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The Power of Mattering: When Students Feel Seen, They Thrive · Higher Listenings

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're not seeing necessarily a loneliness epidemic as been promoted.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because loneliness is not the outcome of being alone.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Research is really clear on that.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Loneliness is not the lack of social contact.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's really the lack of perceived social value to others.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: What if burnout, resistance, or even cheating trace back to a deeper question?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do I matter here?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Zach McCurio, best-selling author of The Power of Mattering, argues that beneath so many of Higher Ed's toughest challenges lies a simple human need to feel significant.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of those conversations Brad and I wish we'd had much earlier in our careers.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because the solution isn't more content, policies, or pressure.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's small intentional shifts that help people feel seen.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when students feel seen, they thrive.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Higher Listings.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Zach, welcome to Higher Listings.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you with us.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Eric.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Brad.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to be here.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you write that we're facing a hidden epidemic of insignificance.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that phrase has stayed with me because I see hints of this, certainly in my own life and my own interactions, and certainly when we think about the student who feels anonymous in a large introductory course, or a colleague who's maybe quietly disengaging, or the friend who might seem successful on paper, but also feels a bit adrift.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So when you talk about this epidemic of insignificance, how does that show up in your experience?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are a couple of signals.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Starting with like grade six through twelve, Education Week did a notorious study of 66,000 students.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: One of the items on the questionnaire was strongly agree or disagree if a if you think someone would notice if you were absent.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And half of that sample either disagreed or strongly disagreed that someone would notice if they were absent.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the worst that data point has looked since they've been doing that survey.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then you look into workplace, and work human did a study in 2024, over 18,000 people, and 30% self-reported that they agreed or strongly agreed that they felt quote unquote invisible in work.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then you see a Gallup report coming out on employee engagement in public, private sector, including education, and were more disengaged than ever.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: And there's one data point in there that that really stood out to me and it got hidden in the reporting and the press releases.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: But just 39% of that sample, this is the lowest this has ever been.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Just 39% of that sample could strongly agree that someone at work cared for them as a person.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Just 30% someone said that someone noticed their unique potential at work.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's some data that indicates that just 46% of students say they feel valued at their school.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so what are we not seeing here?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're not seeing necessarily a loneliness epidemic as been promoted.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because loneliness is not the outcome of being alone.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Research is really clear on that.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Loneliness is not the lack of social contact.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's really the lack of perceived social value to others.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Am I significant to others?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's why you hear that saying, I'm in a room full of people, but I feel completely alone.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're more connected than ever, but we feel more insignificant than ever.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this is pointing to this experience that people are feeling more overlooked, invisible, unseen, unheard, unvalued.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the name for that is a psychological concept that was born in the early 80s called mattering, the belief that we're significant to the world around us and the people around us, that we're important to the people around us.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's, I think, what we're really seeing at the root of this is an epidemic of insignificance that's driving things like disengagement, loneliness, or some of these other symptoms that we've been treating and writing about for years.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So what's fueling that sense of invisibility?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: If this is a trend that we're seeing in the data, like what's behind that?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: What do I think?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think that since mattering, mattering is the experience of feeling significant to other people.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: So mattering, the feeling that I matter to another person happens through interactions.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's an interactional concept.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And our interactions with each other have degraded in quality progressively over the last 25 years.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that people I don't think have really grappled with is what technology has done to our skill to see, hear, and value one another.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, December 1993, engineers sent the first text message.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So since we've been using short digital transactions to communicate with one another, which is great for efficiency, great for connectivity around the world.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that every time I send you a digital message, in the absence of actually being with you, I lose a social repetition, which develops social skills.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, if you give me some bad news, I send that little text message, Slack message, Teams message, Zoom message, say sorry to hear that.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've done my moral duty.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: But every time I do that, I don't have to sit with you, seek understanding, demonstrate compassion, be in that discomfort with one another.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in psychology, there's this concept called skill decay that finds that a cognitive or social skill can decay within about eight days of not using it.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think about all the people out there that haven't even had to show compassion to another person in real time in the last five years.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: We also know our attention spans have decreased over the last decade.