Part of the series “Today’s True Leadership”
Great parents and teachers empower and uplift their children and students by encouraging … [+]
Years ago, I interview Dr. Tim Elmore of Growing Leaders in what became the most viral post I’ve written on Forbes, and it covered the 7 Crippling Behaviors That Keep Children From Growing Into Leaders. From the feedback Elmore and I received, we saw clearly how so many thousands of parents and others who support children’s growth feel lost and confused over how to best to parent and educate, to foster independence, confidence, self-reliance and great success.
As a parent myself and corporate VP, then marriage and family therapist and now career coach, I’ve learned a great deal over the past 25 years about specific behaviors that help people grow and thrive under our guidance, and also the opposite—behaviors that crush impressionable, young people down so that they are pushed off the path to stretching towards their highest, most thrilling potential.
To learn more about how we can raise and teach phenomenally successful adults, I was thrilled to catch up this month with Esther Wojcicki, an internationally renowned educator, bestselling author and founder of the largest scholastic media program in the U.S. at Palo Alto High with over 700 students. Wojcicki was named the 2002 California Teacher of the Year, a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Research Fellow and was awarded the 2011 Columbia University Charles O’Malley Award. She was the Chair of Creative Commons and of PBS Learning Matters, and is on the Board of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum.
Advisor to multiple edtech startups in Silicon Valley, Wojcicki founded the Journalistic Learning Initiative at the University of Oregon and holds three honorary doctorates. She is the author of Moonshots in Education and the bestseller How to Raise Successful People, and is the founder and CEO of GlobalMoonshots.org, a nonprofit to help empower student-directed learning. In addition, she has raised three tremendously successful daughters – Silicon Valley powerhouses Anne Wojcicki, cofounder and CEO of genetic testing company 23andMe, and her oldest sister Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube. Their sister Janet is a Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF and holds a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center.
Wojcicki shares her special take on how to teach—and raise— phenomenally successful individuals:
Kathy Caprino: As an award-winning educator, what would you say is the key to your great success as a teacher?
Esther Wojcicki: It is trusting and believing in my students. It is easy to say, but tricky to do. First, a teacher needs to get to know the student and understand them as individuals. What are their interests, what are their fears, what kind of family life do they have? The better a teacher knows a student, the better the relationship will be, and the more the teacher can adapt the instruction to the needs of the student.
Education is all about relationships. It is the relationship that a student feels between a teacher and between other students in the class that matters. Students need to feel that they belong to the class community.
If the teacher has a positive relationship with the student, there is greater likelihood that they will be happy to be in your class. If they feel like the class community welcomes them, they will be happy to be there.
The next step is trusting and believing that the student can reach the goals you set for them. Sometimes kids think they can never do it but your role as a teacher is to be patient and let them try…try until they get it right. This is what I call “mastery learning.” Let’s take the case of writing an essay or a journalistic article. They need to revise until it is good enough to get an “A” or to be published. Sometimes it takes two revisions and sometimes it takes ten, but my goal is to show them they can do it. And once they do, they are so proud of themselves and empowered and the next time it is easier. A student’s academic self-confidence is the key to their success and mastery learning gives them the self-confidence. The teacher needs to believe in them and then they believe in and trust themselves.
Caprino: What do you do differently from other educators who haven’t experienced the success and impact that you have?
Wojcicki: What other educators do that creates problems is that they don’t implement the mastery learning component. Students normally have one chance to write an essay and get a grade. That makes many students nervous and they get “writer’s block,” which is really just a fear of being wrong. Sometimes students get an essay back with a “C” grade and just a few comments like “poorly structured” or “poor word choice” and they have no idea how to fix it.
Mastery learning also works in other subjects like math where students should be able to redo problems until they understand how and why they are solved that way. It works in all subjects.
The problem for the teacher is that it can take more work and a longer time to accomplish the goals. There are multiple ways to restructure the lesson to provide time for mastery learning. They just need to try it out. The test pressure on teachers keeps most of them from giving students the time they need. Over-testing and punitive testing is a nationwide problem.
Caprino: Let’s talk about raising successful children. You’ve raised three highly successful and impactful daughters–two Silicon Valley CEOs and a college professor. What would you say are the top behaviors that have been most impactful in the lives of your children and in your own life?
