TPP 188: Dr. Terry Roberts on "The New Smart" and How Nurturing Creativity Will Help Children Thrive
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
45 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 1 day ago
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What inspired Dr. Terry Roberts to write *The New Smart* and how does his background shape the book’s ideas?
I think What we need to know is that public schooling is designed to do a fairly narrow range of things. And that that range has become increasingly narrow over the last three decades. And as a result we can run the risk and have alienated certain kinds of students.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host Debbie Reaver and this week we are looking to the future. My guest is Dr. Terry Roberts, a lifelong teacher, educational reformer, and novelist, whose book The New Smart, How Nurturing Creativity Will Help Children Thrive, seeks to answer the questions: who will prosper in the year 2050? How will schools need to change in order to support the students of the 21st century? And in what ways will the markers and paths to success for our children? men look different than our own. In exploring this topic, doctor Roberts draws on his decades of teaching in the public school system and his deep personal interest in the ideas of creativity and intelligence and the ways in which our schools define, recognize, and foster talents in all students.
In this episode, we share a deep conversation about what the schools of the future will look like, how parents can shift their thinking about success, and the importance of creativity in our rapidly changing world. Lastly, if you get a lot out of this podcast and would like to support its production, I would like to invite you to make a small monthly contribution to help fund this show. It's a really easy to do. Just go to patreon.com slash tiltparenting and sign up. You can choose how much you want to donate each month, ten dollars, five dollars, even two dollars a month. Again, that's patreon.com slash tiltparenting. Thank you so much for considering that. And now here is my conversation with Doctor Terry Roberts.
Hello Terry, welcome to the podcast.
Hi Debbie, it is a pure pleasure to be with you. I have great admiration for your work and great sympathy for your many, many, many listeners, both as a parent and as an educator.
Well, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to bringing this conversation. And yeah, I think there's so many things that we could touch upon today. So I'm excited to to dive in. So could you just take a few minutes to introduce yourself to my listeners? Tell us a little bit about your background as an educator and how you came to be doing the work you're doing now specifically in regards to your new book.
Sure, thank you so much. Uh I am a lifelong educator. I grew up in very rural western North Carolina. uh and and the product of something like six or seven generations of subsistence farmers. uh going back to eighteen hundred, all in the same fairly close area, actually, the the southern Appalachian Mountains. And as an adult I've been a high school English teacher. I have uh worked as a in something called the Principal's Executive Program as an executive coach to to educational administrators. I have Uh I've taught writing off and on my entire life. My my PhD is in American literature, so I'm something of an example of the kind of thing we might talk about today. in that I tend I have with my life, I must say, blended various disciplines.
Um I'm a novelist. in in what I sometimes call another life, a parallel life. Uh I've written three novels and I'm hard at work on a fourth, but I'm also very interested in the educational system as as you said. And how we honor talent, how we recognize and appreciate talent, particularly when it's not traditional talent that identifies itself on test scores. uh or by being the, you know, voted most likely to succeed in the senior class, that kind of thing. This new book I've written a number of nonfiction books about education, uh a lot to do with dialogue, Socratic dialogue, but this new book is a departure for me. It flowed out of a lunchtime conversation that I had with a man named Howard Gardner.
Uh for those of your listeners who know Howard He is the creator, as it were, of the theory of multiple intelligences, the idea
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Dr. Terry Roberts to write *The New Smart* and how does his background shape the book’s ideas?
0:00–6:47
2
How does the concept of multiple intelligences challenge the narrow focus of modern public schools?
6:47–13:18
3
Why does Dr. Roberts argue that creativity, not traditional IQ, will drive prosperity in 2050?
13:18–18:45
4
What are the key shortcomings of the current standardization era in education?
18:45–24:21
5
How can schools redesign curricula to honor diverse talents and foster lifelong learning?
24:21–30:07
6
What practical advice does Dr. Roberts give parents for shifting their mindset about success?
30:07–35:32
7
How does the book envision ‘schools of the future’ that serve all learners, not just the affluent?
35:32–40:08
8
Where can listeners find *The New Smart* and learn more about Dr. Roberts’ work?
40:08–45:27
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids