From Teacher to Legend: How Esther Wojcicki Changed Learning

You empower students by giving them the opportunity to try something they're interested in and believing in them. Because when you believe in them and trust them, they believe in themselves. Our Bay Area Innovator today is Esther Wojcicki, an award-winning educator, journalist, and best-selling author of How to Raise Successful People. Her teaching philosophy has shaped classrooms nationwide and influenced some of Silicon Valley's most iconic figures. In this episode, Esther shares her vision of education, the principles behind her parenting philosophy, and her perspective on how social media impacts learning and creativity. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Esther, welcome to our program. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for being here. So, you're a legend in the Bay Area in education. You went to San Jose State, which is my alma mater, and you also taught English and journalism at Palo Alto High School. Now, just those two elements, they're not that much out of the ordinary. Other than the fact that you built the most successful journalism program in the United States, you became the top teacher in California, you wrote a best-selling book, and you're regarded often as the best parent and educator in the country. So, please tell us a little bit about the elements in education that, you know, we can't talk all day about it, but just some of the elements that you implemented through your teaching. Thank you for the questions. Those are very interesting and helpful. So, I implemented this program at Palo Alto High School, and it started in 1984. And in the beginning, it was a traditional journalism program where students came to class and sat on their desks and listened to me, the teacher, and read a book and then took tests. Just like any other class. And then I realized about six months into the program, after I'd just been hired, that not only were the kids not learning anything, but they were bored, and so was I. I was really bored. It just wasn't exciting. And so I, basically, I got rid of the book and put it back in the book room. And then I decided the most effective way for them to learn to be journalists was to read a real newspaper. So I got some real newspapers. You know how they give free newspapers away in those stands? Yes. I took all of them and handed them out in class. And the kids loved it. They loved reading the newspaper. Would you tell them what to look for or just any particular story? I taught the different writing styles by having them read the paper. So if they read on page one, they were reading news. The question is, how do you write news? So these were good models for how to write news. So then I went over each story and explained how it was written, and then they would copy that style and write their own story. And they thought that was great. They loved it. So then I did that with all the different writing styles, like features and opinion, how to write opinion pieces, how to write sports, how to write news, pretty much everything that a newspaper carries. They were excited, and I was excited, because every day we were reading what was new in the world. It's the newspaper, right? And so word got out in the school, I didn't advertise, that this was a fun program. So next year, the first number, I had about 19 kids in the first year. The next year, it doubled, and I didn't do anything. I just told their friends. This is again in Palo Alto High School. This is Palo Alto High School, right. This is in the 1980s. And every year after the first one, it doubled. And the other reason I think the kids came to the program and liked it was because I always let them revise. So if they did a bad job in writing their article, I was like, so what, no problem, just do it again. And so they revised, and kids loved to revise, because then they could get an A. So everybody in the class could get an A if they revised. That was it. So it became a very popular program. By the end of the 1980s, 1989, I already couldn't fit into my classroom. It was so big. So in the 1990s, they actually moved me into another facility, because the program was too big. And they liked the fact that so many students were taking the class, because when you're planning the program for a whole high school, it's nice to have big classes, because they offset the smaller classes, since you have to have a class average. So it continued to grow. By 1996, it already had switched from a tabloid size, which is small, to a full-size newspaper with two sections. Oh, you mean this is the publication that the students were doing together. That the students were doing. It already grew. It continued to grow all through the 1990s until 2000, when at that point I had 100 kids, and I said, this is too money, it's too big. It's a good problem to have to share. I know. I was like, can I hire another teacher? And administrations are always in the process of saving money. So they're like, no, we can't hire another teacher. This is too expensive. But at that point, I started another publication within the same class, a magazine called Verde, that I pulled about 25 students to work on that. Does it mean green in Spanish? It means green in Spanish. And the reason we picked the name Verde is the school colors are green and white. So it seemed logical, and also there's Veritas, which is kind of truth. So we published four of those magazines. All the kids loved the magazines. We submitted those magazines to Columbia University, has a press association where they evaluate publications around the country. And so we won first place in the country with this