Can K-12 and Higher Ed Bridge the Student Readiness Gap?

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0:00:12.2 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. On today’s episode, we explore why so many students arriving on college campuses today struggle academically and socially. Our experts discuss the factors driving this trend, how K-12 and higher education leaders are working to address it, and where greater collaboration between the sectors could make the biggest difference. If you’re interested in student success and the future of education, you’re in the right place. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:48.0 Alexa Silverman: Welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Alexa Silverman. I lead our student outcomes and experience team here at EAB. And today, we’re tackling a question very relevant to that research and one that both K-12 and higher ed leaders are thinking a lot about. That question is student readiness. Why are so many young people arriving at college or entering the workforce less prepared than those who have gone before? From academic recovery and mental health challenges to career uncertainty and sense of belonging, social-emotional well-being, what we’ve been calling a readiness crisis is reshaping the way students make that transition from high school to college or career. It’s even making young people and their families question whether college is worthwhile. This isn’t a new problem, of course. Ensuring that students are ready for whatever comes beyond has always been a big part of what K-12 is all about. But today, I wanted to invite a good friend and colleague of mine to explore in more depth how K-12 and higher ed leaders are thinking about this crisis today. So, Margaret, welcome to the program.

0:02:02.5 Margaret Sullivan: Hi, Alexa. It’s so great to be here. Thank you so much.

0:02:06.7 Alexa Silverman: Of course. Glad you could join us. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role at EAB?

0:02:13.9 Margaret Sullivan: Absolutely. My name is Margaret Sullivan. I’m a director of research here on the EAB K-12 research team. And I am a former elementary teacher turned researcher. So I taught third and fifth grade for a few years, turned researcher, and ever since have been leading a team of researchers exploring some of these highly complex problems that you were just talking about, but particularly from the lens of K-12 schools and directly servicing our superintendents for public school districts as well as heads of school for independent schools. To give some examples of some of the projects that I’ve recently led that are gonna be pertinent to a lot of the conversation today, we’ve gone deep into topics like chronic absenteeism, AI policies, student mental health, foundational math and literacy instruction most recently. And actually a lot of that research has taken me into the field of learning science and behavioral psychology and brain science and how the brain learns to read and why children behave the way that they do. So if you hear me peppering in some of those thoughts throughout our conversation, I feel like you also like to geek out about that stuff. So I’m excited to get into it.

0:03:26.1 Alexa Silverman: You know it. Yeah, please do. I think one of the reasons that I really wanted to bring you into this conversation was not only your experience and expertise in K-12, but also because I think that in higher ed, we don’t always spend a lot of time talking about brain science and the cognitive development of young people. It’s definitely somewhere where my own knowledge has a lot of gaps in it. And so I’m really excited to learn a little bit more and bring that perspective to our conversation today. So, like I said, student readiness, it’s something that we’ve been thinking about and talking about for a while now. And I know it’s also been a major focus of your work and some of that research that you mentioned that you do with K-12 district leaders.

0:04:07.5 Alexa Silverman: So I’d love to hear, paint a picture for us. For K-12 leaders, for teachers, what does the classroom look like today? What are some of those new trends they’re seeing that maybe feel different from how it was a decade or two ago?

0:04:21.5 Margaret Sullivan: Yeah, that is a great question. And my brain immediately sorts this into three different buckets of trends that we’re seeing in K-12 classrooms, but I know that colleges and universities are seeing as well. So academically, I know, at least from the college perspective, we’re hearing a lot about college students coming in without certain basic academic skills. For example, we’ve had that recent report from UCSD about one in eight students needing remedial math support, which is a pretty significant number. And I could talk at length for a while about why that is, why we’re seeing so many students struggle in math specifically. But the key change in K-12 classrooms is that for a long time, for about 15 years, we’ve seen this growing academic performance gap, with the lowest performers consistently not getting the support that they need for a variety of reasons. But what happens from the teacher’s perspective is that now we have this insanely diverse, academically diverse group of students in front of us, and it is increasingly difficult to meet students where they are. We hear that phrase so often. Just meet students where they are, or differentiate your instruction, get students the support that they need, or teach them where they are. And it’s increasingly hard to do that. And so students on both ends of the spectrum are impacted. And so we’re seeing a huge diversity in academic outcomes, and that I know that colleges are seeing as well.