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Gloria Marks, brilliant psychologist, did studies that found 10 years ago our ability to pay attention to something without having an initial thought of distraction is about two and a half minutes a decade ago.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: She replicated those studies two years ago, wrote this great book called Attention Span.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 47 seconds today.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: So think about what that does, not just for tasks, but for the person in front of us.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then I would say the last one is that we have developed a sort of overconfidence bias when it comes to showing people how they matter.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: We've called these things soft for 50 years.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And anytime we see something as soft or simple, we think we're better at it than we are.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's studies that they they ask physicians how well they listen to their patients and they ask them to like rate, like estimate.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And physicians will say on average they let their patients talk without being interrupted for a minute and a half, which is you'd think it's lull, but when you ask patients, on average it's about 11 seconds.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So when we don't approach these skills with rigor, when we see them as soft, when we don't address the skills gap, when we don't name these things and practice them, inevitably we'll lose them.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that those are some reasons why we're in the place that we're in.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the reasons why I like podcasting, because uh it forces us to actually listen and to be fully present.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I like to think we're practicing some of these skills as we as we go along.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is all very distressing backdrop for this conversation.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: I know we're gonna turn to getting to some solutions or some ways we can start to address this.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: But before we go further, I do want to ground it a little bit because we are gonna talk about mattering, which is really central to your work as a way of both really understanding at its root what's going on here and giving us some foundation for how we might begin to address it.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: So let's start with that.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: You say mattering is a primal human instinct.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: So what exactly do you mean by this?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the turn.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the good news.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: The good news is that we can relearn how to do these things.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it can take moments, very small moments in time in which we see, hear, and value another person to restore their sense of significance.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it does tie back to understanding what mattering actually means.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: To matter is a survival instinct.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing we do as human beings is we reach out our arms and a reflex.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's called the grasp reflex.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like a hugging motion.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you put your finger in front of a newborn baby, it'll grasp on really tightly.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, humans are encoded to be important to another person, so that person will keep them alive.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And just like the need to belong, which is the need to be part of a group, we're first wired with that belief to be important to one person.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And as we grow up, the instinct to matter to be important turns into the need, the fundamental need to feel seen, heard, valued, and needed by those around us.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: So mattering is the belief and the feeling that I'm significant to the people around me that comes from feeling valued and knowing exactly how we add value.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: In higher ed, there's been obviously a big push around belonging and inclusion for a lot of very good reasons, but this is a little something different, a little something new in the mix, I would say, at least based on your book and in your work.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, how does that sort of fit into that context around belonging and that broader conversation?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can use a elementary school recess example because recess drama is top of mind in my household.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Belonging is being picked for the team.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and part of a group.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's important to understand.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Being included is being able to take an equitable role in a group, seeing yourself represented, having an equitable pathway to contribute.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's being asked to play in the game.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting is that I could feel like I belong, let's say I'm in a classroom.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: I could feel like I belong in that classroom, feel part of that classroom.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I could see myself represented in that classroom, feel that I can take an active role in that classroom.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe I have no one noticed that I'm struggling on this particular angle of the work.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe I have no one who's ever told me how I missed when I'm not in class.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe no one's ever told me how I have unique talents or gifts or perspective or wisdom relative to other students in that class.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I could feel that I belong, I could feel that I'm included, but feel insignificant to those around me.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I think what's important about mattering is it's interactional.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it happens in interactions.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: One of the questions we ask people is when you most feel that you matter, what is happening?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I've never heard anybody say that an answer that doesn't relate to another person in a small interaction.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't happen through big actions, uh, big pronouncements like you matter here or you belong here, or big like values put on the wall, principles of community for our university.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: It happens when people feel that someone remembers something unique about their lives.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, when someone notices that they were struggling before they even said anything and offers an action to help.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: When somebody gives them feedback and writes on an assignment, for example, I hope you become a writer.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that person told us that little sentence actually propelled their career to go into journalism.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's when somebody, when they're absent, instead of just saying, Hey, better come back next time or where were you, instead of that, they say, Hey, we missed your questions yesterday.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Your friends in that front row, they weren't laughing as much before class started and we missed you.