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Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast.

We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice.

Here's your host, Leanne Castellino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk.

My name is Leanne Castellino.

Our guest today is a philosopher coach.

Pamela Hobart has written widely on ethics, culture, parenting and personal growth for leading publications.

She's also worked in education advocacy and blends academic insight with real world experience.

Pamela is also a mother of four and she joins us today from Austin, Texas.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Hi Leanne.

Glad to be here.

You do lots of different things, but one of the ways that we describe you here is that you're a philosopher coach.

What does that actually mean in practice?

Sure.

So I, I have half a PhD in philosophy.

Academia didn't turn out to be for me, but I was studying philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of education and ed policy before taking some time off to have my kids.

And I noticed that there was a real hole in the market for speaking to someone who was not medicalized like a therapist necessarily would be or psychiatrist.

But many life coaches were kind of in the direction yoga teachers on the beach and sort of the wellness industry has a sway in that direction.

So I just put up a shingle to talk to people who self identified more as kind of nerds who perceive themselves as having kind of smart people problems that were not medical in nature but just kind of wanted to pick through them with someone.

And this was also before the LLMs were big.

So now some people are using chatbots for some of that type of conversation.

But there's still something to be said for the human touch.

So how is that work then parlayed in what you do currently in education?

I would say, I mean, a lot of people that I encounter in my life, they have baggage from their prior education and you can end up with educational baggage in a lot of different ways.

You can sort of be an overachiever who perceives yourself to have been put on this very straight and narrow achievement track that you could not deviate from for many, many years.

Then you get a job and there's kind of script anymore that can be tough.

There's also sort of many flavors of underachievement track where you come really smart out of the gate and they put you in a gifted and talented program or something, and then it turns out to be busy work and you never develop actual study skills and you're kind of no longer the smartest person in the room after a while and you know what's next.

So I began to see a lot of my clients issues as maybe having upstream causes related to their education and their self concept that they've developed along the line.

So basically now I'm working with a school and children who are sort of, they, they have not developed this baggage yet.

You know, they're, they're fresh and new and they have a chance to develop the self concept and academic skills that hopefully set them up for a easier way in life.

So essentially we're talking about gifted and you know, talented children on some level.

Take us through what criteria is for the children that you deal with and how do you work with them.

Yeah, so gifted and talented as a label is kind of not, not tidally specified.

In many school districts where they're identifying students for gifted and talented programs, they tend to have an expansive definition of it which may involve aspects like creativity, leadership, as well as performance on more IQ type tests.

That sounds like it would provide a more holistic view of children entering these programs.

But sometimes it means that they're not neatly targeted at what those students need.

You know, if you have not selected students for math aptitude, then you cannot give them all in the GT program faster math.

So it does lead to sort of a grab bag approach of what goes into that type of program.

Here at GT School where my daughters attend, it's basically a top 10th percentile on a standard kind of IQ screening test.

So it is not all child prodigies, but towards the top end of academic ability specifically.

We are going to talk a little bit more about GT school and sort of how that works and why that model is unique.

But I want to talk about your work which focuses on turning overthinking into wisdom and action.

Can you give us an example of how that looks for somebody that's navigating a complex problem, for example?

Sure.

So when I was working with adults, a lot of their indecision about what they should do in life tended to focus around their careers.

A lot of people I think have had the experience of getting a job.

They're really excited at first, then sort of, you know, a little while goes by, they see all the problems.

And when you're in a job, or maybe this has happened even two or three times, you know, you're 30 or 35 years old, you've had a few jobs and you're beginning to realize that no job is perfect, but it's very, very Hard to tell which jobs are sort of actually worse than is reasonable to expect and which ones are actually quite good.

It's a costly process to navigate.

You know, you give up the previous job in order to try the next one.

And, and so people would spend a lot of time just sort of flip flopping about this, you know, half heartedly looking for a job while also kind of not doing their current job.

And so I tried to help them take a deliberate approach whether they were decid stay or not and to kind of time limit that.

So you might say, well, I'm going to give this job I'm in, you know, six more months, but I'm only going to focus on it.

