 And so, what we ended up doing was actually remarkably a simple solution in the end, but also one that's quite labor-intensive. But it's really a beautifully, you know, pure idea when you think about it. And that is, we just compiled a set of stories about real people's lives from around the world, people who were in situations that many would find compassion-inducing. People who had achieved things despite terrible odds and circumstances in ways that many would find inspirational. And then we shared those stories with people in a two-hour interview, which by the way, that method I stole or sort of borrowed from educational qualitative research, right? In a two-hour interview in which we would, I would sit privately with each person, show them, tell them the story, each story, there were 50 of them in that first experiment. And then ask them, show them some video footage of the person, of the protagonist of the story, real video footage, not actors, not something made up, but the real person, whatever we could find out, almost like a mini-documentary about the person. And then I would just ask them one simple question, which is how does this person's story make you feel? And what we would do is analyze the way in which the person's feeling state then later predicted when we moved them into the fMRI scanner and hooked them to psychophysiological recording equipment. So we were measuring their heart rate, their respiration, their skin conductance, which is like microscopic amounts of sweating on the bottoms of their feet, right? When we look at all of those things that are happening in their body together with the way in which their brain state is changing, the activity in local areas of their brain is fluctuating as the person thinks again about the same stories and we show them the same little reminder videotapes and ask them to think about each one with a long gray screen and to report to us in real time how they're feeling about it right then and right there. And so what we were able to do was look at from the interview how people naturalistically, relatively naturally make meaning out of the stories, the way in which they feel about the stories and what we very quickly found out was that we thought we were going to be studying emotions about other people, the way in which we feel about other people's mind states, their painful mind states, their inspirational mind states, their virtuous mind states. And what we quickly realized was that both in the interview and in the neural data, what we saw was a pattern that showed us that as individuals were engaging with other people's minds, what they were actually also doing as a kind of springboard to understand another person's situation or feeling was calling up their own memories, calling up their own sense of consciousness and kind of rallying this sort of sense of internal heightened self-awareness and sort of reflectiveness or introspectiveness that became a kind of platform psychologically and neurologically for engaging empathically with the other person's story and for making meaning out of it. And I realized right away as we began to recognize that it was oneself that was the platform for understanding other people that this had huge implications for the way in which we understand and structure classrooms because classrooms are social settings. They're heavily cultural. They're both cultural in the macro sense of the culture in the societal level in which they're operating, but they're also microcosms of culture. Teachers and students within schools build kind of ways of getting along with each other, ways of building relationships, norms around interacting with each other, learning with each other, and sharing with each other that become sort of a microcosmic way of culturally constructing relationships together. And what it told us is that the way in which people interact with one another in these constructed microcosms we call schools is going to have huge implications for the way in which both kids and teachers, both the students and the adults, are constructing knowledge within those spaces, the way in which they're learning from their experiences, the way in which they're interpreting the information they're exposed to, and ultimately the way in which that information and those skills are able to become part of who they are as a person going forward so that they become useful tools for innovating and acting in the world purposefully after school, when school gets out or when they're already adults out in the world. So the teacher-student relationship, and I would say really student-student relationships and teacher-teacher relationships all within the space of the educational sort of system, are critical platforms on which people learn and make meaning because the way in which we learn from one another is to literally call up our own sense of self empathically and to sort of simulate what we think other people are thinking about or how they're doing things or why they're thinking the way that they are in our own mind as a way to learn from them. So this is actually the basic process by which we internalize the things that were meant to quote-unquote learn from a school setting is by engaging as if our mind were the teacher's mind, as if our mind were our peer's mind who understand something better than us say and who's trying to explain it to us. And in that empathic sharing, what I like to call empathic resonance between people, it's via those relationships between people that the meaningful learning is actually able to happen because we can't as teachers it's humanly impossible to take information and put it inside your kid's heads. You can't actually take the information that you want somebody to know about or to know how to do and give it to them directly. What we need to do instead is facilitate people building that knowledge on their own from the inside. They need to conjure it and construct it for themselves. But how do they do that? They do that by watching the way in which the more skilled people or the teachers are doing it and then trying to imagine in their own mind how that person's mind is working and why it's working like that and to try to be like that or to try to engage it in a way that connects to who you are, but that's still accomplishing the goal that that person's accomplishing. And what that means is that the tighter the relationship between the learner and the teacher, and those relationships are dynamic, they can change back and forth. The more directly, the more sort of facially those people will be able to engage with one another. So the more facially the teacher will be able to imagine what the student is thinking about and processing so that she or he can facilitate them moving in a direction that's going to help them come to the knowledge you need them to have, understanding what they know and what they don't and how they're feeling. And the more effectively the student is going to be able to sort of get inside the mind and goal of the teachers in order to be able to internalize that mental state and goal, which is another way of saying learn it, right? To be able to make it theirs. So the very notion of social learning is predicated on being able to understand one another's minds and take each other's perspectives. Both of those things, understanding a mind, taking a perspective, are predicated upon the relationship between the individuals involved. And so when