magazine. The administration and the school board were really excited about this. So they agreed to allow us to hire another teacher. After all that, finally it happened. Because they like positive publicity, and this was really positive. That's awesome. So that's how it grew. And to make a long story shorter, from 2000 to 2012, every two years, I started another publication. So today, in Palo Alto, at the Media Arts Center, there are 14 magazines, one newspaper, a television program that is every day, podcasting, and video production. Kids make movies. It's still going on right now. It's not only still going on, there's now hundreds of kids in the program and four other teachers. It's the largest media program in the United States. That's fantastic. And I would assume you gave students feedback and you worked with them. Oh, of course. Every day they got feedback. If they wrote something, I just always gave feedback. They kept getting feedback until it was right, and then they could publish. Well, let me tell you a story I went through. I went to high school in Cleveland, Ohio. This is right after coming from Romania. That's where I grew up. There was a school newspaper, and I took that class, journalism. I just came from Romania. Imagine how my English was. The class project was to do an article, a story, a news story. So I did it. I turned it in. I didn't feel that great about it, but I did turn it in. I finished it. Then a month later, I see it in that school newspaper, as the others were. Then I read the story, and I see my name there in my story, but it was completely different. It was rewritten in a way that I almost, who wrote this? It's just a different story. The point is that I didn't really get feedback. It's just like, yeah, your story is horrible. We'll just redo it, and that's it, right? So the feedback and working with the students, I think, is crucial. The feedback is crucial because I had this philosophy because kids would say, I don't know how to do this. I've never done it before. My philosophy was just do it because then you can revise. Do it quickly, and then revise until it gets to be perfect. It sort of translated into this philosophy in Silicon Valley, which was basically do it, and then it's fail fast. I never said fail to my students. I said revise, make it better, and it worked. They all learned to write. I want to talk about some of the elements that you worked on with the students, and one is empowerment. This is something that you emphasized. Please tell us about how you empower students. What are the steps, or how do you go through this process? I think it's very important. You empower students by giving them the opportunity to try something they're interested in and believing in them because when you believe in them and trust them, they believe in themselves. The problem with the school system is they don't believe in the kids. As a matter of fact, they're very suspicious. They think you're going to cheat. There's zero trust. The school doesn't trust you, the teachers don't trust you, and the rules of the school indicate that you aren't trustworthy. You have to go to the bathroom? Oh, let's give you a pass with the time on it. Then you come back and we'll compare the times. You didn't go across the street and get something to eat. You went to the bathroom. I never did that. I was like, you have to go to the bathroom? Well, just go. How did you deal with the students who potentially would take advantage of that and indeed do something else or just take advantage of the trust? Actually, one of the ways that I did that is build a community so the kids are all part of the community. You trust them. They all work together. You give them positions of authority and responsibility. So when there's a lot of community feeling and sentiment, kids don't feel like they want to violate that sense of community. They all want to belong. I try to, even if there are kids that violate it, I would talk to them individually, not embarrass them, and talk to them about what they did that might not have been right and how they can fix it and make it better and so forth. So I think I had a reputation of being kind. So kids weren't afraid of me because a lot of kids are afraid of teachers. Okay, another topic that I want to talk to you about is about taking risks. Yes. I think you encourage kids. You have to take risks sometimes. Tell us about how do you balance that? How do you teach how to take relatively reasonable risks or how do you go through that process? So if you are creative, you want kids to be creative and come up with new ideas and take a risk, that means that you're vulnerable. So what happens when a kid is vulnerable? If you humiliate them when they make a mistake, well, then no one wants to take a risk. And so my theory was if you make a mistake, no problem. We all make mistakes. I use mistakes as learning opportunities. And actually, if you know how to do it all, you don't belong in school. You can be the teacher or you can graduate. But everybody should have the opportunity to be creative, to make mistakes, to fail, and to revise. And so I think that's how I encouraged kids to take a risk and be interested and innovative. I allowed students to come up with their own ideas for stories, their own ideas later on. They created additional publications. What's the publication about? Why do you want to have another publication? Don't we have enough publications? And then the big question was, of course, who's going to pay for it? How are we going to do this? Because schools only pay my salary. They don't pay for all the printing costs. So I had to also teach kids how to set up a business, how