Wojcicki: There are five critical behaviors that were deeply impactful in my parenting approach and in my own life:
#1: Trust
The number one behavior is trusting your child’s innate ability to achieve the goals that you and he/she set. Sometimes kids want to do something that parents are not interested in or feel are a waste of time. It is important to respect your child’s interests provided they are not hurtful or counterproductive.
For example, Anne decided she loved ice skating. I am not an ice skater and I was not excited about the practice times for ice skating (5 am) but I supported her as much as I could. She actually had to get the skates herself since they were so expensive, sometimes almost $1000 a pair, but she did it.
I had no idea if she wanted to be a professional skater and I am not sure she knew either, but I supported her in this goal. Each of my daughters had something they loved doing that I knew little about but I encouraged them and then did not get angry when their interests changed.
#2: Respect
Respect your children as individuals. Don’t expect them to be just like you because the probability is small that they will be the same as you.
They were born in a different time and that alone changes their interests. If your child does not want to go to the museum, maybe you can make a compromise, but frequently little kids do not enjoy museums. They don’t have the background unless the museum is geared to kids like the Exploratorium in San Francisco or the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Trusting your child and respecting them gives them the opportunity to trust and respect themselves. In fact, the first person anyone should trust and respect is themselves; you need to take care of yourself and forgive yourself when you make mistakes. We all make mistakes. There’s a famous quote by Rabbi Hillel that I love: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?
#3: Independence
Give your child independence as early as possible. Today we have an epidemic of over parenting, over-protecting our children and cutting into their independence. We all need to learn to be independent; that is the trajectory of life. We should be celebrating while also feeling a bit sad when our children leave for college. If we did it right, they should be excited to be independent and try out life on their own with their friends.
If they are always calling you for help, feeling unable to cope (like 80% of college students today) we have done something wrong. Our parenting has been too overprotective. Julie Lythcott Haims wrote a great book called How to Raise an Adult in which she talks about these issues especially about how to break through if you have spent the first 18 years of your child’s life over protecting them.
Independence can start early. Toddlers can learn to put on their own clothes, clean up their toys, help set the table. Kids are honored to be trusted and included. Just don’t call them chores; they are not chores. They are family responsibilities and they are part of the family. We all have to participate to make a family
#4: Collaboration
Don’t dictate all the time. No one likes to be controlled, even when they are two years old. That doesn’t mean there are no rules, no structure. There are definite rules for proper behavior but within those rules, there is opportunity for collaboration.
Kids can help decide what to do this weekend; they can help decide what color rug to buy for their room; they can help pick the breakfast cereals; they can learn to use a broom and dustpan. Each of my daughters decorated her own room. Susan picked her carpet when she was six and it stayed in that room until she graduated from high school. It wasn’t my choice. She picked hot pink shag carpeting and she loved it. She also picked her own bedspread and lined up her favorite animals. It was her space.
Janet did the same only hers was blue and Anne also did the same with florescent green shag. Janet is the only one who did not pick shag. I can tell you that the rest of the house was not like that at all. So it was a collaboration on many fronts including clothing, travel and food.
#5: Kindness
While these behaviors are all important, kindness is probably the most important. Why? Because the first person you need to be kind to is yourself and then your family and friends. Be kind to yourself when you make a mistake or when other people make mistakes. Take care of yourself; eat properly, sleep properly, exercise. It is all so simple, but many of us don’t do it.
Finally, forgiveness is vitally important as well. Every religion in the world teaches kindness and forgiveness and yet we see terrible fighting everywhere including women and children being killed for anger that started centuries ago. How can people say they are religious and then fail to be kind and forgiving?
In ordinary everyday life, we need to teach our children to forgive by modeling it. Don’t hold onto anger. In the classroom, it is important for the teacher to remember that school is a place to make mistakes. It is a place where learning happens and none of us does it right the first time.
For more from Esther Wojcicki, visit www.raisesuccessfulpeople.com.
To lead and manage with more positive power, and to build a more impactful career, join Kathy Caprino in her Career Breakthrough programs, and tune into her Finding Brave podcast.