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the things that actually create a sense of mattering.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think this leads really nicely into something I've been thinking since we we got to this part of the conversation.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Why do we care about this?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Why does it matter?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: What does that drive for us?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Isaac Brilitensky, who is one of the theorists around mattering, uh, he talks about these two elements of mattering, feeling valued and adding value.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: The way our educational system has been structured and our industrial work organizations have been structured really for the last half century, is with this subconscious belief that people should be valued once they add value.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: So once someone sufficiently adds value, performs, we give them a good grade, or we give them a perk, or a pay raise, or a salary increase.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to add value to be valued in our Western society.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: But psychologically interesting, the opposite is true.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: People tend to add value once they are valued.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why is that when you see, hear, and value somebody, you're helping incite two beliefs that are predictive of future behavior.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Those two beliefs are self-esteem.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: We've all heard that in education, the belief that I'm worthy, and then the belief that I'm capable, the belief that I have what it takes.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And those two beliefs, they add up psychologically to what we know as confidence.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: But when you look at the predictors of self-efficacy and self-esteem, you can't really find a study that doesn't show it's hinged on supportive relationships which reflect back your worthiness and capability.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, across the lifespan, having relationships in which people verbally reinforce your worth and your uh capability are key to developing those two beliefs.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: So when we show people that they matter, they're developing the beliefs and the confidence they need to add value.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's why some people say to me, like, how do I get my students to be more confident in doing this or try something new and not always need all my direction, or leaders will ask me, how do I get my employees to do this?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And confidence doesn't come from just telling people to be confident or sit in their room and chant self-affirmations to themselves, right?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Confidence comes when we know someone has our back.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Where we can go, we can try, fail, experiment, take risks, fail because we know we already matter enough to someone else.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's that relational insurance that we have to go do to hard things.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: People take performance feedback even differently when they feel valued.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: You go into it's just as you can do a thought experiment.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: You go into a situation or a classroom in which nobody's ever talked with you, you've never made eye contact with anybody you know, nobody ever has ever named something unique about you, checked in on you.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: How energized are you?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard for something to matter when somebody doesn't believe that they matter.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Many people, like with our younger generation, especially, like Gen Z, millennials, or later millennials.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm one of the first.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't necessarily feel this, but Gen Z is like the loneliest generation.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: They report the lowest quality interpersonal interactions, the lowest reports of having those secure bases.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're looking for it when they come into classrooms and community groups and organizations.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: For me, a lot of our conversations in the past year on this show have really been centered around building and deepening engagement and trust as a formula for driving persistence and student success.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: But it comes to the same thing, right?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm feeling like I'm at her, then that's going to drive these sorts of behavior.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's going to actually not only make me more willing to take a risk intellectually or in a group context, but it's going to increase my engagement and heighten my interest in persisting and succeeding in this course.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it goes back to that relationship of feeling valued and adding value.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And resilience, for example, one of the most important predictors of resilience is social support.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: John Taylor, a researcher, found that feelings of mattering to others can actually reduce objective levels of cortisol through objective blood and urine samples of cortisol, fight or flight hormones.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then he measured like over a thousand people.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: He then measured them on their experiences of mattering every other week to the people around them.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he was able to say that our cortisol levels are lower when we know we matter to other people.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: A protective factor.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: One of the key outcomes is like David Yeager, educational psychologist, he has done studies on performance improvement and what types of feedback, for example, improves a student performance.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and one of the things he's found is that you can give the same like critique to somebody, but when they don't have your belief, when they don't have your explicit tangible support that you're there to help them, and when you haven't affirmed what's good about who they already are, they're much less likely to improve their performance over time.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times it's because people critique before they demonstrate care.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I thought one of the most powerful arguments in your book is that attention, not like programs or policies, is the real engine of driving or creating a thriving culture, whether that's in the workplace or in the classroom.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So why does attention carry so much weight for you?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, feeling that someone else pays attention to us is really the most elementary form of mattering.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is really hard to care for someone if you don't understand them.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really hard to understand somebody if you don't take the time to understand them.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people say that they care about people or about their students.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can care about something from afar.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's really easy to do that.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sense of caring for somebody means you have to get up close.