I'm going to like do my level best and see how that changes the situation, you know, what impact can I have from the inside.

Or you might say I'm going to look for a new job for six months and I'm going to put my full energy on that rather than just do this kind of waffle thing for a long time.

That's neat.

They know one foot at the door really leaves people in a poor emotional state that makes the worst of both, both choices.

So in terms of taking that example and then getting it down to the level of kids, you say you deal with them when they don't have the baggage.

So what would an example involving young children look like?

Sure.

So the way that, the way that our school works is that in addition to doing core academics on apps in the morning time, the students do many life skills based workshops in the afternoon and they're largely on six week sessions.

So the projects switch over.

So my seven and nine year old old daughters sort of have more experience in chunking long range projects into goals or sort of seeing how much progress you could really make on something in six weeks if you focused on it.

Like no one ever taught me these things.

I mean I think a lot of adults live now in the world of productivity and self help tips, but this was not in the, in the water or in the air Even, you know, 20 years ago it was not a thing.

And so we'd like to find a way to make these types of skills natural from early in life.

Just like what am I even doing?

Why am I doing it?

What is my method for doing it?

If I make a little progress each day, what can I expect to happen in a relatively short amount of time?

You know, it would be much better to have those skills early in life than to be floundering around when you're, you know, 35 or 40, wondering how to plan something or how to have a goal.

Absolutely.

And you know, as you kind of allude to with AI and all the tools that we have, for many people, they're helpful, but if you don't know how to use them properly, they can actually work against you.

In terms of what you're just describing there.

Let's go back a little bit and have you sort of give us your assessment of the current landscape in the education system, just in general, in terms of how it approaches gifted or talented students.

So I would say in general, not just for gifted and talented students, but for basically all students.

The conventional education system is characterized by just enormous inefficiency.

Like you are pouring in hundreds of hours, teacher hours, you know, staff hours, student hours each year.

And if you look at student progress on sort of hard skills, particularly as measured by the NWA MAP test, which is an adaptive computer based standardized test that's given at many schools across the country, especially high school students, they learn almost nothing each year.

In an average school, they pick up a few points on a 300 point scale.

That problem is all the worse for gifted and talented or high ability students because they tend to do well on tech whatever tests they're given, whether or not any value has been added by the school.

So you say, oh, they're doing fine.

You know, you're in the top few percentiles of the test.

But that student may not have learned really anything in the past semester or year, and for a while at least they will keep getting very high scores in the test.

So to find out how well gifted and talented students are doing, you really have to give them tests with no ceiling so that you would expect to see growth each time.

And that is something that some gifted and talented schools do, and it's something the MAP test allows as well.

But another way to tell that gifted and talented students are being underserved is if you look at what happens over the summer with school students is that most students will lose progress over the summer and then when they return to school within a few months, they sort of get it back.

And that shows that the school is doing something when they're there.

The score goes up and then when they leave, it ticks back down.

The school is having a treatment effect.

But in many high ability students, if you test them on a similar cadence, they will keep learning a little bit through the summer.

And that shows that it wasn't the school that was doing it.

It's their independent reading or their independent work that is producing their Gains that's a real injustice to them, I think, when we're purporting to be providing an appropriate education for everyone.

Mm.

Let's unpack then.

Gt Schools, you alluded to it earlier.

Tell us a little bit about, you know, what it does that's different and unique from what's out there in general, and how did you become involved both as a parent and otherwise.

Sure.

So GT School here in North Austin is kind of an offshoot or a sister school of Alpha School, which is a chain of private schools that's sort of been in the media a lot lately for having an AI driven platform behind it.

What makes Alpha School and by extension GT School different is that we focus on delivering core academics, math, reading, writing, science, through an apps platform such that the teacher in the classroom or the guide is not lecturing, they are not delivering content.

The content is delivered through the apps at a pace that is identified as being correct for that student.

So every student comes in, even advanced students can come in with certain holes in their knowledge from prior educational experiences.