you are more closely aligned with one another, when you're able to empathize and engage with one another in genuine ways that have give and take that are really feeling like you're sharing your mind with the other person and in turn able to simulate the other person's mind, that facilitates the exchanges of information and the ways in which people ultimately will be able to learn. So what do we do as a school system when kids really have no intrinsic reason to have an emotion about something because they can't engage with it in a way that feels relevant to their world, right? They have no way to enter. They have no sort of connection to things they've learned before or experiences they've had in the world or things that they could predict in the world. Well, what we do is rather than oftentimes, I mean many great teachers don't do this, but what we do instead of finding ways for the kids to genuinely appreciate why this material is interesting and important and to need it, we need to make them need it. We have to set up a world in which they need to know this, so that you're creating emotion about the actual content, right? But instead what we do is we slap extrinsic stuff on the outside and say, well, I'll make you have emotions about this. If you don't do well with this, you're going to flunk and not get into college. Or if you don't do well with this, you're going to have to stay after for detention and do it later and miss your play time. Or if you do do well, everybody's going to be proud and we're going to stick it on a bulletin board and you're going to get an A and a sticker, right? Or whatever it is, we come along and we add these kind of superficial, irrelevant kinds of rewards and punishments that we sort of slap onto the top that indirectly cause emotion because we care about rewards and punishments. And by causing emotion, we make it literally biologically possible for the person to engage. But here's the stick, right? And that is that the thing you remember is the thing you've had emotion about. So when we teach these ways and we overuse these kinds of extrinsic rewards and punishments to engage people and these ways of sort of framing it so that they're going to need it in a sort of superficial sense that they can't actually genuinely connect to at a personal level, then what happens is the person comes away with memories of the grading system. They remember the sense of failure, the sense of success of doing well. They remember sort of how they steered through it in terms of the rewards and punishments they got. They don't remember the intrinsic interest of the material. And they don't engage with material as if the actual ability to think in a scientific way or a historical way or in an artistic, expressive way is the value added. Instead, the value added is the thing that happened at the end that somebody else gave you. And that's the sort of the connection between emotions on the one hand, relationships on the other, and the structure of the classroom on the third. So what you ideally want to do is leverage the quality, the relationships in the cultural context of the school to be able to engage kids with problem solving that they actually care about, that they own, that they feel like they're inventing for themselves. Even if a million people have invented it before, it doesn't matter. They feel like they own it and it's something worth owning. And that process empowers people, both teachers and students, right? It empowers people to own what they have and to use it going forward so that the emotions they have are actually steering their judgment and their reflection and their memory ability within the space of the knowledge they're trying to build as compared to something that's superfluous or not relevant to what they actually are doing within that knowledge space. And by the way, teachers are people too. All of this is as relevant to them as it is to preschoolers and kindergartners and high school kids and college level kids. You know, when you come along and give teachers incentive pays that aren't tied to write that, but instead of resources and respect, genuine respect and freedom to engage in innovative ways in the classroom, what you do is take away their intrinsic interest and talent in actually making the classroom a wonderful place and instead replace it with something really superficial which is a tiny reward from the outside which isn't actually meaningful to people. So how do we help promote the kinds of emotion and feeling states in learning environments that we really care about? One way is to genuinely respect each other's knowledge and have high expectations that the other person, both students and teachers, right, can engage in a way that's worthwhile that can bring something to that knowledge setting, to that cultural group of that microcosm in that school that is worth having. So what that means is we honor the sort of the home knowledge, the world knowledge, the lived experiences of the people who are coming together in that learning space as a starting point for a rich diversity of ways of engaging with the material and the skills that you want to learn. That's the first thing and we can give examples for what that looks like. There are many fantastic educators in the world who do this incredibly well. That's the first piece. The next way in which you can really engage both teachers and students is through this notion of deep learning. What is deep learning? Deep learning is the opportunity for people to engage with disciplinary thinking at a very sort of deep and focused level. So we're affording people the supports, the resources, and the skills for engaging in thinking about an interesting, relevant, complex, dynamic problem that they really care about solving so that they get in and are actually engaging with really deeply understanding the nuances of some topic that interests them. And it actually doesn't even matter that much what the topic is. That becomes the fodder for them to learn what it feels like to really be an expert at something and for a teacher to learn what it feels like to really be engaging with his or her students in a way that's promoting a mutual understanding between them, that's promoting a genuinely respectful culture of learning in which everyone's contributing and learning from one another and really growing to their potential, the teacher included. And it's a way for the students, for example, through project-based learning or other kinds of learning which leverages their home culture experiences. For example, the indigenous children of Australia bring a lot of knowledge about nature, for example, and about oral storytelling. That those children's experiences and ways of knowing can be a starting point for their expertise to grow. And as they engage knowing more and more, they begin to feel the power of knowledge. They begin to experience what it's like to really understand something and to be an expert in it and to be able to share it with other people and to be the person who really knows how to predict what's gonna happen next or why things are the way they are. And as that happens, you're teaching people the feeling of being an educated person and then they crave naturally more and more of that and start to work harder and harder to be able to get it because it becomes so satisfying intrinsically to understand, to be able to predict, to be able to share knowledge with other people.