How Children Succeed

cares about them deeply, but when a student gets upset after a loss, Spiegel is rarely the one to go over and offer comfort. John Galvin, the vice principal at IS 318, who often came to tournaments as Spiegel’s co-coach, was better at that sort of thing, she said; he had more “emotional intelligence.”

“I definitely have a warm relationship with a lot of the kids,” Spiegel told me at one tournament. “But I think my job as a teacher is to be more like a mirror, to talk about what they did on the chessboard and help them think about it. It’s a big thing to offer a kid. They put a lot of work into something, and you really look at it with them on a non-condescending level. That’s something that kids don’t often get, and in my experience, they really want it. But it’s not like I love them and mother them. I’m not that kind of person.”

Researchers, including Michael Meaney and Clancy Blair, have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. What Spiegel’s success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming–style care but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle- school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel’s chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

During the months when I was most actively reporting at IS 318, watching the team prepare for the tournament in Columbus, I was also spending a lot of time at KIPP Infinity, tracking the development of the character report card. And as I shuttled back and forth on the subway between West Harlem and South Williamsburg, I had plenty of time to contemplate the parallels between Spiegel’s methods of training her students in chess and the way that teachers and administrators at KIPP talked to their students about day-to-day emotional crises or behavioral lapses. You may recall that KIPP’s dean, Tom Brunzell, said he considered his approach to be a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy. When his students were flailing, lost in moments of stress and emotional turmoil, he would encourage them to do the kind of big-picture thinking—the metacognition, as many psychologists call it—that takes place in the prefrontal cortex: slowing down, examining their impulses, and considering more productive solutions to their problems than, say, yelling at a teacher or shoving another kid on the playground. In her postgame chess analyses, Spiegel had simply developed a more formalized way to do this. Like students at KIPP, IS 318 students were being challenged to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently. And whether you call that approach cognitive therapy or just plain good teaching, it seemed remarkably effective in producing change in middle-school students.

This technique, though, is actually quite rare in contemporary American schools. If you believe that your school’s mission or your job as a teacher is simply to convey information, then it probably doesn’t seem necessary to subject your students to that kind of rigorous self-analysis. But if you’re trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn’t enough. And while Spiegel didn’t use the word character to describe what she was teaching, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between the strengths David Levin and Dominic Randolph emphasized and the skills that Spiegel tried to inculcate in her students. Every day, in the classroom and at tournaments, I saw Spiegel trying to teach her students grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism.

On a couple of occasions, I even saw her use her analytical techniques to teach social intelligence. One day in September, I went with Spiegel and the IS 318 team to a big outdoor chess tournament in Central Park run by Chess-in-the-Schools. It was a hot day, and while I was sitting with Spiegel on the stone steps that led down to Bethesda Fountain, a student came up to us, looking upset, wanting to talk to Spiegel. It was A.J., a student in the seventh grade who had dark skin, short hair, and big, thick Elvis Costello glasses. A.J., I knew, had difficulty in social situations, often losing his way amid the middle-school joking and jockeying, frequently misinterpreting what was going on around him. His story that day came out in a jumble: another IS 318 kid, a recent graduate named Rawn, was threatening to slap A.J., and A.J. wanted Spiegel to do something about it.

“Why does he want to slap you?” Spiegel asked.

A.J. haltingly explained that he had brought his football to the park, and between matches, he and a few of the other boys were tossing it around. A.J. felt hot, and when he went to get a drink, he decided he needed to take his football with him. When he grabbed it and headed off to the drinking fountain, he thought he heard one of the boys call him a bitch. He accused Rawn. Rawn denied it.

“He said, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that,’” A.J. told Spiegel, sounding aggrieved. “He tells me, ‘I will slap you in the mouth.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ And then he tried to come over to me and slap my face, but everybody backed him off.” It was, in other words, a classic quarrel between boys on the cusp of adolescence: impulsive, awash in hormones, intensely moralistic, somewhat nonsensical.

But rather than take sides or offer some vague bromides about getting along, Spiegel started to break it down like a chess game.

“So, let me see if I understand,” Spiegel said, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking up at A.J. “He tried to hit you after you told him to try to hit you?”

“Yeah,” A.J. said, a little uncertainly.

“Well, you know, if Rawn didn’t say anything to you, and then you were saying stuff back to him? Then he’s going to be upset. Does that make sense?”

A.J. stared at her, silent, looking a little like Sebastian Garcia being chastised for losing his bishop.

“My other question would be about the football,” Spiegel went on. “You have to understand that people aren’t going to like that you’re taking your football when they’re playing with it. Do you think it would be okay if they used it when you weren’t there?”

“No.”

“Well, you have to understand, though, that if you’re not going to trust them, they’re probably not going to be your friends.”

A.J. looked frustrated. “Forget it,” he said and walked away.

I had actually observed a similar conversation a few months earlier between A.J. and Spiegel. I was sitting in Spiegel’s classroom with her, talking chess, and A.J. had come in with a complaint: he’d said something about another kid’s mother, and the other kid had called him a name.

At first, I assumed that A.J. was coming to Spiegel for recourse or revenge, so that she would discipline the other student. But after observing the Central Park conversation, it struck me that he was really coming to her for the same reason he came to her for help after a game when he had squandered a lead or hung a queen. He wanted to know how to quit making boneheaded mistakes. He wanted advice on how to get better at what was, to A.J., another incredibly complex game with way too many moving pieces: surviving middle school and getting other kids to like you.

5. Justus and James

When I first saw Spiegel in Columbus, the afternoon before the opening day of the tournament, she looked happy and well rested; she was wearing a crisp white dress shirt and pinstriped tailored pants, eating tangerines and sipping chai tea and going over last-minute chess worksheets with a couple dozen students crammed into her hotel room high above the convention center. Once the competition began, though, her crispness began to fray, and each day her hair grew a little wilder, her eyes a little more glazed. For her, the junior high tournament was the most important competition of the year. “I feel like it’s a judgment on my work,” she told me that first afternoon. “Everything I do all year comes down to how well we do here.” And so she sat in Union B all day, drinking coffee and eating takeout from the food court and worrying.

IS 318 had teams competing in five divisions, and the two that Spiegel took most seriously were K?8 Open and K?9 Open. (Open means that there is no upper limit on the ratings of players.) K?9 Open included students up to ninth grade, but it was considered by many coaches to be a less competitive section than K?8 Open (which allowed students only up to eighth grade), since fewer junior high teams competed in K?9. Spiegel thought her team had at least a decent shot at winning both sections, even though no school had ever won K?8 and K?9 in the same year—and even though IS 318 didn’t have a ninth grade.

One of the reasons that Spiegel’s teams had always done so well in tournaments was that she had what