A crisis of mattering

A conversation with Angela Maiers

Before she was a keynote speaker, viral Ted-Talker, lecturer, and author, Angela Maiers was a classroom teacher. She found that her kindergartners needed to be recognized and valued before they could learn from her. They needed to know that they mattered to the adults around them, including their teachers. The lessons that she learned from her students prompted her to explore the importance of mattering.

She discovered that being valued is not a socioemotional or mental health issue. It is rooted in biology. “It’s our first instinct as infants,” she says. Newborn babies search for faces to show them they exist. “It’s called the mattering reflex.”

Schools have been focusing on student engagement during and after the pandemic, especially in light of widespread issues with student absenteeism. When schools talk about student motivation, they tend to focus on curriculum, programs, and mental health interventions. However, Maiers says, students who don’t see themselves as valuable and who don’t believe anyone cares about them won’t engage and won’t respond to these interventions or programs.

Maiers has traveled to many schools and school districts, holding workshops and developing materials for teachers  on the necessity of mattering. She has helped schools set up Genius Hours for their students, modeled after Google’s 20% time, where employees could take one day per week to work on a passion project.

Maiers has written four books on the concept of mattering and unleashing individual genius in students, including Genius Matters and Classroom Habitudes.

Maiers spoke with Phi Delta Kappan about what schools get wrong about student motivation, how mattering interventions take little time but yield big results, and what gives her hope.

PHI DELTA KAPPAN: During and after the pandemic, schools are paying more attention to student mental health and social-emotional learning, but it seems as though they are missing the mark with student motivation and engagement. What is happening?

MAIERS: I hate using the word crisis, but we are in a crisis of mattering, and it affects every aspect of our life, of our work, and of our world. And I think that we’re not naming the problem. We’re naming associated outcomes or hopeful outcomes, and not naming the actual problem that underlies all of it. And that is mattering.

It’s a biological fact that we’re driven to matter. It’s our first instinct as infants. Before we need food, before we need hugs, we are seeking someone who knows that we’ve arrived in the world. Newborns are looking to know that they are recognized and welcomed into the world. And from that moment on, that is our quest: to matter.

What really brought mattering to the forefront for me was starting my teaching career 30 years ago with kindergarten. Five-year-olds demand that mattering is the agenda. First, we matter and then you get to do anything else with us. Young kids need attention, they need to be noticed, they need to be valued, and they need to contribute. With five-year-olds, if you were off your game of noticing on that day, they will let you know that this isn’t just a little thing for them.

We don’t have a bullying problem. We don’t have an XYZ problem. We have a mattering problem. Kids don’t think they matter.

I’ve taught everything from preschool to graduate school. I started seeing this significant difference in culture and climate and performance as early as 2nd and 3rd grade. Kids were hiding and holding in and doubting themselves and experiencing high levels of stress. I thought, we don’t have a bullying problem. We don’t have an XYZ problem. We have a mattering problem. Kids don’t think they matter.

You don’t have to be a kindergarten teacher to know that when you greet somebody at the door, when you say hi to them, when you use their name, when your eyes light up, they change right in front of you regardless of what they felt like when they came in.

This is everything. This is everything for every human being. So that’s what sent me on this journey.

KAPPAN: Do educators have a misconception about what helps with student motivation?

MAIERS: It’s helpful to position mattering as a DNA-level need. It is a biological instinct. It drives us, influences us, and shapes us in the same way that food, water, shelter, and air do. We are not fully thriving human beings when our basic needs are not met. We have to position mattering in that category. Can you imagine having a social-emotional learning program on water and good school lunches? It would seem ridiculous.

I use football as an example: No matter how great your coaches, no matter how great the team is, no matter how great the equipment is, if your players are starving, if they haven’t slept for three days, if they are dehydrated, they’re going to fall flat on the field. That is what’s happening when people believe they don’t matter. We are not getting to the DNA-level root if we don’t recognize what we see as a consequence of mattering, whether it’s engagement or its disengagement or everything in between. So, we have to look at how we create that feeling of mattering and ensure that every single day, they get it. We need to start with a mindset that mattering isn’t a feeling. It’s not an event, and it’s not just for a certain group of people. Someone living on the street needs to matter as much as somebody working on Wall Street making $5 million. Whether it’s a five-year-old or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you don’t matter less just like you don’t need less water or food or shelter. It’s part of the human condition. When we understand this, we don’t throw on surface-level Band-Aid programs that don’t get to the heart of changing someone’s biology. People who know that they matter show up differently in the world in every way: physically, emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally. If you want a positive outcome, whether it’s for your superintendent, for your parents, for your five-year-olds, then you have to make sure that these essential needs are met.

