their homework as fast as possible. Another sign is that they say, oh, school's boring. It's just boring. I learn nothing. Kids are in passenger mode because school is actually too easy for them.
We talked to so many kids who said, look, I'm in class, and the teacher is going over the math homework from yesterday, and I got everyone right, and I know the answers, and it's 45 minutes of that. And I understand the kids who don't get it. They need the help. but I'm gonna shop online.
Or I have kids who say, well, I got the homework home and I know how to do this stuff, so I just put in chat GPT and it did my problem set for me and then I turn it in. So that's when it's too easy. Another version of why kids get into passenger mode is when it's too hard. School's too hard. You could have a neurodivergent kid. Kids don't feel they belong, and so they're not tuning in.
They've missed certain pieces of skill sets that they really need. Knowledge and education is cumulative in many ways, and they get kind of overwhelmed, and they need particular special attention. So that's kind of what's going on in passenger mode.
I think you're 100% right. I've talked to kids all over the country, and I've seen lots of incidents or cases of highly motivated, highly engaged kids who are using AI really well. They'll write the paper themselves. They'll go in and use AI for research and help them copy edit. They're doing the thinking.
They've lined up the evidence to create a thesis, and they've presented it in logical order on their own. And that is the art of thinking. And that's why we assign seventh graders to write essays or 10th graders to write essays. It's not that they're going to create incredible works of art. It's to train them how to think logically and how to think in steps.
And that is a core component of critical thinking. So As long as kids are mastering that and the AI is helping, that's a good use. But a lot of kids are using it to do exactly like you said, shortcut the assignments. So an example, one kid I talked to said, well, you know... This is a high school kid. For my essay, I break the prompt into three parts.
I run it through three different generative AI models. I put it together. I run it through three anti-plagiarism checkers, and then I turn it in. Another kid said, I run it through chat GPT, and then I run it through an AI humanizer. which goes in and puts typos in and makes it, you know.
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