0:05:40.8 Margaret Sullivan: So that’s academic, but we have a couple other variables that we also want to look at. Next would be socially and emotionally. What we’re seeing recently, and there’s a lot of data coming out about the amount of time spent alone that young people are spending today. They’re spending more time alone than any other generation before them. They’re socializing less and less. And this is not just because of technology. I know that the narrative right now, we want to talk at length about smartphones and social media and their impact on young people. And they are partially to blame to an extent, or at least correlated in a way. But we also have different parenting styles at play, more intensive parenting. We also have young people in America who aren’t allowed to leave their house as often as prior generations. And so some independence is not being developed as early as it used to. So a few other home life shifts as well. We’re busy working parents, distracted parenting. But social isolation in general is kind of a really hot topic that I know K-12 is really trying to understand and understand the impact on young people.

0:06:52.4 Margaret Sullivan: And then finally, we also think about just psychologically and behaviorally, motivation and what motivates a young person to want to engage in school at all. We’ve seen a lot of change since the pandemic, but even before, about what actually motivates a young person to want to engage in any sort of activity. It is true, I know that a lot of the young people we’re thinking about, we see groups that are seemingly more pessimistic about the future than ever before. But to give them a little bit of credit at least, young people are highly perceptive to opportunities that increase their social status, and they always have been. This is evolutionary. There are reasons for why their brains are so perceptive to social status. It’s a survival technique. And what we also know, and I would love for you to talk about, is how some of our traditional pathways to success don’t feel as certain. It’s not a guarantee that success is gonna come through graduating high school, going to college, getting a degree, and getting a job. There’s a lot of differences here. So success oftentimes now is delivered through a different type of algorithm than what you learn in calculus. And so we’re not paying attention in calculus, and we’re instead paying attention to different types of algorithms. So an interesting trend there. But yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts as well.

0:08:14.6 Alexa Silverman: Absolutely. And what you said for K-12 students really rings true as well in the higher ed space. We talk a lot about the sort of vicious cycle or self-reinforcing cycle between academic readiness or academic health and mental readiness or mental health. So do you imagine, take your student who really succeeded in high school, let’s say they’re going into a STEM major, biology and chemistry were their favorite courses in high school, they always got A’s. Suddenly now they’re in college and that first biology or chem exam comes up and they didn’t do so well. That of course has an impact on their academics, on their GPA, but it also has an impact on where they’re at mentally. That feels bad. And that feels bad, and if you don’t have good coping skills, you haven’t developed those in the kind of social settings you’re talking about, you might spiral a little bit. And then maybe you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, you’re distracted, you’re engaging in unhealthy behaviors. You probably don’t do so great on the next exam either. You can’t focus, you can’t study, and then your mental health spirals even deeper. And so you could sort of see how these two things, we can’t really talk about them as separate conversations or separate parts of the student. They are all what we’re talking about when we talk about student readiness.

0:09:31.5 Margaret Sullivan: It is the whole student.

0:09:33.1 Alexa Silverman: And to that end, I actually wanted to double-click before we get into talking about what comes next after college, which is certainly a topic I have a lot of thoughts about. I wanted to double-click on what you mentioned around the pressure to meet students where they are. Because I think that’s something that comes up a lot when we talk about the pressures that K-12 instructors and leaders face. They feel like students come in and they’ve had this whole constellation of experiences before they get there based on how they were raised, based on the schooling they’ve had so far, the resources they have access to at home, their level of motivation and distraction and comfort with tech, all those things. I think sometimes in K-12 it feels like there’s a little bit of pressure to solve all of society’s problems and wave a magic wand and fix everything. And of course we know that’s not possible. And I think it would be helpful maybe for some of our higher ed listeners to get a little window into that. What are some of those pressures that K-12 leaders are under and how are they thinking about that?

0:10:35.5 Margaret Sullivan: Oh, so many, Alexa. I’m glad you phrased it like that because it is kind of its own little constraint that we’re operating under. And I don’t like to think about serving the whole student as a constraint. It really is an opportunity, and so many school districts are stepping up to it. But when you think about all the different variables at play, it is very, very easy to kind of write off some of the issues that we’re seeing in K-12 to, “Oh, well, we can’t do everyone’s laundry, so chronic absenteeism is always gonna be a goal that’s, or an issue that’s out of reach for us.” But it’s been really inspiring for some of the districts that we’ve been working with who have really found creative ways of serving students and really tackling some of those root causes to those really complex issues that I talked about earlier. We have districts who are talking about laundry services in the same sentence that they’re talking about attendance, and in the same sentence, they’re talking about foundational math and what they want teachers to be able to prioritize and focus on during class time, and who are the support systems around them to help support the rest of the student, making sure that we’re hitting as many variables as possible.