It seems so simple, but it isn’t, because common sense is not common practice. And that’s probably the biggest frustration I have. I could understand if I was talking about trauma or addiction or other things that the average person is not equipped to handle on their own. But mattering is the most malleable of all conditions, and we can do something about it. That is what is so exciting. It takes seconds, and it hardly costs anything. But it requires an awareness and a different knowledge of what the problem is and how the solution impacts the problem.

KAPPAN: How do classroom teachers and school administrators and staff help students believe that they matter?

MAIERS: You can’t force someone to matter. You can create the conditions for them to come to that conclusion, but they have to believe they have value. Look at behaviors that communicate to another person that they have value to you. The first is your presence. If somebody walks in and sees you, and you do nothing, you don’t look at them, you stay on your phone, you don’t smile, you don’t even acknowledge that they exist, you render them invisible. Or they see that someone else was noticed and they weren’t noticed. This is really detrimental. They will think, “Well, I’m not valuable enough to even be noticed.”

The No. 1 thing I hear from kids is “no one notices me, or no one would care if I didn’t show up.” This is not bashing any adult or any person because mattering is based on a scale of perception. So if you asked 100 kids and 80 of them said, “I go to school, and I feel invisible. I feel ignored. I feel marginalized.” You asked 100 adults who teach them or love them, and they would all say, “100% absolutely I love this child and I noticed them.” But the perception is their reality.

Every single person is standing outside their office, their cubicle, their classroom waiting for somebody to notice them. That is not ego; that is DNA.

The first thing we should be doing is making a conscious effort to be present for whatever human being is in our presence, whether that’s a five-year-old or the secretary of school. You don’t have to sit and listen to all their trauma. But when people feel they are not acknowledged as a human being, that is punishment at a DNA-level for a human being. And it’s the foundation of our dignity. That is why five-year-olds showed up before school in my classroom and waited outside the door until I saw each and every one of them, until I looked at them, said their name, and noticed something about them. Every single person is a five-year-old. Every single person is standing outside their office, their cubicle, their classroom waiting for somebody to notice them. That is not ego; that is DNA. So that’s the first condition.

The second thing is giving everyone the knowledge that you not only have value, but that you add value. To be needed is the deepest driver of human behavior. We were created to make a contribution. Think about what school is. School isn’t a place where we learn to make bold, courageous, creative, unique contributions and have them celebrated. School is a place of consumption and correctness. Conformity and formality are celebrated. We see this in the hallways, where everybody’s paper looks the same. We were meant to make an impact. I told my kids that there’s someone else in the room who needs exactly what you have. That is why show-and-tell was the most significant part of my kindergarten classroom. Five-year-olds learned quickly that the goal of show-and-tell wasn’t to outdo what is in someone else’s backpack. It was for somebody to meet you at recess and say, “tell me more,” because that validated that you have something in your backpack that someone else in the room needs. There is nothing more motivating. To be needed by another human being changes your life. It is what life is built on. We were created for significance and finding out what we can do to serve others is important.

Every one of my five-year-olds had a job. The most coveted job in my kindergarten classroom was taking the milk count. The kids came in the morning, and they got to ask, “Do you want chocolate milk? Do you want white milk?” It was a huge deal. One person was the milk carrier, and they got to pick another person. Everybody in the class is dependent that they counted right. They got to go on their own with the little milk crate to the freezer. Count it out, bring it back. I was saying, “You are so essential. I trust you. I believe in you. You have the classroom’s milk list in your pocket.” Kids are not asking for less. They’re asking for more. They are saying, “Believe in me. Trust me and give me hard things to do. I’m tired of filling in the blanks. I am more than that. And even if I fail, I will try again. I will do my best if it is helpful to somebody else.”

When those two conditions are met, there’s no limit to the potential of human beings.

KAPPAN: How do you make students feel valued?

