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88: Connecting Through Transferable Learning w/ Trevor Aleo, Kayla Duncan, & Julie Stern
51 Plays5 years ago
Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation, we're joined by Trevor Aleo, an English teacher in Wilton, Connecticut, Kayla Duncan, a professional instruction coach from Cumming, Georgia, and Julie Stern, author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding and many more, and workshop leader of Making Sense of Learning Transfer.
Together, along with Krista Ferraro, a history teacher from Braintree, Massachusetts, have written Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World, releasing in April, 2021. This work connects interdisciplinary learning, centers students in instructional design, and offers educators with tools to plan effectively.
In our conversation together, we talk about what it means to transfer learning, how this differs from traditional "brain science" curriculum planning, and how we can push for social justice through interdisciplinary, aligned learning.
GUESTS
Trevor Aleo, middle school English teacher from Wilton, Connecticut who focuses on making students become sense-makers.
Kayla Duncan, personalized instruction coach from Cumming, Georgia, who focuses on authentic experiences and increased ownership.
Julie Stern, best-selling author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding and many more, and thought leader of the Making Sense of Learning Transfer workshop series.
RESOURCES
- Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World (release April 2021)
- Education to Save the World
FURTHER LISTENING
- Conceptually Speaking (Julie Stern & Trevor Aleo's podcast)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Supporters
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 88 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:10
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:15
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Dylan Wentz, Lisa Biber, and Margaret Clifton.
00:00:22
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:23
Speaker
You can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
About 'Learning that Transfers'
00:00:48
Speaker
In today's conversation, we're joined by Trevor Alea, an English teacher in Wilton, Connecticut, Kayla Duncan, a professional instruction coach from Cumming, Georgia, and Julie Stern, author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding and many more, and workshop leader of Making Sense of Learning Transfer.
00:01:03
Speaker
Together, along with Krista Ferraro, a history teacher from Braintree, Massachusetts, they have written Learning that Transfers, Designing Curriculum for a Changing World, releasing in April 2021.
00:01:13
Speaker
This work connects interdisciplinary learning, centers students in instructional design, and offers educators tools to plan effectively.
00:01:19
Speaker
In our conversation together, we talk about what it means to transfer learning, how this differs from traditional brain science curriculum planning, and how we can push for social justice through interdisciplinary aligned learning.
00:01:30
Speaker
Let's just simply start off with just an overview of what you're currently doing.
00:01:34
Speaker
How do you want to change things up?
00:01:35
Speaker
How does it differ from what's out there?
00:01:37
Speaker
Just kind of provide an introduction to yourself and what you're doing.
00:01:40
Speaker
Okay, so essentially our goal with learning that transfers is to help students be able to construct and build conceptual understanding that they can use to transfer to future situations.
00:01:50
Speaker
So typically when you think about curriculum, you hear that word, you think about kids memorizing facts that are organized around topics.
00:01:56
Speaker
So, you know, their ability to know a bunch of things to treat them like a sort of empty vessel that we dump facts into, even after doing that, that knowledge can't be used in any other context other than whatever the next test is.
Leveraging Prior Knowledge
00:02:08
Speaker
So what we suggest is to consider how you can take knowledge and skills and organize them around broader concepts.
00:02:15
Speaker
Then you put students into situations where they have to try to figure out how those concepts connect and interact with one another.
00:02:20
Speaker
And then they can take that understanding, which is broader and deeper and apply it to future situations.
00:02:25
Speaker
So what that does is it allows students to a better leverage their prior knowledge because we're not coming in and saying today we are learning about this battle in World War Two, which is completely divorced and devoid from anything that they've done previously.
00:02:37
Speaker
You might be talking about things like sovereignty and power.
00:02:39
Speaker
So these are things that throughout their daily life, they may not actively think about and realize that it connects to what's happening in the classroom, but it does.
00:02:46
Speaker
And then what that kind of extends from that is this idea of we want students to build a culture of transfer, which is where they're always sort of thinking about what are the patterns or structures that sort of undergird things that are happening in their life, things that are happening on the news, things that are happening with the text and context that they interact with every day.
00:03:04
Speaker
So that's kind of like the impetus and focus of the work is to have students
00:03:10
Speaker
develop conceptual understanding so they can recognize these patterns and structures that sort of undergird everything that happens in the
Mental Models for Learning
00:03:17
Speaker
world.