to raise money, how to sell advertising. If they didn't sell enough advertising, well, I guess you're not publishing this month. Either you know how to do it or you don't. So it was an operation that was fully supportive itself. It's self-supporting. Yeah. Wow. So I was teaching them how to set up a business more than anything and then also giving them the opportunity to fail and not to be embarrassed by it. I think the reason that most people are afraid to take a risk is they're afraid to fail and to be embarrassed. Now, I also heard you talk about if we only follow what the teacher says or we only follow the instructions, we're like sheep, you know. That's right. Following, you know, the shepherd. So, again, how do you balance? Because you have to respect the teacher. You have to follow the teacher's instructions and you have to do what the topic is. But how do you balance going beyond that? I think what you do, so most of the teachers that don't follow what I'm doing are afraid that if they give the kids any control that it will be out of control. The whole class will be chaos. So I came up with this philosophy that worked and it was let the kids make the rules for the class at the beginning of the school year. So every school year, because kids change, you don't want to have last year's rules functioning this year. So every year the kids spent the first part of the school month creating rules that worked for their class, talking about which publications they liked, what they wanted to do, what kind of articles they wanted. So they basically set up the class themselves within a structure that I helped provide. So it gave them the opportunity to be creative. And empowered. And so I gave them the opportunity to come up with what rules do you think we should have for cell phones. You all have cell phones. You can spend your whole day looking at your phone, but you're here in class. Do you want to be on your phone or do you want to be in class with your friends? And so they came up with the rules. So if they come up with the rules, they follow them. They don't follow the rules that I come up with, which is normal, right? That's amazing. And I also heard that you were not necessarily telling them what to do or giving them answers, but once in a while at the right time you would drop a hint. I would drop a lot of hints. A lot of hints. I would let them continue to do something which I personally didn't think I would ever do. But sometimes those things actually worked out. I remember one of the magazines they wanted to create was a magazine that I thought would just fail. It was a crazy idea. It was a creative magazine where they were teaching kids how to cook, how to braid your hair, how to do all these things that I thought, I don't know, we're spending all this money producing this magazine and probably no one is going to look at it. I was wrong. The whole school wanted to look at it. So you have to trust them because it's their generation, right? It's not my generation. What's interesting to them, give them that opportunity. And within a typical classroom, give kids an opportunity to be creative. You can't learn to be creative by watching someone else do it. You have to do it yourself. It's kind of like swimming. We would all be Olympic swimmers if we just learned by watching the Olympics. You have to jump in the pool and flounder around and figure out how to swim and practice. What would you say is the biggest thing that's wrong with education right now in public schools in the United States or in California? I think the biggest thing is too much control of the students without giving them any opportunity to have input. I would suggest for most schools, no one wants to give up total control, but if they could just let the kids control a certain portion of the day. So I've come up with this new idea. I used to call it peer-to-peer project-based learning, but everybody just kind of yawned when they heard that. They said, oh, well, whatever. So now I came up with a new name that's the same thing, entrepreneurial training. Everybody wants their kid to be an entrepreneur, and the other school, you're going to train kids to be entrepreneurs. Oh, my God, that's so exciting. And it's exactly the same thing, peer-to-peer project-based. The kids come up with a project. They work with other kids, and they produce whatever it is they want to produce. So entrepreneurial training. I think every school in the United States, or actually worldwide, should have 20% of the time devoted to entrepreneurial training. One thing I realized is that Google employees get to spend 20% of their time on whatever project they want to work on. That's right. It sounds like the same idea. It's the same principle. Speaking of Google, do you know what a very famous 20% project was at Google? No. Gmail. Can you imagine what would the world do without Gmail? It was a 20% project. Wow. It was not part of the company's original plan. I feel no discussion on education and technology, in that sense, would be complete without the advances of AI that happen these days. And I want to ask you about that. I want to ask you, where are we going with this? First, I just want to talk to you about a couple of examples. The calculator. The most basic advancing technology in education that one can think of. Calculator, of course, is great. It's very quick to come up with a number that you're calculating. But when I was a kid, we didn't have calculators, so I had to calculate numbers. With a slide rule? No, just on paper. Oh, okay. Just on paper. So what happened is, at least I would always have a sense of what the number should be. If I have two three-digit