MAIERS: When I’m in schools and sharing these practices with teachers, I tell them, you’re going to notice a change in the first conversation you have with kids, the first effort you make. If you give kids your presence and you invite kids to contribute their ideas, that’s everything. Ideas from kids can be extraordinary and simple and profound and easy to implement. They will come up with 100 ideas, and you might implement one, but you asked them, and you honored their idea. That is what they need. That is what they’re asking for.

It’s the same with teachers. Teachers say to me all the time, “I don’t have a voice in this. I’m not even going to participate on that committee. I’m not joining that, because I will give my heart and soul. I’m not expecting everything I say to be embraced. But I know that it is all lip service, and I’m just a token teacher on this thing.” That’s exactly how they feel. Human beings are not going to give any more than they have to because we are protecting ourselves.

What gives me continued hope, even though it’s frustrating that the solution is so simple, is that I know once teachers implement this, they’ll see results. Here’s an example of an overwhelmed high school with lots of pressures. They had a truancy problem. I suggested looking at how they greet kids. When a child comes late, instead of saying, “You’re late again,” try saying, “We were waiting for you. I’m so glad you’re here. We would have missed you today.” The truancy issue was transformed in three months, because kids show up when you’re happy to see them. The school didn’t touch curriculum. They didn’t touch culture. They just worked consciously on making sure to connect when kids show up, revisiting them during the day and saying, “I know it was really hard this week to show up and you came in three times.” It made a huge difference. They did it consistently, and then they kept a record. That was the only intervention, nothing else. And it changed everything. That’s the results that you see. What would be the reason for not doing it when it takes very little money and very little time? There’s a perception that this is an inspirational message. And it is inspirational, but we are way beyond inspiring. We’ve got to take action.

KAPPAN: You’ve developed a framework for teachers to use in the classroom?

MAIERS: This is a framework not just for your classroom or your work, it’s for your life. When you look at the way that the brain records our experiences, our moments are weighted differently, and the two most important mattering moments in your life are at the beginning of an interaction and at the end of an interaction. Whatever happens in the middle, even if it’s something bad, your brain doesn’t remember it. But your brain will base its impressions on how you were greeted, and how you were left. Neuroscientists call this hijacking the amygdala, and you’ve got two to 20 seconds to hijack somebody’s amygdala.

You can do it with environmental things, but if you’re physically with somebody, you do it through these very basic actions. The first and foremost is to be present. When you’re talking to somebody, if you have a distraction in your hand, if you are looking somewhere else, if you are on your phone, put it down and acknowledge that person. Eye contact with another person is hugely powerful. If you say their name, it’s powerful. Why do you think Starbucks writes your name on a cup? Why do you think when you go into a nice hotel, they welcome you on the television screen in your room with your name? That’s profound human psychology. We look, we pause, we are present. We notice them. We smile at them. We use eye contact, and we say their name. Every one of these things triggers something biologically that changes your mood and your state of being, and it takes less than 20 seconds.

Then when someone leaves, you make sure again that they recognize that they added value to your life. “Thank you for stopping by. It was such a pleasure to serve you.” Say anything  to them that communicates, “Yes, I noticed that you were here.” That is a huge thing. When you begin an interaction and you end an interaction, make sure that people know that they are valued and that they added value.

And then the middle is what I call a bonus, and this came from my five-year-olds. I’m in my second week of teaching kindergarten. They were all showcasing their awesomeness to me, and I was exhausted. So I made a chart. Monday, I promise you I will notice you five, on Tuesday you five can be awesome, and on Wednesday, you five can be awesome. I committed to give those students on those days my full effort and attention. I worked to notice and note something about them. If they were playing in the sand, or they were lining up for recess, or they were doing homework, or they were reading. I wrote what I saw in this little notebook called my noticing notebook. And then I showed what I noticed to each student because it’s like giving somebody a front row seat to their own brilliance. And it was profound. I’ve got kids all over the world right now carrying noticing notebooks everywhere.

We all have 40 seconds a day. We all have two seconds a day. If we can’t do the whole framework, then do the beginning or do the end or do something because it makes a life-changing, game-changing difference. And every one of us is a changemaker in that respect, and that gives me great hope. Great hope.

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This article appears in the February 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 5, pp. 42-45.