0:11:43.3 Margaret Sullivan: But when we think about the multitude of things that students bring with them to school, there’s something else I know that is not as often spoken about in education spaces, or at least in K-12 education spaces, because it’s a little bit, it’s not taboo, but it’s kind of hard to contextualize. And that is what do we rely on as the North Star for how we serve certain students? When it comes to academics especially, we have all of this academic research about how do we teach reading and what’s the best way to do that? Or we are navigating lots of conversations about how to teach math, what’s the best way to do that? And what we’re seeing is this broken pipeline of getting academic research and best practices directly into classrooms. There’s so many players along the way and so many different personality traits and preferences and people who are involved in making districts operate. They’re highly complex systems. But that pipeline of academic research to classroom is something that I think deeply about and I’m so deeply engaged in.

0:12:50.0 Margaret Sullivan: And it’s kind of its own constraint in of itself, is there’s so much out there about how we can best academically, at least, serve students. But there’s a lot of room for improvement, at least for K-12, to help all educators, whether they’re at the leadership level or the classroom level, understand what does it look like to follow what evidence says about how we teach students to read or how we engage students in mathematical discourse. And that’s a whole other podcast, I feel like. But when we think about the different constraints that districts are operating under, beyond just serving the whole student, while that’s an opportunity, there’s also another opportunity to really think about the research that we’re applying day to day.

0:13:33.1 Alexa Silverman: Well, we should record that podcast. So get back to me.

0:13:35.8 Margaret Sullivan: I’m coming back.

0:13:38.4 Alexa Silverman: But it’s interesting because I think in higher ed we often have this mindset of, look, K-12, they know how to teach students how to read. They know how to teach them to add numbers. They don’t know how to feed them and clothe them. Actually, it sounds like it’s kind of the other way around. So they’ve gotten a lot better at caring for the whole student, and now they’re trying to navigate all of these different approaches, all of which seem to have really good evidence behind them for how to teach.

0:14:05.4 Margaret Sullivan: And how do we get that into classrooms? That’s right.

0:14:07.9 Alexa Silverman: Super interesting. I did though, I did want to go back to the question that you posed a little bit earlier, which was about making that transition from school or college to what is next. And this is kind of a little sneak peek of some of the research I’m currently working on, because in the higher ed space, we are talking a lot about this really tough job market that recent grads are facing. And so there’s been some pretty shocking, I guess, reports. Burning Glass had a really great publication for one, that showed that the levels of unemployment and underemployment, so students who are in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree but they have a bachelor’s degree, that those levels are reaching possibly historic highs. Unemployment for recent college grads is outpacing unemployment for the whole population, partially because Margaret Driscoll’s doing a great job, they’re actually helping their students get into jobs, but also because a lot of different factors have made it really tough to make that transition from college to those college-degree careers. And there is also, I think there’s a good reason why people have been asking about whether college should always be the path to a career. There are great jobs out there and there are also great… There are a number of different paths I think that a learner can take to a great job, to lifelong fulfillment. Some of those involve college and some of them don’t.

0:15:39.6 Alexa Silverman: So in many ways, the role of K-12 is less to decide for a student what feels right, but more to make sure that we don’t shut off any of those paths prematurely. Especially when we think about, we don’t want to assume that a student’s background is their destiny, that that determines whether they should go to college and into a college-degree career. So I guess first of all, would you agree with that assessment that the role of K-12 leaders is then maximizing that opportunity and sort of optionality? And then if so, how is that showing up with the educators you work with? How are they rethinking what those educational and career pathways look like and how they help students navigate them?