And the apps platform is able to fill that in a way that no human teacher ever could, because it knows exactly what questions the student has missed, how many repetitions you need on different skills, and it's doing all of that automatically that makes core academics go really fast.

Even regular students, not necessarily gifted and talented ones, can learn at least twice as fast as students in regular schools by using this kind of platform.

It also minimizes time waste because the AI is checking if students are engaging with material it can see when their eyes leave the screen and things like that.

That frees up a huge amount of the school day to do other things.

And at all of the.

The platform is called Two Hour learning, or Time back is the new version.

So at any school that's running time back, you've done your core academics in two hours and there's still four hours or more left of the school day.

In that time, students do project based workshops, basically either alone or in small groups or in pairs.

At the regular Alpha School, they've done cooking and sports.

But here at GT School, we have more of a nerdy or academic flair to some of those workshops.

They've done chess, they've learned piano.

My daughter is building an escape room with her peers, Lego, robotics, things a little along those lines.

I had a daughter who was at the regular Alpha before GT School was opened.

It's quite new.

And she pretty quickly became.

We figured out that she was pretty high ability, especially in math.

And so we were excited to learn that the GT school had opened up.

And around the same time, I got kind of recruited into this role to get the word out online about the state of GT education and what's really possible in the new model.

So we've all been drafted into the GT school mission now together.

Well, and on that note, if you were to drill down to what is the uniqueness of GT school, what would that nugget be?

So I would say what makes GT school different from other gifted and talented programs and even gifted and talented schools, there are a few of them out there.

Is that we believe that first and foremost, what gifted and talented students need is academic acceleration, faster core academics, not random activities.

Right.

The standard model for gifted and talented education is more like enrichment, where you do random stuff and it's fun and you might learn something, but meanwhile, you're getting a lot of the same math and reading as everyone else.

When I was in a gifted and talented program in a public school outside Atlanta growing up, they did skip me a grade, but that was about it.

And then in the GT program, we did things like they brought in sharks, and we dissected sharks.

You know, like, I learned a few things about sharks.

The whole school smelled.

All the kids in the other classes were like, why do they get to dissect sharks?

Okay, but did this do anything to, like, promote, over the long term, learning faster, learning better, moving towards a career that's right for you?

It's just random.

And that that model is.

Is.

Is no good in the long term.

So when we talk about the model that you just described at GT school, so AI is the dominant component in the first half of the day.

There are still plenty of people out there, parents among them, who are leery of fully understand it, who are scared of it on some level, and many of them also out there who believe that, you know what I need a human being at the front of the class.

I grew up that way.

It's what I remember.

It's what, you know, we should have for our children as well.

How do you counter those types of arguments?

Sure.

So in the first place, I mean, here at Alpha NGT School, we agree that if you give a student a chatbot, like a chatgpt.

Chatbots are cheap bots.

They will just use them to produce their work.

That is not like maybe one kid in 10 or a few in 100 will sit with the chatbot and use it to socratic tutor themselves or something.

That is possible.

It is by no means guaranteed.

And that's why we don't do it.

The way that AI works in the apps platform here at Alpha and GT is that it's basically powering the content delivery.

So there is no indication from the student side that it's even AI at all.

They're just interacting with a platform that's offering them daily lessons and, you know, telling them if the questions are right and wrong and showing progress per day and per week.

It's a hard misconception to dispel because AI has basically come to mean chatgpt in people's minds.

And of course with things like the hallucinations and people sort of going crazy using their chatbot and developing relationships with it, that's what looms very large in people's minds now.

And part of what we're proud about at our family of schools is that the guides in the classroom, even though they don't deliver lectures, they are incredible human beings who have been very carefully selected to be positive influence on children's lives.

They're much better paid than regular teachers.

Every guided alpha or and six figures or more.

And it's actually pretty hard to get even smart students to do their apps all the time.

Like if you just download IXL or something and you give it to your kid, even a bright kid is not going to put in all that time just sort of of their own accord each day.

It takes a lot of attention and sort of group dynamics and individualized rewards or incentives to make that happen.

So we had some pieces go out that were like the school with no teachers.