numbers I'm multiplying, I'm going to know what the result approximately should be, right? Right. So I feel the problem with calculators is you can be like two digits off. Yes. If you do it in your mind, and you don't know it. Yes. Because you're so dependent on the calculator. Now there's the most basic example. There's the GPS, which I always give the example. Without the GPS, I can go to Lake Tahoe to this cabin I knew, just go straight there on Highway 80 or whatever, right? Now I'm afraid to go to Milpitas without a GPS because I'm going to get lost, I feel. Yes. And I panic if I don't have it. So how do you feel AI and ChatGPT and all these things are working with education? So first of all, let's talk about the calculator. Yes. So it came out in the 1980s. All the schools banned it. It was banned for 10 years. If you brought a calculator to school, you were expelled. Just thought you should know that. As you can see, schools have changed their mind. I went to elementary school in Romania, so I wasn't here. Well, that's what happened. And also you can see that people still learn to do math. So they don't use calculators in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th grade, whatever. But as kids get older, they get opportunity to learn how to use a calculator. And calculators are even in your phone. Everybody has a phone. So that was okay. It seems to have worked out. Okay, now with ChatGPT and AI and all that. So they're really worried that kids are not going to learn to write because ChatGPT does all the writing for them. Most teachers, and there's all kinds of tools to detect if it's written by ChatGPT. Most teachers can figure out whether or not the student wrote the paper or whether ChatGPT wrote the paper. It's actually because kids write the way they speak. Teachers, you can hear it. And so if all of a sudden the kid turns in a paper that looks like it's from the encyclopedia, well, there's a lot of suspicion. It's like maybe you didn't write this one. So if you teach this to kids and give them the opportunity to revise over and over again, they won't cheat. I think the reason they cheat is they just have one shot at making an A. And so since they only have one shot, they're like, I'm going to cheat. I want that A. But if it doesn't matter, then... And I think the C is part of T.R.I.C., the collaboration is part of T.R.I.C., which is something that you brought upon. Tell us about that. So T.R.I.C. is my acronym that's in my book that I used, and it stands for Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. So this is what I did in my classes and what I did with my children, and I think it belongs in all human interaction. And so the C is collaboration. And one of the major problems in the United States today is loneliness. So most people are lonely. I mean, kids are lonely. Everybody's lonely. And so if they have to work together on a project, you're not lonely. If you work individually, it's like horses in a race. It's everybody individual for themselves. That's a sense of loneliness and competitiveness. If I look around Silicon Valley, the most successful companies focus on collaboration. Everybody works in teams. Nobody really works alone. So why aren't we teaching kids to work collaboratively so they're prepared for the real world? I mean, even if you work in a company where you work, so to speak, by yourself, you're not really by yourself. You're part of a company, part of a team. Let's follow up on the loneliness part. Do you think that happens more now than decades ago, and why is that? Why are people or kids more lonely today than before? They're more lonely today. People are lonelier today because they're getting all their social needs met by their phone. And so instead of talking to their neighbor and saying, oh, so what happened in the neighborhood? Or what are you doing? What are you thinking? They talk to their phone. They don't talk. They look at their phone. So you go into a restaurant and you see people sitting at a table, getting ready to have a meal on their phone. Like, why did they come to the restaurant if they're going to be on their phone? I mean, I don't know. It's a little crazy. So I think that's the reason is that people are getting their social needs met. Not only are they getting their social needs met, they're addicted to the phone. And so they spend a lot of time looking at it instead of talking to other people. So I'd like to follow up on the social media phenomenon that makes people lonely and there's other issues with AI. Which one do you think is worse? Well, I think social media is probably worse because they've got these addictive qualities on TikTok and Instagram. And so people are just scrolling through one after another after another. They don't even realize. It keeps you hooked. So one of the things I would teach in school to all kids is the addiction quality of social media so they're aware of it. So most people aren't aware that they're addicted. And then also it's kind of crazy. I saw these articles about would you rather have a live girlfriend or would you rather have a bot that's your girlfriend? It's like who wants to have a relationship with a computer or a bot? And they're thinking about for old people that it might be lonely. Bots for old people? I mean, we're all human. We want to interact with other humans. We don't want to interact with a tech device or a bot or something like that. And I think if we meet some of those needs with technology, then we don't look outside that need and try to solve it in another way. We're addicted to the phone. I think older people, if they can be more open about volunteering and helping with young