0:16:24.4 Margaret Sullivan: Oh, Alexa, such an interesting way to think about this. The phrasing of maximizing opportunity I love. I also want to unpack this because I think this is a place of opportunity for K-12 to think differently about exposure to careers or putting opportunities in front of students. We are in a paradox of abundance right now is what we’re calling it, where we have so many opportunities that are technically available but reduced likelihood of payoff. We are not sure which pathway, whether college or not, is going to be right for a student’s interests and aptitudes. And there are so many variables at play. And what we’ve seen recently is that when K-12 really shoots for maximizing opportunities and putting as many options in front of students as possible, there’s this counterintuitive effect of that where it actually cognitive load just kind of explodes. And students, as they’re forming their own opinions and developing as to their understanding of what a career is and what their own interests and aptitudes are, it could actually backfire and they don’t have the navigation skills at some point to be able to make an informed choice amongst the myriad of choices that they have. And so in the work that I’ve been recently leading with K-12 district leaders is helping them understand what is our portfolio of choices right now, what are the different career pathways we’re exposing students to. How can we be more intentional about signaling to either high-demand, high-wage opportunities versus what is the importance of student interest and passion, and how much do we balance and weigh those in our conversations? But at the end of the day, we want students to be as informed as possible. We don’t want to romanticize any sort of career field. We want to make sure we’re speaking in words that students understand, but being very honest. Because the goal here is it’s not always maximizing as many options as possible, but being really intentional about what we can put in front of students that is gonna benefit them.

0:18:23.8 Margaret Sullivan: But at the same time, we don’t want to be tracking students, of course. This is the other side of the spectrum where you start to path students a little bit too rigidly, if that’s a word. And what comes out is we ultimately lack opportunity. We don’t have the off-ramps or the on-ramps for students to be able to say, “Oh, this is actually something I don’t like,” which is just as much of a valuable piece of learning as “This is something that I do like and I do want to do and I do feel good at.” So we’re trying to help districts understand what are the different ways we can focus both on student interest but also labor market demand as this two-sided matrix, and we’re working within that and not just one or the other. And a couple other ways that we’re trying to help districts understand how do you connect career experiences or career-focused experiences in a way that helps students see how one step leads to the next without tracking them so rigidly, if that makes sense. And we can talk about navigation skill building as well. I know you mentioned that earlier, but I feel like that really resonates with the work that you’ve been doing with colleges as well and how they’re navigating this.

0:18:30.9 Alexa Silverman: Yeah, it really does. Actually, the first thing that comes to mind as you were talking about that is one of our favorite practices here at EAB, which is experiential major maps. And our favorite version of this comes from our friends in Canada at Queen’s University. What experiential major maps are is you think about your classic degree map, which tells you what are the academic course requirements that you need to take in order to graduate. The experiential map says, “Alright, what if that is just one column of a map?” It’s a literal paper map that has four columns. And so in those other columns, you have things like career exploration, service learning, exploring your interests, your passions, building a network. And that’s kind of an overwhelming proposition for your average 18-year-old who is just getting started. They don’t even maybe know what major they want to choose, and they don’t necessarily know what are the things I should be doing in my first, second, third, fourth year to get to, by the end of those four years, I’ve chosen a major, I’ve gotten my degree, and I have at least some sense of what’s coming next. And so experiential major maps really help create that year-by-year plan that eventually should get a student to where they’re headed next. And they also, I think it’s if you flip the major map around and look at the back, they show you what are the careers that you can go into with this major.

0:20:59.6 Alexa Silverman: So I’ll use myself as an example here. My college major was linguistics, and that’s something that I’ve always been really fascinated by. It’s an incredibly interesting field, one where there’s actually a lot of really interesting stuff going on right now with all the opportunities provided by AI and automation. But I don’t work as a linguist. And being able to see that connection between the experience I had, the skills I developed in college, and I could go on to do things like research best practice strategies in higher ed, that’s also what major maps help students do. So that’s how we’re kind of thinking about it in college, and it makes sense. As we go from children to young adults, our brains are getting a little better at making independent decisions, at being leaders. Again, I’m kind of a mile wide and an inch deep here, but I’m curious if there are any best practices or cool ideas you would point to in the K-12 space for how leaders are helping students with, like you said, that navigational piece.

0:22:05.4 Margaret Sullivan: Yes, Alexa, when you were talking about those major maps, it reminds me of a practice that we’ve been talking about with our district partners, our K-12 district partners, about what is the purpose of doing a four-year plan with high school students where putting something on paper is not going to be what gets them to take action and actually make a decision about their next step. Their navigation skills that they need at a moment’s notice when they suddenly decide, “Oh, this field, this nursing program, this goal that I have is actually not for me anymore,” or “Oh, I’ve heard about something different. Now that I like this other thing, what do I do? Who do I talk to? Who can help me understand?” are skills that young people don’t come pre-baked with, and it takes repetition. It takes reps in what we call metacognition and social navigation. And so metacognition, that ability to stop and notice what you believe and what you’ve learned and what you think you can do next based off of what you learned, is something that we are hoping districts can arm more people in the district to support students in building metacognitive practices more than just counselors already do.