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: To care for anything, whether it's a plant or a pet or a person, you have to deeply understand it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so understanding takes time and attention.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And people repeatedly tell us that when people make time and they show them true attention in the moment they're in with them, it makes a huge difference.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: We've come to call this practice noticing.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: So there are three elements that we distilled when we asked people this question is that people felt that they matter when they feel noticed and they feel seen and heard.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that notice, that's why it's the first, right?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's the elementary form because it's very hard to then move on and appreciate, recognize, or affirm somebody if they don't feel that you notice anything unique about them.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the second one was once people feel noticed, when they feel affirmed.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So when somebody shows them how their gifts and presence makes a unique difference, and when they feel needed, when they know that this place needs me, this classroom needs me, this community needs me, this organization needs me.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: People tend to feel that they matter.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: But that first one is important.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Very hard to experience care without someone's time and attention.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's such a simple framework.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Noticing, affirming, needing.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: This sounds pretty, pretty achievable for me as an educator or as a manager of staff in a work environment.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: What does that look like in practice?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give us some sort of concrete understanding of what I would do to execute that if I were teaching a class full of students?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we find is that leaders and educators who are great noticers tend to not leave it up to chance.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: They have some process to observe the details of people's work and what they talk about, what they hear, have some process to note down what they observe and schedule time to deliberately share back what they notice.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of my favorite stories is actually this comes from the workplace, but there was this distribution center.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: They were scoring really low on engagement, except for one team.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: They had really high engagement scores.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to them and I just said, What's going on here?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they all just said, it's our leader.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: She just gets us.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: We do anything for her.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I went to her and I said, What do you do here?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And she pulls out this notebook and she says, On Friday, I write down each of my 27 team members' names, and I write down just one thing I heard them think talk about, complain about, they were nervous about, had questions about.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: I write that down.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And on Monday morning, I look at this notebook, and I spend just five or 10 minutes looking at that, looking at their names, and then I schedule just a little three-minute check-in over the course of the week.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, Hey, I remembered last week you were nervous about that meeting.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: How did it go?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: I remembered last week that you were struggling with this piece of equipment.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Did we get that fixed for you?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the classroom, it looks like when someone asks a question in class and they're struggling with something, right?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like just write making a note on it, writing it down.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Beginning of next class, follow up with on that question, see if they got that answered, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: That just closing that loop.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: We've come to call it a noticing notebook.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Closing that loop can be incredibly powerful.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Also asking better questions.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, starting your class, hey, I hope everybody's doing well.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine if you're a student you weren't doing well?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Would you be like, not me?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: People who are able to really come to deeply know people, even in large groups, tend to ask questions that people can actually answer.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I have a colleague who puts us out a note card and they'll just write down one barrier you're facing in your projects, and he'll collect them after.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like a barrier.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: He has all of these barriers, all this data for this classroom of 50 people.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then he can easily collate them into themes, and that's how he starts the next class.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, like I went through these themes.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's work through some of these barriers.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, that's how you get a group.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's asking a better question.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really easy mechanism.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's how you get a group of people, a large group of people in an instant to feel seen.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's like some things you could do for a noticing practice.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: From an affirming practice, just give a better thank you or good job.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: As educators, we have a really great opportunity to do this in very small ways.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Describe specifically the unique gifts, traits, talents, perspective, wisdom you noticed from that student or from a colleague.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Name it.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Say, I noticed three paragraphs ago when you said this and that, you demonstrated your ability to synthesize things really creatively.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to let you know that's the this is the effect it had on me as a reader.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's just an example of name the setting, when and where it happened, the behavior, the gifts.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you name those gifts, the perspective they offered, the unique strengths they exhibited, and then describe the impact it had on you or somebody else, or the impact it had on something down the line.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody asked a question that facilitated a discussion in class, as that person's walking out of class or leaving class, just pull them aside and say, Hey, did you see what happened after?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That did you like?