kids, that would be helpful for the schools, for the playgrounds, for everybody instead of worrying about interacting with bots. Now my next question is you've had an amazing career. You have three kids that have amazing careers. How would you define success in the simplest sense of the word for a student or for someone who grows up? I think it is having a project or a life goal that has a positive impact on the world in some way. And so whatever it is that you're working on, it can be gardening, it can be sales, it can be inventions, whatever. You're part of the human race and you want to do something in the world that's going to make the lives of other people better. So success is when you succeed in doing that. Whatever it is, something that's beneficial to humankind. I mean, just like I have a great gardener around my house. I can't do all the stuff. It's too heavy for me. But he's doing a great service to the whole neighborhood. Looks beautiful, thanks to him. Why would you say the Silicon Valley is such a hub for technology? It's such a unique place in the United States. What makes it unique? That's a great question. What makes it unique is the culture. And the culture is basically a lot of what came out of my program. It's being willing to take a risk and not being ashamed of making a mistake. So in other parts of the world, you do something, you start a company, you start a project, and you fail. And then you feel humiliated. You're afraid to do it again. Where the culture of Silicon Valley is basically just do it. And do it quickly. And then if you fail, so you fail fast. But then you revise. So it's all part of this culture that I had in the classroom. What I would like to find out is what motivates you, or what drove you to create the programs and to always think how to improve students' experiences and education? What was the factor that made you strive to do what you accomplished? Well, I was born in New York City. But both of my parents were immigrants. My mother was from Siberia. Krasnoyarsk. I actually know where that is. Oh, and my father was from the Ukraine. You know, Chernivtsi. We had no money. First they were poor as immigrants, but then also my father was an artist. Which I think, you know, if you're Pablo Picasso, you can make a good living. But he was not able to make a very good living. And so I learned early on that it's important to be able to do something that is valuable to other people and to make the world better. And I also learned early on, and I was 10 years old at the time, that I realized that the most important thing that I could do was to be informed and know as much as I could about the world. And that made a huge difference to me personally. But then I also realized it should be something to help everybody else. Because if you rely on other people for information, it could be incorrect information. You should be able to understand a lot more of the world so you can make your own decisions to make the world better. So I just wanted to, as a child, my goal was to change the school system. Can you imagine? That was because I had a not so great elementary school experience. In Los Angeles public schools in the 1950s, children that didn't behave properly were actually physically hit. As a matter of fact, they sent you to the principal's office and the principal would take a paddle that was about this long and whack you with the paddle on your butt. And the teacher would, if you did something wrong, they could take a ruler and hit you across the knuckles. We had that. You had that too? Yes. It was fairly common, unfortunately. So I got into a lot of trouble because I had some friends that needed help doing the work they were doing and I helped them. So then I got sent to the office to get spanked. And then on other occasions I was actually put under a teacher's desk for a few hours so that I wouldn't talk to the other students. I mean, while I was sitting there under that desk, I said to myself, when I grow up, I'm going to change school. Now, given that experience you had and given the fact that Palo Alto High School, Gunn High School, is probably one of the premier high schools in the country, how would your system or your education advice work in the public schools that are in less fortunate areas, like L.A. or San Jose or San Francisco or whatever? Do you think you would have a different approach or the same approach would work in public schools? I think the approach would work. It would just take a little bit longer to implement. Because I was teaching in the 9th through the 12th grade. When you get kids in the 9th grade, they've already been educated for 8 grades, right, 8 years. And they're used to a certain type of teaching. And they're used to the teacher not trusting you at all. And so it takes time to reverse that and time to change the way kids think about school and about the class and about you, the teacher. So an elementary school, actually, in poorer areas, I know they try to do some of the things I talk about. But I think teachers are told that the best thing they can do is have complete class control. So the ideal class is you walk by the classroom and you see all the children sitting quietly doing the same thing at the same time. Individually, not in groups. That's their ultimate vision. That's the vision. They're all working at their desk. The project is the same, but there's no collaboration. Esther, again, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. You've revolutionized in so many ways education. Thank you for being on our show. Oh, well, it's a pleasure. Thank you for your good questions. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.