0:23:15.0 Margaret Sullivan: We know that school counselors are deeply engaged in some of this skill building just in social-emotional learning programs or in their advising meetings with students. But we’re excited to get districts to stand up some teacher training programs on navigation skills, whether it’s through industry-based advisory cohorts where we’re talking about career industries at least three times a week with these groups of students and talking about what we’ve learned about it, how our thoughts and feelings about it have changed, how different opportunities are being put in front of us, and really talking about this as experiences happen as often as possible and not just once a year in a counseling conversation. So building metacognitive practice time and time again across a student’s lifetime, or a student’s life from K-12, is gonna be one of the most powerful things that we can help more people in a district do than just the counselor who is already highly invested in that. And then social navigation as well. We’re connecting students to those who are already working in a current field, especially if it’s a highly opaque field. We hear that often about the healthcare field and then public policy or law, which lots of students are interested in. But depending on where they live, it could be very opaque about what it actually means to go into medicine or to do a residency or to go to law school versus be a paralegal versus go into public policy or government work.

0:24:38.7 Margaret Sullivan: There’s lots of kind of opaque vocabulary or experiences that take some social capital to understand. And how do we help districts get more connected to industry professionals who can help demystify some of that for students? And so those two distinct skills, that metacognitive practice and social navigation, is something we’re helping districts get a little bit more intentional about how often we’re helping students develop that.

0:25:02.5 Alexa Silverman: Yeah, really cool to hear about. Thank you. And I think all those things are setting those students up for success when they do get to whatever’s next, whether that be college or something else. But while we are on nerdy brain science things, I think you mentioned earlier that you’ve also seen K-12 institutions start to embed more about what we know about how people learn into how they’re teaching math and English. And I think our higher ed listeners will be really intrigued to hear what the front-of-the-boat districts are doing there because, again, they’re seeing these readiness challenges in college. So how are we addressing that on the K-12 front?

0:25:40.2 Margaret Sullivan: Yeah, if we want to tackle reading first, I know there’s been lots of conversation about what does science say about how students learn to read, especially in those early years, K-2. What are the foundations or building blocks of reading? Lots of good research out there, lots of districts or states even that are mandating adopting science-based reading curricula. And there’s a lot that’s going well, and there’s a lot that we expected to be a little bit rocky when it comes to implementation and how it looks for a teacher to change their practice. And it takes a little while for some of this to trickle down into classrooms. But if you think about what’s going on in the reading world and you try and make a direct comparison to the math world, you’ll find yourself in kind of a strange world, a strange place over there when you make comparing what does it take to learn to read to what does it take to learn to do math. But I do want to add some comfort there that there are a lot of similarities that I do hope districts take to heart and understand. When it comes to learning to read, there are very specific building blocks of skills, discrete skills that you need in order to be able to comprehend a word, to decode a word, and then to be able to read more complex texts over time. In math, there are specific discrete skills that you need to be able to do higher-order math problems, understand more complex ideas or concepts later on.

0:26:58.6 Margaret Sullivan: And what we see front-of-the-boat districts doing might be kind of the opposite of what you might be hearing in the news. If the news is focused on a lot of this experiential learning or real-world relevancy, which is very important, and I’m not trying to downplay that, but some of our most high-performing districts are making sure that they are protecting those early basic skills in the math classroom and getting really intentional about helping teachers protect time for things like fluency with early math facts or multiple practice opportunities for some of those tougher skills like double-digit subtraction with regrouping, and being really intentional about how you teach that and then protecting time to do it. As well as keeping that focus, our eyes are set on the more complex thinking, computational thinking, and that will come. But it’s kind of one of those go slow to go fast moments in K-12 where there is a balance, and it’s about choosing the right instructional approach at the right time. And so for math, if we’re looking at this from the learning science lens, it’s really about controlling the working memory of your students and making sure that you’re just giving them the tasks that fit within the working memory they currently have. And you have to be able to put things like basic facts and basic skills into your long-term memory in order for your working memory to be able to process some of the higher-order thinking, which is our goal ultimately, is to get students to advanced mathematics. That learning process of going from being a novice to being able to do advanced math is something that will always be really important as brain development and grit and resiliency and how to understand how you learn as a person is a journey we want all students to take.