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Did you feel the energy?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's because you asked that question.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Just those moments can keep someone going, keep someone in class, keep someone in school.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Says, whoa, I'm valued here.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last one is showing people how they're needed.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I like using these five words.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: If it wasn't for you, hey, I wanted to like if it wasn't for you, this discussion wouldn't have been what it was.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: When I send my I teach a lot of online classes and some asypriness.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: So this was really like important to do this.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll write each of them, like, hey, I just want to let you know, I went through the discussions again at the end of class, and I wanted to let you know if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't have uncovered this or this in a particular discussion.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: It takes me about five sentences to do that, but I try to do that at the end for each of the students.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: And for an overarching one, I would say one thing you could do is have students answer the question before class.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: However, you collect data about your students, when you feel that you matter in a classroom, what is happening?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that does a couple things.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: One, you're stating your good intention.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine if all of us think about the professors that we've had and teachers we've had?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: If I had a teacher that did that, I would be like really jazzed up to be there.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: When you feel that you matter in a classroom, what am I doing?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is an educator doing?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: And have people write that down and write those things down and ask yourself, am I doing these things?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Another overarching practice is at the end of each week or uh every couple of weeks, ask who do I need to notice more in my classes?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Who do I need to check in on?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Who do I need to show how they add value or the difference they're making?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Who do I need to remind that they're needed?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Just even doing a scan can be really helpful.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Again, this is not rocket science.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I sometimes it's embarrassing that I have a job or that there's even research to be done in this area.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that we all know that our students matter.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that each other matters, our colleagues matter, the people we lead matter.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is we don't bring it to conscious awareness and practice as much as I think we need to.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've talked a lot when I came to Top Hat about the importance of intentional teaching.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what it takes.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: It takes being explicit and intentional in your craft.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: So that if I can make relationship-rich education the center of my focus for a year of improving my teaching practice, then concrete, actionable kind of behaviors of the sort that you've just recommended can drive those relationships quite deeply in the right sort of direction and transform the my experience of what it is to teach a class, but also the experience every one of my students has in that class of feeling like they matter and therefore they trust and they commit and they're creative risk takers in their intellectual journey, which is what all of us want in the classroom.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean it's uh it's about being intentional in the practice.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one byproduct of all of this is that as an educator, you start seeing how you matter again.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you can create that evidence of your significance around you when you have that conversation with a student, when you just have that one interaction that goes an extra to show somebody you're grateful for them.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Watch what happens to you.
• 25:04
  unknown: Right.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Watch what happens to you that day, how you even think about your day differently.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it can have a big effect on helping you stay motivated and why you're there within this big system doing this work every day.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: All three of us will never forget the moment our children grabbed onto our little whooping key.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the adult version of that, it's like the incredible flood of positive emotion you get from making somebody else's day in that way.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: I know as a teacher, like when I see someone for the first time know that they have it, they have what it takes, or like they're good at something, and they realize, oh my god, that's good about me.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they almost check you.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I did that well, like really, and they like, yeah, those are like really formative moments for people.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: I I've had experiences in my life where you're right, it's a little phrase, and it's not a big long award ceremony or something like this.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and the power of that too is almost like the phrase sticks with you.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: We had someone in our interview, in one of our interviewees, and they were talking about they were like a freelance journalist, and they were talking about an eighth-grade teacher who wrote on the top of their of one of their science, I think they were doing something around Macbeth or something, actually.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they wrote, I hope you become a writer.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that was it.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he like held on to that.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was that that he said that's what he went back to every time things got really hard, is that one comment.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always astounded at that the right words at the right time can chart people on career trajectories.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: We we talked to a couple of profs who teach out of Buffalo, and they were trying to wait to figure out a way to scale feedback.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: They taught a very large class, but one of the things that they wanted to make a point of doing was giving feedback to the top performing students.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because we do things like here's the weekly course report, and I'm sure most faculty are like, okay, who are the students who didn't get the questions this week or were actually struggling?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm not going to worry about the people scoring A's, but they're often overlooked in some ways because we feel like, okay, they got this, they're good.