It was fun to grab attention, but it's not really the truth.

At the end of the day, when.

We talk about gifted and talented students, they tend to see the world differently.

What would you say is a common misconception, maybe more than one, that parents have about these specific learners?

I actually sort of think that a little too much attention is placed on their differences and that it's a little bit, you know, the meat and potatoes of dealing with a high ability student is give them more and harder work that means something that can allow them to have meaningful progress.

Like don't let them develop habits of coasting or just getting more busy work.

That's not to say there are no differences in high ability children that are more emotional or more moral traits, but if you focus on those while you're basically just giving them dessert, you know, dissecting sharks and so on, you're sort of making the problem worse, not better.

I think some of the problems and emotional sensitivities we see in gifted students are A result of having to spend so much time in school, that's not appropriate for them.

And that if they didn't spend so much time in those environments or around students who maybe even make fun of them for being nerdy, rather than celebrating the progress and the strengths that some of those perceived differences and problems would, would soften.

So along those lines, then, Pamela, do you have an example of a student whose challenges weren't, let's call them, fixable in a traditional setting, who upon, you know, entering and being at GT school or Alpha school, they were able to thrive in that environment?

Why was that?

You know, to think of sort of a type of student.

I mean, some people, some parents may realize that their student is high ability, but they're sort of unwilling or unable to consider placing them in a different school environment.

And they think like, oh, I'm just going to take them to tutoring at night or something to supplement what they're receiving in the school day.

But people, children included, respond very differently to hours of boredom during the day.

Some students never notice their mind.

Like, if you're very extroverted and you enjoy just kind of being around other people, then being at school, even if it's kind of too easy, might actually be pleasant and fine.

But not everyone's like that.

You know, some people are quite introverted and maybe even find it exhausting to be around people.

And if you have an introverted student who also has not learned something from their school that's too easy for them in literally a year or two, that's, that's pretty much torture for someone like that.

And so that's a student where if you could get them into an environment where they were spending even half the day doing something that was appropriate for them, then you know, all of a sudden you take someone who might present as a school refuser or, you know, acting out all these things and turn them into just kind of a regular, a regular student who can do their work and sort of go along for the ride.

I mean, that's why they skipped me a grade when I was a child.

I was in first grade refusing to color the sheets because I thought it was stupid.

And for whatever reason, they were able to identify that as boredom and not just disobedience, but it does happen.

So along those lines there we're talking about GT schools blending AI with mastery based learning, which may be a new term for a lot of parents listening to or watching this interview.

How does that help children?

You know, on the right level of challenge versus being having them overwhelmed.

So mastery based learning is the idea that before you proceed to the next level of skills, it's important that you fully master the prior level, not just get like a 70 or a C or even a B.

If you keep passing students along at math or reading tasks when they have only a 70 or an 80%, they will soon accumulate debt at those skills.

And this is part of why high school students don't make progress.

Because you can sort of get by for a while, but then all of a sudden, you know, the math goes up to geometry or the reading gets really hard and sort of historical and you no longer can sort of get by.

And then just a few years go by and that's it.

You never really learn something again.

Here at Alpha and gt, we insist on mastery learning because it's basically a way to go slow, to go fast.

Right.

Like, you may have to go back and fill some holes, but that's quite easy to do with an AI powered system.

Right.

There's no human who's having to do this individually for each student.

And so it's even for GT students, you know, parents don't expect to hear, well, your student's very high ability, but they need to go back a grade level, maybe even a grade level behind, to pick up this hole that they're missing.

But what students and parents learn is if you do this on purpose and you do it with our apps, it's a quite finite and achievable task.

You can catch up and fill the holes in a matter of 10 or 20 hours, not a month or a year.

Mastery learning is basically made possible at scale in our schools due to the AI platform platform.

And it's not something that other schools or even most apps that you could download in an app store and use for their student, most of them allow the sort of 70 or 80% to move on.

So you've got the AI LED portion in the morning, two hours.

That accelerates learning using the apps.

Then you talked about the life skills portion in the afternoon, you know, and you mentioned chess and some of the others.

