It's a real pleasure to be here with you and I want to thank the NEA Foundation for extending the invitation, and it's an honor to be a senior fellow with the Foundation and to work with the Foundation and the NEA in trying to influence the direction of education policy and the way we approach school reform. Probably like many of you, watched the debate last night, which I found entertaining. And a lot more inspiring than the last one. And it made me think that after the selection is over, and I'm hoping it ends in a good way, it'll be time to then roll up our sleeves and really get to work on how to influence the direction of the administration. Because I think we have to face it that the policies that have been pursued over the last four years are a lot like the policies pursued of eight years before that. And don't really get at the important issues. And that's not a political statement, it's a statement rooted in evidence. That is all you have to do is look at the lack of change in our schools. The fact that dropout rates are still high in most of our cities, that this achievement gap that we've been focused on for over 12 years is still wide and predictable, and all too familiar in most places. The fact that we continue to use assessment as a weapon, rather than as a tool, is probably the most distorted part of this whole policy. Anybody who knows anything about assessment knows you need to assess children. But assessment only works if you get the information back to teachers in a timely manner, so that it can be used for diagnostic purposes especially. Just using it to rank children, schools, or teachers is not helpful, particularly when we know the assessments don't give us a lot of information about a child's ability. So I would say that there's a lot of work to be done. And part of that work is getting teaching and learning back at the center of reform. Because that's not what we've been focused on. We've been focused on lots of other things, but not on how to ensure that good teaching is going on in schools. And I would say that's because our policy makers don't really understand what good teaching is. And I would say that if we spent more time focused on how to create conditions in schools that nurtured and cultivated good teaching and learning, we would be a lot farther along than we are right now. But that's not where we've been. We've been in a blame game. We've been using accountability as though it's again, this lever, and I think you heard from Michael Follin that we've been using the wrong levers. And I think his point about the need to focus on capacity building can't be emphasized enough. And all you have to do is go to the schools that have been failing for years and what you find is no capacity to meet the needs of the students. And beating up on those schools, firing principals, firing teachers will not change outcomes if you don't build capacity. But somehow that's not understood or recognized by our policy makers and we've got to make sure that that direction is changed. And we've got to do that at multiple levels. We can only focus on what's happening in Washington because we know there's way too much noise here. You can get lost in all the noise of all the lobbyists. Sometimes I think you can get far more progress at the state and the local level. One of the states that I've seen actually making a lot of progress in this direction right now is Massachusetts. And Massachusetts is often held up as the beacon of reform because Massachusetts, as we know, if it was a nation would be right up there with the top performers and has some of the highest standards in the country. But we also know that part of what's happened in Massachusetts, because I know Paul Revelle, the state commissioner very well, is they've started to acknowledge that it takes more than simply focusing on test scores to change outcomes. That you do have to look at extended learning opportunities. You do have to look at health. You do have to look at what's the life of that community appearance, engagement and teacher support to change outcomes. So Massachusetts is a state I think we could learn a lot from. And I just got an email this morning from Susan Satchewitz. I'm probably saying her name wrong. She's the principal of Brockton High School. Oh, you all know Susan too. Brockton High School is such a success story. Over 4,000 students, largest high school in Massachusetts, predominately low income, predominately minority, predominately immigrant. One of the top performing schools in the state. And guess what? The kids don't arrive in ninth grade as top performers. A lot of that growth happens in those four years. At a time when Gates was telling us to make our schools small, Brockton said, no, we think as big as better. Because big schools have more resources. At a time when the district was, the states were focusing on test prep, they say, no, we have to focus on literacy. And they made sure that every teacher at Brockton High School, regardless of what subject they taught, was teaching literacy. Last year, this past June, one third of their seniors received the top state scholarships. In fact, the majority of children of color in Massachusetts who received that scholarship came from Brockton High School. I'm sorry, Cambridge. I know you're out there. My question is, why aren't we learned from Brockton? Why isn't Brockton held as an example? Why aren't we taking teams of educators to Brockton High School? And schools like it, because there are others like it. They're not the only one. Why are we learning from success? Well, that's because we treat reforms as fads. Every few years, we know it's a new gimmick, a new fad of the moment, and that's the way policy's been made over the last few years. We focus on assessment, but not teaching and learning. We don't focus on buy-in from the people who actually have to carry out reforms. We do reforms to teachers, not with teachers. Makes a huge difference, doesn't it? We completely ignore our school culture. And if anything, Seymour Saras and that psychologist at Yale told us years ago, if you don't change attitudes, beliefs, expectations, values, norms, nothing will change. You can reorganize the school, you can put in smart boards and new computers, you can replace the principal, you can paint the building, but if the culture does not change, nothing changes. And here's what we know. Cultures can't be imposed on schools, can they? No. They have to change through a process of engagement, of dialogue, of deliberation, getting people organized around a common vision of how to educate children and how to engage parents and community. It's hard work, let's be clear, but that's the work we should be focused on. Instead, we're focused on the wrong things and too often ignoring the needs of our children, not just their academic needs, their social needs.  