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: But they said that they had a number of students reach back and say, I can't tell you how much that meant to me to get a positive affirmation about what I was doing because I was really having a tough week that week.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the inclination is we leave them alone because they appear to be doing well.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, this is really important, actually, because high achievers, the data shows is are susceptible to feelings of not mattering.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: Hmm.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And low self-compassion.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so what that means is more susceptible to negative self-talk.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Things like that.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: High achievers, especially, like our attention automatically goes to what's wrong or what we have to improve, or we have to clean up, or what we have to fix, and not what's going right.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: But this also applies to lower performers as well.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because we often tend to see low performers as low performers.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you all know of the Pygmalion effect in education.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: The way we see someone is the way we treat them, the way we treat them is usually how they see themselves.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: So how they see themselves is how they perform in the future.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so we also have to seek what's good about those who are underperforming, invest in those things with our support.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: What about in a large class?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: We work so many faculty who they teach two, three, sometimes 600 students in a single lecture hall.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's a pretty big challenge.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: So how does your framework come into play with in a way that's mindful of some of those constraints?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you can do you can communicate that you're seeing that you're affirmed, and that people are needed in large group ways.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if I'm teaching a large group online, for example, I teach some online classes, and some of them are very large.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things I do is I synthesize their discussions every week.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I I actually give them affirmation as a group.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll say, here's what I synthesized, here's what surprised me, what added value to my learning, what I think added to the readings.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that also helps people set see, oh gosh, this is noticed more generally.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And here's how, and here's how it is noticed.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: It it feels to me like such a deep, simple, but very deep reorientation around the whole enterprise.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: This is the first time I've really felt like I want to be back in the classroom again, or I want to be back in leadership leadership position again to do this stuff.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: So could you say a little bit about what it might look like for a class that that really took the seriously for an organization took seriously?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: What's that?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: What's that look like?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: There'd be a lot less work needed to do the work.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is that when I ask people like at the university, they're doing a wonderful research, teaching wonderful classes, doing amazing things.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: But when I ask them about what they're working on, they don't talk about the work.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: They talk about the work they needed to do the work.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: All of the issues of feeling unheard or unseen or unresolved conflicts or feeling unrecognized or feeling that the voice never makes it to where it needs to make it in the organization.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that there would be less work needed to do the work.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that it's a facilitator, that experience of mattering, because you develop trust, you have relationships.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's not that barrier of I don't have anybody to tell, I don't have anybody to talk to, I don't have anybody that sees me, that hears me, that values me.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you thought about a classroom in which everybody felt seen, heard, valued, and needed, everybody felt worthy and capable.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you think about the commitment that they would bring, not only to you, but to each other, it's very powerful to think about.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because mattering also begets mattering.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: What I mean by that is that mattering has a boomerang effect.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: When you experience it, you usually want to give it to others.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the more you create it for others, the more you experience it.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what organizations would look like.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if someone's listening and thinking, I want to start showing people they matter, what's one small action that they can take this week?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: I would just ask, whoever that person is, just ask them when you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'll use a personal example of where how that question can be powerful.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: I got interviewed by this journalist for this magazine article and never published, actually, so it must have been a bad interview.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: But she was asking me at the end of the interview, she's like, I'm I have this 13-year-old daughter, I'm struggling to connect with her.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any advice for me?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, just try asking when you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: In your own way, however you want to ask it.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't hear for for weeks.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And she wrote me this long email and she goes, I asked my daughter that, and she said it was when I take her to school and we're just sitting together listening to her favorite music.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: But what was really powerful for her is that she thought that was just a routine, a chore.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was just something she didn't even give any thought to.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of us we tend to underestimate our impact on others.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I would do is ask people when you feel important to me, when you feel that you matter to me, when you feel that you matter here, what am I doing?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: What am I doing?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's happening?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: And write those things down, do more of those things.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll be surprised at what you hear.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's been so great talking with you, Zach.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for the work and for joining us for this conversation.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my pleasure.
• 32:14
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