How are the themes of that second half chosen?

Yeah, so at first, when Alpha and GT Score were coming about, we were kind of just brainstorming life skills based on, you know, what guides were able to offer and their interests and trying to do a good range of things.

But behind the scenes, Alpha's parent company is actually developing a whole formalized life skills curriculum that will represent sort of what you should know about that life skill at different ages, with the goal of providing A rotating number of workshops for students across their time at these schools to hit it all.

So for instance, we have financial literacy in the life skills.

What does financial literacy look like for someone in level one who's maybe a kindergarten or first grade age that might be identifying coins, like making change, that sort of thing.

And then my nine year old, she did a financial literacy workshop maybe about a year ago where they played a game that modeled basically the experience of driving for Uber.

And it offered you choices like do you want to get the oil change now or do you want to take another fare and have a 25 chance your car breaking down?

And it costs such and such to fix that sort of thing.

And so that, that really introduced her to the idea of, you know, trade offs in time and money and understanding how much you could earn in a day and things like that.

So we're trying to make basically a master chart of all the different life skills and what they would look like at different ages is with an eye of offering those across the student lifetime.

It's interesting because so much of the discourse around education, certainly in Canada where I am, has a lot to do with the lack of life skills learning and teaching going on in schools.

Having kids come out seemingly unprepared in many respects with respect to critical thinking and sort of real world learning and real life examples.

So it's interesting that that is is sort of embedded in the structure of the schools that you're talking about.

The other piece that GT and Alpha School sort of focuses on the inner work versus the outer work.

Can you take us through what that looks like in terms of the students daily learning and emotional development?

Sure.

So it's another thing where sort of the superficial impression is, oh, it's just students and desks doing acts.

Apps like this is very sterile.

And how do they learn to get along with other students?

How do they learn to manage themselves or just doing the app?

But I think that the model where the guides are freed from doing lectures and doing grading and stuff really actually supports inner work and social and emotional growth more in the process.

Because those guides are still there, they're helping the student.

You know, maybe they talk about in the morning, they do like a morning launch meeting.

What are we working on today?

You know, sometimes when you're not feeling well that day, the best thing to do is to get right into the work, you know, and just do something hard and you'll feel better.

Other days, you know, maybe if you didn't sleep well or something has gone wrong, maybe you do Want to take it a little bit easier.

These are not concepts any teacher talked to me about ever.

My, my seven and nine year old girls are already familiar with this.

They understand really well from their time on the apps that failure is something you can learn from, you know, because the apps will scale with each student the level of difficulty you will, no matter how smart you are or how high of an IQ you tested, you will always get something hard and get it wrong every day.

If you weren't getting something wrong, it would mean that the app was too easy.

So the fast feedback and guide support allow them to learn to face that.

Whereas I was in college, you know, failing a paper and like throwing it away because I couldn't bear to see the comments, you know, 20 or 25 years old.

The, the Life Skills workshops provide many opportunities for the students to do things together.

And it's great because the life Skills are not detracting from or being offered.

Instead of core academics, there's so much time for them.

Specifically, you know, we know they're getting the academics, the test scores are going up.

So you go to Life Skills and you're being invited to do group work or to do something outdoors.

And it's all with a strong human touch and rather small groups.

So some of the younger grades had done workshops where they were like playing board games or building something together.

Like that's not easy.

That's not easy for a five year old.

You know, if you roll a bad, you roll the dice and it's not in your favor or someone's not pulling their weight in the group.

Many of us have had the experience in a group project where you just quietly do the whole thing and someone free rides.

But like, we don't allow that here.

Every member has to individually do the task and work together in the process.

So it, I just kind of chuckle when I see those complaints.

You know, your kids are being raised by robots, you know, chained to the desk.

It's our job to communicate that, that that's just not true.

And one way to communicate that I imagine is by seeing, you know, changes in the student in terms of how they learn.

Can you take us through generally what parents with kids in this program, what would they notice about their child?

I think a lot depends on whether your student has come from a different school environment.