And we have lots of kids, particularly now, with poverty rates so high as they are across our country. Kids come into school with unmet needs that invariably impact learning. And let me be clear, that's not because poverty is a learning disability. It's not. So let's not pretend that poor kids can't learn. That's not the issue.  Poverty can get in the way of learning, as it would for any one of us here. So it's not an either or. It's both. We've got to focus both on the learning needs and on the social needs, which forces us to then to recognize schools can't do this by themselves. They need partners, because schools don't have the resources. We can't expect teachers to be psychologists and social workers and nurses and probation officers. They're not trained for it. They can't do it. And focus on the learning needs of kids. Doesn't make sense. The only thing that does make sense is to bring social workers and psychologists and those partners into the schools in partnership with schools, so that schools' teachers can, in fact, focus on the learning needs. And where this is happening in disadvantaged communities, we're seeing different results for kids. Because these are schools that understand it is about educating a whole person, not simply focusing on achievement. And again, it would help if we had policy that acknowledged that too. So someone asked me a few years ago, what was the major accomplishment of the Obama administration education? I said it was healthcare reform. Healthcare reform is the major educational accomplishment so far. I don't know, that's not yet been implemented, but if we can get all kids with access to healthcare, it will actually boost achievement in this country. And it's important we keep these connections in mind. Because when you look at the countries that are outperforming us, those two don't have healthcare. Now, they also have preschool. They got a lot of things that we don't. So it was Massachusetts. Got a lot of things we don't have in this country. And so, okay, okay, that's enough on Massachusetts. I'm not a Patriot fan, let me tell you that, okay? But I will say I am a fan of what Massachusetts do in education. So a big part of shifting direction is changing the focus. I would say right now, we've been asking the wrong questions. We've been asking how do we raise achievement? When you get educators focused on their raising achievement, what happens? Then they focus on test preparation. And with that, what happens? Then kids get bored to death. And then you see the curriculum get narrowed. And anything that's not about test preparation gets taken out, right? Art is not on the test, so art's taken away. Music's never on the test. Music is gone. Fizzed at a time when obesity is the number one health challenge facing our children. You see schools getting rid of physical education and recess. The only thing that kids like, recess. So I studied the other day, it said that eating lunch was good for test scores. I said, thank God. It might take lunch too. This is ridiculous, isn't it? Our kids need art. They need music. They need recess. Fizzed, they need a well-rounded education. Instead of focusing on how to raise achievement what we should be focused on, how to get kids excited about learning? Think about the question for a moment. I was in Newburgh, New York, at the beginning of the year, a district that's just chronically in trouble. A community that's in trouble. Gangs, all kinds of social problems. And I said to the teachers at the beginning, I said, I want you to think about what you're gonna do. Day one, to get your students excited about learning. Whatever you teach. What are you gonna do to get those kids stimulated, to get those kids inspired, to get those kids engaged and motivated to learn? And a teacher came up to me afterwards, said, I've been teaching here for 30 years. It's the first time someone's asked me that. What is wrong? We're focused so much on the wrong things. I was in Baltimore, a year ago. Where they've actually been making steady progress. In Baltimore, to say you're making progress in Baltimore, it says a lot, doesn't it? And unlike Michelle Rhee, who got a lot of attention with her broom. Andres Alonso, in Baltimore, has been making a lot of progress. You don't hear about any labor problems. No board problems. He's a Cuban in a predominantly black community. You don't hear about racial issues. They've been using science to drive their literacy curriculum in elementary school. You know why? Because the research shows science is our kids' favorite subject when they're small. Because it actually encourages kids to ask questions, develop curiosity. So I sit in a classroom, a first grade classroom that science teacher brings in, a hermit crab. Well, see, everybody attention now. The kids want to know about this hermit crab. Where does he live? What does he eat? Then they find out the crab comes from the harbor. The same harbor they see every day. They're curious. Everybody's attention is focused on the crab and now they're ready to write about that crab. No problem in writing. No distractions, no disruptions. Everybody engaged on task. Why? Because she got them engaged. She enticed them and invited them into learning. What would happen if we told our teachers in our schools? To develop strategies that will motivate their students, that will inspire them to want to learn the subject, to bring the passion that hopefully they had or at least had some time ago for learning to bring that to their students. How would that change the way they do the work? Over and over again, when I see the school, the teachers that do the best, work, it's because they still have that passion. We've got to find a way to bring that back into our schools. To make learning fun, to make it interesting, to make it worthwhile because too often the number one complaint we hear from students about school is what? Boring, why? They say that because it is. It's too often the way they're expected to learn is not the way they actually learn outside of school. Too often we're still doing what Roland Duff calls the cemetery method of teaching. You know that one, line them up in rows, keep them as still as possible? Deadly, a lot of kids don't do it like that. We've got to actually show teachers what good teaching looks like. What engagement looks like? And you know what it looks like? It looks like this. Look at this classroom, middle school classroom in East LA, Holland Beck Middle School. Now let me tell you how good the teacher is. She's talking to me in that picture. She's so good, she could talk to me and whatever the kid's doing, they're on task. Because the kids are in control. They're in control of learning. What does it take for a classroom to look like that? A middle school classroom. It means all those kids know how to work in groups because you don't see one kid doing all the work while the others sit back to the copy. Do you ever see that one happen? In group work? You don't see kids distracted talking about, well we don't know what they're talking about, but