0:28:47.1 Margaret Sullivan: So if we have a conversation about the importance of algebra or calculus, I’m happy to get into that as well. But I’ve always believed that all students are capable. If we look at how students learn, everyone can. It’s just a matter of understanding the variables at play and giving them the type of instruction that they’re ready for.

0:29:05.1 Alexa Silverman: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You’ve got to build that strong foundation first. You alluded a little bit to the social, emotional, motivation, and confidence side of this. And so maybe you’re gonna tell me the answer to the question is exactly what I just said. But how are school districts now thinking about shoring up that more mental side of student success and readiness?

0:29:30.5 Margaret Sullivan: Yeah, of helping students feel successful in the classroom. So we think about what motivates a student to want to come to school. I think we think of four things, and I want to make sure I get this right: safe, supported, connected, and engaged. So we have to make sure students feel safe. We have to make sure it’s not just physical safety, but psychological safety. So we’re talking to teachers about, are we making sure that all students feel like they can participate in a classroom activity? Do we notice any students who are frequently on the fringe of an activity? Supported: every student has one adult in the building who knows them, knows their name, knows where their house is, what neighborhood they’re coming from, and what’s going on at home, and someone that they can talk to if they need someone to talk to. So safe, supported, connected: that they actually have some sort of activity that they’re involved in beyond just going to class every day, that they’ve been invited to a certain group, that they’ve been invited to something going on that is relevant and of interest to them is another thing.

0:30:30.6 Margaret Sullivan: And then finally, let’s see, the last one. Alexa, can you remind me of the fourth one? Safe, supported, connected, and engaged. So that means if we’re looking at what motivates someone to want to engage in something, it’s a very, very complex conversation. But something I alluded to before was that adolescents specifically are highly motivated by social status. And you can compare that to being engaged and motivated in things like experiential or real-world learning or work-based learning. It’s highly motivated to feel like you’re making a difference and doing something of value for somebody else. You look at some studies of two different brains: one of an adolescent who is kind of being nagged by their mom and an adolescent who is being praised for helping somebody else. And the one brain will look like a typical teen, and they’re gonna look like they’re angry, and they’re gonna look like they’re shutting down. And the other one is gonna look like an adult. Their brain will actually function like an adult where they’re making long-term plans and they’re thinking about the future. And it just shows that adolescents are capable of thinking like adults if they’re given that opportunity to engage in something that they know is gonna be of value to the world around them or to the people that they care about. And so if we kind of understand that about young people, there’s so much opportunity that we can take about the policy that we make and the practices we choose to implement.

0:31:48.3 Alexa Silverman: Love that. And I think such a great high note to wrap up on. So first of all, I want to thank you again for joining me on the podcast today, sharing your insights and the research you’ve been working on. It is really cool. I wish we had two hours to talk about this. But before we go, what’s one thing that you’d really like our listeners to take away from this discussion, maybe one piece of advice you’d share?

0:32:15.1 Margaret Sullivan: I think that would be that today’s young people are not cognitively different from any other young person at any other point in time. Physiologically, their brains are the same. Their brains are not wired differently per se. It is the environment in which they are living and learning that has completely changed. So success used to be predictable from fewer places, but now we’re seeing the traditional formula has shifted. Value of college is being questioned. Value of what are specific other professions that will provide me success or even social status in my group. That’s all changing. And young people are responding to that in any other way an adolescent brain would, which is reaching for what society now rewards. So I want leaders to know that if you understand the world in which students are living in and operating in, and you take time to learn about how adolescents respond to their environments, you’ll be steps ahead with whatever change you decide to make next. And it’s all about responding to the variables at play. It’s a very humbling exercise when you think about it.

0:33:21.9 Alexa Silverman: Yeah, I love that. And at the same time, we’re not saying this is Millennials are from Mars, Gen Z is from Jupiter. Students are still students. We don’t have to throw out everything we know to meet them where they’re at and to serve them in what they need. So, again, really appreciate you taking the time today. Loved getting into the crunchy brain science of it all, and can’t wait to hear where your research is headed next.

0:33:46.9 Margaret Sullivan: Thank you, Alexa, and you as well. This has been so fun. Thanks for having me.

0:33:50.4 Alexa Silverman: Absolutely.

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