First, my daughters both entered in first grade, so they had just been to kind of forest kindergarten and didn't have big expectations for what the next level of school would be like.

And sometimes I have to explain to them how Much worse other schools would be.

You know, I'm like, you don't know how good you have it.

You know, you didn't have to read under the desk to stave off boredom and then get yelled at, you know, and punished for reading.

Students who come from other schools and parents may have sort of habits and expectations already in place that need some changing.

So a lot of times at other schools, if a student is not making progress, they essentially just tell you, let's wait and see.

And we don't do that at Alpha, you know, with the apps platform, you know, each day and each week at a very granular level.

Like, is this student learning anything?

And we don't allow semesters and years to go by with the lack of progress.

That's.

That's not acceptable here.

Excuse me.

So it may seem a little bit obsessive in the moment, but what it contributes to overall is getting to be much more relaxed about education in general.

If you're not wasting semesters or years and you know your student is learning life skills, you do not have to be at home doing tutoring and like micromanaging all the added academics you're trying to do on your own.

The school takes responsibility for the students learning, which is sort of, in our view, the way that it should be.

As, you know, as you're talking, I'm just thinking, Pamela, is this kind of a format that should one day be considered for all students?

It's a great question.

I mean, certainly we have curiosities in that direction for our platform.

There is a homeschooling version of the app apps available.

But the big problem is that if you do not have someone doing the role of the guide, holding the student's hand, encouraging them, offering incentives, emotionally developing them to understand how to do work, most of the value is just not in the apps.

It's in kind of the overall motivational environment.

And so that is much harder to provide as scale.

It would require many, many changes to move away from narrow grade levels in the conventional education system, much as tied to them funding and laws and so on.

Here we have sort of broader grade levels with two or three years together, and the students can't move up grade levels till they, till they finish specific objectives.

So we do not just move most people up at the end of a calendar year, anything like that.

There is a lot of sort of jadedness around educational technology because so many fads have come and gone.

You know, oh, buy every school a smart board or like, buy this, buy the kids Chromebooks and Everything will be fixed.

It's right to criticize those things.

They were not magic.

But I do believe that the apps platform is different in kind.

Not just the next best thing, but it requires a lot of human touch to make it work overall.

And many of our guides are not standard classroom teachers.

They come from diverse backgrounds.

Some of them are more like sports coaches or involved in other things.

My daughter had a guide who was really into riding horses, you know, and she had worked with children in that regard.

So it would require a sea change on many levels to bring truly at scale.

We only have about a couple of minutes left, but I did want to ask you on the question of guys, that's obviously intentional that they're not all classroom teachers.

What is the advantage to having a guide that has a broad based, you know, body of experience?

So the guides are responsible for helping the children to love school.

First and foremost, our belief is that if you don't love school, sort of you're dead in the water.

You know, you have to like being there.

You have to want to do hard things to get it off the ground, to enjoy hard things, you know, and actually accomplish them.

Another so the guides basically get that part of the job and they have full responsibility for delivering that.

We ask each student continuously if they're loving school and what could be changed because we really care about that.

We know that it's a non negotiable requirement for it to work.

But in terms of delivering the academic content, I mean, in theory, regular school teachers are academic experts.

But if you actually go look, a lot of them aren't so expert, they will teach things that are false or they have a degree in the field from many, many years ago that they didn't even get particularly good grades at.

So that's sort of the worst of both worlds where maybe they're not an expert and they are not particularly motivating.

They're kind of doing each thing only halfway.

But when we give the teaching job, the actual content job to the app, part of what that allows is that we know in a centralized manner when any of the lessons have a problem.

Like if students are always getting a math question wrong, maybe it's a bad question.

Whereas if teachers were individually kind of patching that up or explaining it, we'd never know that we never get the feedback that the app needed to be changed in that way.

So splitting the job in that manner allows us, will allow us to scale much better and to sort of let guides do what they do best.

Such an interesting conversation, Pamela Hobart, mother of four, philosopher, coach and a gifted and talented education expert at GT School.

Really appreciate your time and your perspective today.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

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