I was there, they're talking about the work and not what was on TV, not about the video games they're playing. They're deeply engaged, they're so engaged that when the bell rings they're surprised. They're not packing up five minutes before the bell rings to get ready to get out. We need to show teachers who can't do this what this looks like. How to create classrooms like this. Because when this happens, achievement goes up. Learning outcomes improve. And too many of our teachers haven't seen this. Why? Because they too often teach in isolation. And too often we have some excellent teachers right next door to some teachers who are struggling and what we are not good at is enabling those who are excellent to be a resource for those who are not. And until we can create an environment where it's okay to help, where it's okay to say I need help, and that doesn't mean that that triggers in an evaluation, until we can do that in our schools we're not gonna see our best teachers become a resource for our weaker teachers. And that's what part of what we've got to do to change the way schools work right now. We need instead of focusing on how to hold teachers accountable or students accountable or principals accountable, we need to follow. How do we hold everybody accountable? Let's start off at the top, let's start with the governors. Let's start with the state legislature. Let's work our way down to superintendents and mayors. They want to take control, okay, what are you gonna be accountable for? I keep telling them, Mike Bloomberg. He said, I'm in charge, he said, what are you accountable for then? What are your metrics? If 140 schools have failed under your leadership, many of which were started under your leadership, bad sign, isn't it? Real bad sign. I kept asking this to Joel Klein when he was the chancellor. You're in charge, what are you accountable for? His response was, I'm accountable for, holding everyone else accountable. Not good enough. Not good enough. We need to think differently about accountability. Parents need to be accountable. Children need to be accountable. Teachers absolutely need to be accountable. The whole system needs accountability. And we need to be clear on what each party needs to be accountable for. Because it's true that when you look into the schools that are high-performing, there's a clarity of purpose. My colleague Dick Elmore at Harvard says, the best schools have internal accountability, not external accountability, and they're not waiting for someone from down, down to come and see what they're doing. They're accountable to each other. And because they're accountable to each other, they work together, they collaborate, they challenge each other respectfully when they need to. It's a different conversation about the work. That's what we need to focus on. How do we create that kind of context? I was in Texas a couple of years ago speaking at a statewide conference on dropouts. Just before I was to go speak, the state commissioner was there. She said, she was nervous. I said, why are you nervous? She said, I'm not nervous to this group. She said, I'm about to go to the state legislature to ask for our budget to be funded. And they're gonna tell me they want no dropouts in Texas. I said, none? She said, none. And I don't know how I'm gonna respond. I said, well, why don't you tell them you want no kids coming to school hungry? And you want no kids coming to school who haven't had their health needs met, right? Because there's a connection here. It's easy for the political leaders to point fingers at schools and completely ignore their responsibility to address the other needs that our children and our communities have. So we need to shift the focus and the whole way in which we're thinking about accountability and standards. We think about standards as something that kids have to meet. We don't talk about learning standards, basic conditions that need to be put in place to ensure that kids have the opportunity to learn. It's a different way of framing the issue. But guess what? That's how we think about highways. That's how we think about airports. That's how we think about food and drugs. Say, you have to meet the standard. If you don't meet the standard, you can't fly. I don't care if you're in Podunk, Mississippi, you meet the federal standards for airports. We don't say good luck in Podunk, right? No, no, there's a federal standard. How could it be that there's not a federal standard for schools? How is it possible that we can send some kids to schools with broken windows and just emergency teachers, third-world conditions? And then we said, no, we're gonna hold you accountable to the same standards as everyone else. That's equity, that's a cool joke, that's a farce. That's deep and profound inequity. And that's what's happened on No Child Behind is that we have focused on holding all kids to the same standards and completely ignored the standards in which they learn. And that's surprisingly the outcomes haven't changed because the learning conditions haven't changed. So we need to shift the focus. And instead of focusing on closing this achievement gap, which is, I think, a noble goal, but I think we frame it wrong. We should focus on how do we create schools where racing class are not predictors of outcomes. Think about the difference. I'm a realist. I don't think all kids will be above average one day. I have four, they're not all above average. I love them all. Some work harder than others. All right? I am focused like a laser on their outcomes. I want them all to be independent and not living with me as they get older, okay? That's an outcome I'm really hoping for.  But I also know they're not the same. And some might go on and get a PhD, like my son, he's working on his PhD right now. Another one, I'm not sure what he's gonna do yet. He wasn't ready for college at 18. I told him go work for a while, then maybe you might be ready. Different kids have different journeys. But what we should be most disturbed by is when we go to schools and at age five, you can predict how well a child will do if you know their neighborhood, if you know their race, if you know the culture, if you know the language they speak, if you know how much money the family earns when that's happening, then you know something's wrong with that school. You know why? There's talent in the trailer parks, isn't there? Yes, there is. And there's talent in the housing projects. And there's talent in single parent households. Talent comes in all shapes and sizes. We know that especially in athletics, don't we? Oh yes, we do, you can get football players out of the most broken down housing projects in the country and we do. Because we love football, don't we? There's a little town in Florida called Belglade. Belglade right outside of West Palm Beach, the Florida Indians know it? Belglade, very poor. Very poor, but Belglade has produced more professional football players than any town in the country for the last 20 years. They say it's because the grass is so hot it has to run fast. I bet if we cared as much, we could produce scientists from Belglade and accountants and doctors. I'm doing work right now at Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. And it's so sad. You walk the halls and there's a hall of fame of their alumni. And on the walls you see doctors, lawyers, judges, all kinds of dignitaries who come out of Westinghouse High School when it was a segregated school. Now it's not segregated. All black, but not segregated. Right? Isn't that the way it works now? Over 50 years after Brown, we have de facto, not de jure segregation. But no more doctors and lawyers come out of this school. Oh no, it's a totally failing school. Why? Because it was designed to fail. It was overstaffed with the neediest children and then staffed with the teachers that nobody else wanted. And guess what? That's a recipe for disaster, isn't it? That's a setup. And so often when I go into these schools that Arnie Duncan called to drop out factories, what do you see? They were set up. These schools were set up. They didn't have a chance in the first place. So we need to shift the focus again. Focus on the opportunity to learn. Focus on cultivating talent in children, not on measuring and sorting ability. That's a different focus. That's the old paradigm, right? When we would let to believe that intelligence was in the genes, some had it, some don't. Read Paul Tuft's new book, How Children Succeed. I encourage you to read it. You know what he finds? There was research in mining and digesting all the neuroscience research on learning that's out there. IQ scores, SAT scores, test scores, they're not strong predictors of outcomes. You know what are the strongest predictors? Character traits. Like the ability to persist when something's hard, the ability to pick yourself up when you fall, the ability to regulate your emotions, defer gratification. Are we cultivating those character traits in our children? Then on the test, and I would say it takes a very different approach to education to be attentive to those character traits. But the research shows ultimately those are the individuals who do well in life. As parents, as citizens, as workers, which again means we need to shift the focus. Always have to keep in mind, I'm not sure how I'm doing for time. What's your name? Okay, I'll stop with this. Always have to keep in mind that education is about two things simultaneously. It's about preparing this generation for adulthood, for the jobs of the future for college, making sure that they're ready. But it's also about providing them with the critical skills they'll need, the creativity they'll need to solve the problems that this previous generation left them with. Think about that for a moment. We're leaving them with a whole lot, aren't we? We're leaving them with global warming. We're leaving them with wars and famine and disease. The knowledge we have right now is not good enough to solve those problems. Otherwise, we'd have solved them. We need young people who are creative and able to think outside the box who don't just see the world based on some finite notion of knowledge that they've got to absorb, they're able to see beyond what we already know to imagine new ways of understanding the world. So they can solve some of these problems and not be afraid. That means we need to create classrooms where imagination and creativity is encouraged, where kids are encouraged to reason and think and challenge each other, where critical reasoning is actually a high priority, where there are no simple one answer, right answers. There are many possible answers to the questions we pose. We need to create schools where learning is fun, where it's encouraged, where it's cool to be smart. Cool to be smart. We need to shift the focus of the conversation. And so I encourage the NEA, I encourage you as you're thinking about this work, as we're thinking about what's gonna happen after the election, as I said already, I hope it turns out well, okay. How do we then shift the focus of reform? Because we have ample evidence that what we're doing right now is not getting us to where we need to be. Thank you. Fantastic, so, energy? It's all this before 9 a.m. And grounding us. So we have a few minutes, we've asked Pedro, he's got another 15 minutes, he's got a flight that he has to catch back to New York, but he's been gracious to cut his comments a little bit short to open up for Q and A. So we got a couple of mics and some questions as we move forward. There's one here behind you. Testing, yes, thank you, Pedro. Two questions, big, but one, given what you laid out, what do you think the role of teacher unions should be? And secondly, how does your analysis relate to the push now for the common core standards? So two big ones. Well, I think, and someone got mad at me because I wrote an article for the nation and then I talked about the Chicago teacher strike. And one of the things I said in there is that the teacher's union needed to be more forceful and clear about how it envisions reform. Well, people in the union got pissed off at me and they started sending me emails. Look at our document. I say, having a document is good, but we gotta go further than that, okay? We really gotta talk about the conditions because if we talk about teaching conditions that are good for learning, then guess what? The kids, their parents are all aligned with us because they're interested in the same thing and we need those parents with us in this struggle for the direction of reform. So I would say that the union has to become much more clear about the nature, the kinds of reforms it wants to see in schools. And they have to really relate to learning conditions, the conditions of work, right? If we're gonna push for class size, right? And that's a big debate. We have a lot of debate over and over again and usually the people who say class size doesn't matter, people have never taught, right? But we need to be really clear. What in what classrooms do the size matter, right? Which classrooms, right? Well, I don't know, I've taught, I could teach honors. I think if you're teaching honors in English, you might be able to handle 40. But if you're teaching remedial English, you might not be able to handle 40, you might need 15. Okay. So we need to be clear, more precise about what, especially because we know that there are limitations in budgets, we can't just, we can't do everything that we'd wanna do, right? But I think we gotta get clear about reform. With respect to the Common Core, I have issues with the Common Core. Honestly, I don't. I think having the Common Core is better than not having it. That is because what we know goes on in too many schools is there's great unevenness in what kids are learning, right? And kids, I see it all the time, kids in the South Bronx learning very different things than kids in the Upper East Side, right? Yet still, they're all gonna be taking the SAT, they're all gonna be competing, so I think the idea of having clarity around the expectations in the curriculum is important. The hard work, though, is teaching it, right? That's the hard, teaching it to English language learners, teaching it to special ed kids. And guess what? The policy makers once again, they think they already did something. They say, oh, you got the Common Core, now moving on. Guess what, that was the easy part. The hard part is about how to do this now, right? And outside, I'm going to schools all across the country that are struggling with that part of it, right? How do we actually teach this to the range of students out there? How do you teach Common Core 9th grade to kids who are learning at third grade level? Those are our kids, aren't they? Okay. What kinds of structures need to be, scaffolds and supports need to be put in place so that we maintain the rigor, but we also make it accessible, right? And address their learning needs. I think that part of the conversation is not happening sufficiently right now. Thank you. Other questions? We've got a few more minutes here. My name is Tim Collins. I'm from Springfield, Massachusetts. But we still have a long way to go. And I want to thank you for your presentation. I've been beating the drum on educating the whole child all my career. And you're echoing a lot of things that I say. When people ask me, what's the number one thing in Massachusetts we could do to improve students? And I say, live and wage jobs for their parents and guardians. And you're absolutely right. We have to hold our elected officials accountable to creating circumstances where not only children have a chance to succeed, but their families have a chance to succeed. So thank you for your presentation. I'll take it to heart again and I'll start beating the drum as hard as I can. Well, thank you. And you know, I've been to Springfield and so I'm familiar with your community. And I was there maybe two, three years ago and I remember we were having a conversation about the achievement gap and about what to do. And I kept saying, you know, we can't only look at what's happening in school. Let's look at what's happening outside of school. You've got a gang problem in Springfield, don't you? Okay. And you're losing kids to gangs at young ages, right? If we don't figure out how do we make school a more compelling place? If we're not working with churches, neighborhood groups to address the needs of these young people, because they don't live in school, they live in their community, we're gonna keep losing them. And so I would just say that it's very important that we really think, you know, I'm part of an effort that's called the broader, bolder approach, which has been advocating that we need to stop this narrow focus on the schoolhouse and look more broadly at the communities where these children live. And then ask, okay, what does it really take to educate these kids? What kind, who do our partners need to be? What kind of supports do we need to have and put in place for them? And I think we'd end up with very different strategies than we do now. So I would just encourage you. I was invited to another part of, to New Bedford, Massachusetts, okay? A few years ago, I was invited because they had a very high juvenile homicide rate. And they asked me, pray to come and meet with us, help us figure out what to do. I said, I'll come on one condition. Condition is this, that in the room, there are educators, there are parents, there are church leaders, there are people from the courts and the police department, there are youth service workers, there are people from the business sector, and there are kids. They said, well, why do you need all those people? I said, because you don't even know why kids are killing each other, do you? I said, well, truth is no. I said, well, first of all, we need to figure out why, what's going on, and then we need to all be in the room together, figure out what we all need to do to address this problem. Schools can't salv it by themselves. So we need to make sure we have the right people in the conversation. Can't say that enough, thank you. Yes. Question here? I'm sorry. Michael Full here, thank you. Hi, Pedro. So what do you see as the role for teacher preparation programs in this cycle? Another big question. They have to completely change. They have to completely change, right now. I mean, and some are making that change. Some are further ahead than others, but right now I would say generally, the gap between teacher preparation and teacher work is too wide, right? So we're preparing these teachers, we're giving them, and when it's done well, they're learning a lot about child development, they're learning a lot about content, they're learning a lot about instruction, but what they're not learning about is how to do those things with the actual kids they'll teach, right? So they can teach the math, but they just can't teach it to those kids, right? And that's the gap that's gotta close. The training of teachers or the education of teachers need to look like the education of physicians. Think about it. We don't take a brand new physician resident and say, okay, go on, you're on your own now. Say no, no, no, you're gonna work under, for the first, you're gonna do your residency and there will be a senior physician in the room with you, you only take a temperature without a senior physician watching you during those first few years. But what do we do in the districts now? We will take brand new inexperienced teachers and give them the most challenging classes to teach. That's to teach the American model, isn't it? A bad idea. It's a bad idea whether they're credentialed or not. It's a bad idea. And so part of what we've gotta do is both change the way we prepare them but also change the way we place them when they get into our schools. We said, I'd sometimes say these young people, because I'm working with them at NYU, they're 22-year-olds, they go out, sent into the most difficult schools, difficult classrooms, they're so idealistic when they first come out and see them a year later, like they're aged 20 years, hair falling out, they're like, I'm done, I don't wanna be a teacher anymore. Why, because they were set up. They were set up and they didn't get a mentor, they didn't get the support and the university said, we're done. And that to me is not good enough. Do we have a final question here? Yep. Go ahead, thank you. I, it's really an honor to listen to you and ask you this question. Amy Mazzalco from Milwaukee Public Schools, I'm a teacher. What I, when I listen to you, I'm thinking of total transformation and how do we, in the context of relentless, top-down, misguided reform. We have teachers who are pretty beleaguered, overly obedient and compliant. There are hundreds and thousands of us. How, what would you say to teachers to help them understand that for us to be able to provide classrooms where kids can question the system and feel entitled to a seat at the table, like how do we unleash teachers here to know that until we are advocating for the kid sitting in front of us in a way that we would for our own children. Do you know what I'm asking? I do, I do. Thank you. Because you're right, that teachers get socialized too, right, and the longer you've been doing it. Now you always meet the outliers, the people who never lose sight of the magic of teaching, right? Who always understand teaching is art and skill. And they know the beauty of teaching is that you close that door, no one really knows what you're doing, and they can do great things with kids. But then there are others who get compliant, who focus on covering material, as opposed to teaching kids. I would say confused teaching with talking, right? And for those folks, the work is harder, because it is about re-socializing and changing. But I would say that most people into teaching for the right reasons. They went in there to make a difference. They may lose sight of what that means over time, but I think if you can tap back into that initial impulse, what I'm seeing that's the most promising right now as a reform strategy, and it actually comes out of the charter school movement, is giving teachers a chance to design new schools. But you need time to plan, you need time to organize yourselves, because if you do it too quickly, you can set people up for failure. But the problem is that a lot of these schools, the structures, the way things have been done, is so heavy on people.  So why? So it's too hard, it's too hard. People have to change the way they teach to do it. Oh, okay, I guess. And we can't do advisories, why? Because they become bad study halls. And they act like the schedule was handed down by Moses, right? Moses didn't create your schedule, you created the schedule. I work with the high school. Now, this is a brand new public school that has a longer day, a longer year. Teachers have staggered vacations. The union completely supports and brought into it. Teachers designed it, it's called Generation High School. It's a model that's working. And why does it work? Because there's complete buy-in by the teachers about what they're doing, how they're approaching the work. Now, there's buy-in from the students. And they are getting excellent outcomes at a school that was a failing school. So I would say we need to give people that chance to reimagine their work again, and to do it differently. Don't be stuck by the way it's always been. Because sometimes that's what limits our ability to imagine it could be done so differently than it is done right now. Pedro, thank you again. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you so much.


If you start to see success, you deserve all of the success that comes your way. The universe, God, whatever it is that you believe in, is not going to bless you with success unless it feels like you deserve it. Today, we're going to talk about what I learned from 1,000 episodes of this podcast, The Mindset Mentor. And before we dive into that, I want to tell you a little bit of the story of it, because I think it's interesting to see where it started, because a lot of people can look at the podcast and see this success and think that it was this way all of the time. But this podcast wasn't a successful podcast from the very beginning. And so, I'm going to go over the five things that I learned from going through, but real quick, let me tell you how this came to be. Hopefully, this can be an inspirational story for anyone out there that wants to start a business. It's the exact same thing, or wants to start a podcast, or wants to be able to help people in some sort of way. So, a little background on me. Before I started the podcast, I was in sales. I had trained a few thousand salespeople at a company that I was at, and the thing that I missed the most after I left and went into doing corporate sales and corporate training, the thing that I missed the most around that was I just missed helping people. And then one day, I was in a place called Jason's Deli with my girlfriend, and I got this like feeling, this overwhelming feeling. This is back in 2015, this overwhelming feeling of like, I need to teach the stuff that I've learned that's helped me along the way. The personal development, the books that I've read, the mindset tips and tricks and all of that stuff, I need to teach it. So, I told my girlfriend, and literally had this microphone that you guys that are watching on video can see, this exact same microphone is the same one that I've been using since the very first podcast episode. I just happened to have it inside of my house because I'm a musician, so I had recording equipment, and I just decided to do it. But for six months, I didn't put the podcast out because I was afraid, why would somebody listen to me? You know, I had the imposter syndrome, but why would somebody listen to me?  It's just six years ago. And I'm like, why would somebody listen to me when they can listen to Tony Robbins or some of the greats that are out there? They can listen to John C. Maxwell. They can listen to Brian Tracy. They can listen to Zig Ziggler. They can listen to Jim Rohn. Why would somebody listen to some 29 year old guy that's still just trying to figure it out? And that's what I thought. And for six months, I didn't start the podcast. And then I just decided, you know what? Screw it. I'm going to do it. I'm just going to put out the podcast and we'll just see how it goes. I created seven episodes. I'm sorry, I created 14 episodes because I heard that the average podcaster gives up after seven. So I created 14. And on day one, I released, and this was in August of 2015. On day one, I released three episodes. They were terrible. I don't recommend going back and listening to them. You can if you like, you can scroll all the way back and listen to them. But they were nowhere near as good as I feel like they are now. I had 44 downloads, 44 plays, 44 listens on the very first day, 44 for three episodes, which means approximately 15 people were listening. At that point in time, I think a lot of people can get discouraged and say, you know, I don't want to do this. You know, only 15 people are listening to me. It's never going to be anything big. I might as well just give up. I'm right. I was a fraud. I am an imposter. Somebody can go listen to Tony Robbins. They can listen to John C. Maxwell, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, all of the greats, and they can give up. But my thing that I have is that if I start something, I usually don't give up on it. If I started, I'm going to see it all the way through. It grew and grew and slowly grew. And then it got to about 80,000 downloads a month. And it stayed at 80,000 downloads a month for about three years. And it just stayed. It plateaued. It was a hardcore plateau. And at that point, a lot of people would think it's not growing. It's not worth it. I can give it up. But for me, I was like, I'm going to figure out a way to get this to continue to grow. But if you fast forward, six years, we're at around 1,000, just over 1,000 episodes and approaching 100 million downloads. And we consistently are in the top 100 podcasts in the entire world. It's just been an amazing ride. And so there's a lot that I've learned in this process, but I wanted to tell you before I tell you what I've learned, I wanted to tell you the story so that you can see that it wasn't all, you know, unicorns, sun shines and rainbows. There's a whole bunch of struggles and having to stay with it for a really long time. No matter where you are, whether it's a business you want to start, whether it's a podcast you want to start, you want to start helping people, whatever it is, this, what I'm going to teach you, these five steps, the five things that I've learned will help you immensely. So number one is to trust your gut feeling. This is something I feel like people, especially people that I've worked with, thousands of people, I've worked with over the years, a lot of people have really hard time distinguishing their brain versus their gut feeling like that. What is it? What do I feel like my intuition is telling me? Because we're so trained, especially in the West, to think, to think, to be logical with stuff. And so to go, what does my intuition say? It's very foreign. I got the feeling inside of Jason's deli that I needed to start a podcast. Logically, it didn't make any sense because I was 29 years old working for a sales company, not working very much.  It didn't make sense logically to go, Hey, I'm going to go start a podcast because six years ago people didn't really listen to podcasts and to think that I'm going to build a business on the backend of it, let alone a business that's doing multiple millions of dollars every single year now. It's like, that didn't make any sense. I didn't think that that was even going to be something that could be possible, but there was this feeling inside of me like, this is what I'm going to do. This is what I feel called to do is if it is my obligation to do this and to teach this stuff. And it was just a gut feeling. And the people on the outside, all of my friends were like, you're going to do what? That doesn't make any sense. What is a podcast? I don't even know how to listen to podcasts. There wasn't a podcasting app on your phone at that point in time. Spotify didn't have it. It was just really hard to listen to them. And so many people when I first had the podcast were like, Oh, that's cool. I've heard of podcasts before. I've never listened to one. I don't really know how to. And so it didn't make logical sense, but I got this gut feeling of like, I'm supposed to do this. And I just followed the gut feeling. And then I just never gave up on it. And that's the beautiful thing about it is just to continue to keep going. And that's going to be one of the steps as well. So the first thing I'll tell you is if you get a gut feeling, if you get a pull, if you have this feeling of like, I'm supposed to do this, even if it doesn't logically make sense, if it feels right, not if you think that it's right, if it feels right, even if it just feels right to you, it usually is right. Your gut feeling is your emotional compass.  Your job is to try to tune in to what that is to actually figure out what it is that you're supposed to do. So the first thing that I will say is go with your gut feeling and don't pay attention to what anybody has to say. I don't care who they are.  Doesn't matter if it doesn't make any sense to anybody else. Doesn't even matter if it doesn't make sense to you. If it feels right, it's usually right. So the first thing is to follow your gut feeling. That's what I've learned from this podcast. The second thing that I've learned is to follow your dreams. For me, all I ever wanted to do is be able to build a business where I've been able to help people. That's all I wanted to do. How can I help people? How can I help people? The thing that I miss the most about when I left Cutco and I was 23, 24 years old, for six years, being in the corporate world, I just missed the feeling of being a teacher, the feeling of being a mentor, the feeling of helping people. And so my dream was in some sort of way, how can I help people? I don't know what it is. It doesn't make any sense. But I had this, this first off, this emotional gut feeling that I needed to do something. And then I also had this feeling of like, I'm supposed to help people. I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means it's supposed to be a coach. I don't know if that means I'm supposed to go and be a high school teacher, but I just had this pull of I'm supposed to help people. And that was the dream that I wanted to follow. And the cool thing about it is now looking back six years later, all of the dots connect a thousand episodes later, all of the dots connect. It all makes sense. But back then it didn't make a whole lot of sense. I just had a couple feelings of I'm not supposed to be doing the sales job anymore. This isn't fulfilling me.  I don't want to be stuck in the rat race. And I went through and looked through my journals six years ago before recording this podcast. And it was just journal entry after journal entry after journal entry that just said, I don't want to work for anyone anymore. I want to build my own business. I want to help people. I don't want to have a salary. I don't want to be stuck to somebody else's schedule. I want to be able to travel the world. I want to be able to help millions of people across the world. And it was just like I kept journaling and putting it down and putting it down and putting it down. And eventually the universe revealed itself to me in a way that just made sense and that gut feeling was the pull. And so I'll say, make sure that you follow your dreams, start to figure out what your dreams are. If you're not clear, as I always say, if you've never heard me say it before, it's okay not to know what your passion is and what your purpose is right now. But if you don't know what it is, it's not okay to not be in constant search for what that thing is. You've got to figure out what it is. So that's number two is to follow your dreams. Number three is to just don't stop. That's it. It's simple. The only reason why I feel like I've won in the podcasting world is because everyone who started when I started, they just stopped doing it. It was just countless person, person after person after person after person after person after person. I follow up with them years down the road and they're like, Oh yeah, I gave that up, you know, about a year in. I just didn't stop. And I eventually just figured out my flow. I figured out what people liked. I found a community of people who liked my message and it just worked. And so whatever it is that you want to do, just don't stop. You're not going to see success right away no matter what it is that you do. It's just not, it's not going to happen. It's going to take time. You know, it's like the Chinese bamboo. It takes five years for the bamboo. Once you put it inside of the ground, it takes five years for the seed to even break through the ground. But after five years, it goes from no feet, zero feet, you know, literally just a tiny little seed to up to 80 feet high in six months. But it needed five years to get to that point. Sometimes people give up right before they're about to see success. And so what I'll tell you is if you get the gut feeling and you feel like it's right and you have this dream that you're following, time doesn't matter. You need time on your side. It needs time to mature. It needs time to grow. It needs time for you to mess up and figure things out and mess things and figure, mess up things and figure them out. Just don't stop. Just stop stopping. If you want to be successful, just stop stopping. That's it. Just keep going.  Like you just don't die. You just keep going and keep going and keep going. And that's that's how you have to be in pursuit of what you want. So just don't stop. Number four, be consistent with whatever it is. That's one thing that I've learned over a thousand episodes. And from the very first time I started the podcast, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I have not missed a Monday, Wednesday or Friday in six years. Not one time in a thousand episodes have I missed a Monday, Wednesday or Friday simply because there was one time years and years and years ago that I uploaded an episode and it didn't go out in time because I scheduled it instead of four o'clock in the morning. I scheduled for four o'clock PM and I was brushing my teeth and I saw a couple emails that had come through. And as I was brushing my teeth, I looked at these emails and people were sending me emails saying, Rob, your podcast didn't come out. Are you okay?  I was like, holy crap, it's only been a few hours and I'm already getting emails from people who are concerned about my wellbeing simply because they've gotten used to my podcast coming out at a certain time. And so, you know, you have to stay consistent with it. I realized that my listeners depend on me. You guys depend on me to sometimes fill your time when you're driving to work or while you're going on your morning run or while you're at the gym. And it's my obligation to make sure that I show up for you if you're going to be listening to me. And so when I say be consistent to be successful in anything, you have to number one, like I said a minute ago, don't stop. Number two, be consistent. Just continue to keep showing up. Doesn't matter if you believe in yourself, but if you show up to the gym four times a week and just work out hard with a trainer, you're eventually going to get in much better shape. That's exactly how it is with life. That's exactly how it's a success. Just don't stop. Be consistent. Don't stop. Be consistent. Keep going, keep going, keep going. And then the fifth thing that I've learned is you deserve all of the success that comes your way. This is one thing that holds a lot of people back. I have coached many people. I've coached many people who have a massive trouble with success. They have massive trouble with failure. And a lot of times the reason why is because they don't feel like they deserve the success that comes their way. And so they actually, when they start to see success, they self-sabotage that success. They get in their own way. They literally think to themselves, I don't know if I deserve this money. I don't know if I've come from a place where everyone is poor. I don't know if I deserve to me. And they're not consciously thinking this most of the time. It's usually a deep subconscious that's just a pattern, but it's like, if I get rich, will everyone that I've always been friends with not be friends with anymore? Cause I don't fit in with them. Will everyone want to use me for money? Will everyone forget, you know, make fun of me and, you know, get rid of me and not be, not let me be part of the family. It's this weird thing where it's like, it doesn't make any sense when you actually speak it out loud, but so many people have this deep psychological feeling of, I don't deserve success. I had that feeling for a little while of like, why, how did I get so lucky to do something that I absolutely love doing that makes me feel alive and also be able to make a lot of money doing it? It was like, this doesn't seem fair. I remember seeing people and seeing parts, see my mom and family struggle to make money when I was younger. And it seemed like it was so hard to do. And it's like, who am I to be able to do something that I love to not feel like I'm struggling for it to feel effortless for me to love doing this and for me to get paid tons of money doing it. And for years, I want to say years for a while, I was like, I don't know if I deserve this. And so there's a lot of people that deal with this. And I want to tell you that no matter what it is that you do, if you start to see success, you deserve all of the success that comes your way. The universe God, whatever it is that you believe in is not going to bless you with success unless it feels like you deserve it. The success, the money, whatever it is that you get is just a byproduct of the value that you're giving the world. And so you deserve all of the success that comes your way.  And so don't self sabotage yourself on this path to success thinking that I don't know if I deserve it. I don't, I'm not going to fit in with my friends anymore, you know, all of my friends are broke. Will they try to use me for money? Will they make fun of me for starting to make money? It's just this weird thing where you feel like we're going to be kicked out of the tribe if we simply become different. If I start talking in front of people and putting my message out there, am I going to be exiled from the group? And it's kind of like the old, you know, tribal feeling of the brightest light gets the most arrows. Maybe if I stand out and I do something different than I have to fear that because there could be something that could come bad down the road. Nothing bad is coming down the road for you, no matter what. It's all coming. There's all good coming down the road for you. You either believe that the world is working. Everything that's happening in the world is happening to you or it's happening for you. I'm here to tell you it's happening for you.   And so with six years, almost 100 million downloads, over a thousand podcast episodes, those are five biggest things that I've learned. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well. If you were already the person that could create the success that you want, you would have already had that success. So what we're getting down to is that it's you that needs to change.