00:03:17
Speaker
And we developed kind of like a simple mental model, which is acquire, connect and transfer.
00:03:24
Speaker
And what that does is students acquire understanding of concepts, they connect them in relationship, and then they have to transfer that understanding to future contacts.
00:03:31
Speaker
So that's just sort of like the simple mental model that we use
00:03:34
Speaker
to frame and phrase what students do.
00:03:37
Speaker
And the goal is really to help them understand and take on those patterns and then really take ownership and go into contexts that are self-selected or that they find interesting or engaging or are around a topic they're passionate about and use that conceptual understanding to make sense and make meaning of those contexts that have personal relevance to them.
00:03:54
Speaker
It seems like a pretty high level idea, like when you're kind of coming in with it out of thin air.
00:04:00
Speaker
What brought you all to get to this point?
00:04:03
Speaker
That's such a great question.
00:04:05
Speaker
What brought us to get to this point?
00:04:08
Speaker
So, well, I am the one who sort of brought everybody together on this new book and on this new team.
00:04:16
Speaker
And Christopher, our other co-author who's not on this podcast and I have known each other for about 15 years.
00:04:22
Speaker
And we were a curriculum team at a charter school that was designed to get kids to be sort of active participants in society.
00:04:31
Speaker
And they, you know, whoever wrote the charter for that school said, you know, we want all subject areas to like get kids to be empowered.
00:04:40
Speaker
We want all subject areas to contribute to students' understanding of public policy.
00:04:45
Speaker
It was a charter school for public policy.
00:04:47
Speaker
And so I had to work with the PE teacher, the math teacher, the health teacher, everybody to incorporate this empowerment lens into
00:04:55
Speaker
into their curriculum.
00:04:56
Speaker
And that was, in some cases, it was like beating my head against the wall.
00:05:00
Speaker
And so I think that experience, almost like from adversity, we sort of figured it out.
00:05:05
Speaker
I think going through that and finding the work of Lynn Erickson, who was a mentor of mine for many years, and our first, Chris and I's first two books are part of Lynn Erickson's concept-based series,
00:05:16
Speaker
And sort of building on the work of understanding by design, Wiggins and McTie, most people know what that is, and sort of thinking about the enduring understandings.
00:05:24
Speaker
What do we want kids to ultimately remember and be able to understand once they leave our classrooms?
00:05:30
Speaker
Building on that into concept-based and then sort of furthering our own thinking about how fast the world is changing.
Real-World Application
00:05:40
Speaker
And really, what do we know about research that's going to help our kids to make sense of complexity, to be prepared?
00:05:47
Speaker
You know, what we keep saying is, look, our ultimate goal is for kids to figure out a situation when we're not there.
00:05:55
Speaker
And for them to use what we taught them to figure out this situation when we're not there.
00:06:01
Speaker
And so we sort of started from like, okay, if that's the goal, what do we know about cognitive science?
00:06:06
Speaker
What do we know about learning?
00:06:07
Speaker
What do we know about humanity?
00:06:09
Speaker
What do we know about all the things that we know about?
00:06:11
Speaker
What are the things that we need to know more about?
00:06:13
Speaker
So we did just incredible amounts of research.
00:06:16
Speaker
among the four of us, and that's how we came to this conclusion.
00:06:20
Speaker
And one quick example of that, I love that Trevor used the World War II example, because one thing that I keep saying is, look, what's the goal?
00:06:28
Speaker
Is the goal for kids to remember every single battle of World War II and every single leader of each country that was involved?
00:06:35
Speaker
for instance, or the date of each of these battles, or is the goal for students to use their understanding of World War II to try and prevent another major global international conflict, then we've got some tools for you.
00:06:50
Speaker
And so, you know, that's really what we're trying to do.
00:06:52
Speaker
And what we realized in this journey, one of the things that was kicking around in our brains that
00:06:59
Speaker
it was nice to work on this intensely with this amazing team is that it's concepts and their connections that can, that basically sort of link our prior experiences to new situations.
00:07:12
Speaker
And so if we can make that explicit to students, then we are have, we can't guarantee it, of course, but we have a better chance of preparing them to recognize a new situation and how their prior knowledge applies.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:26
Speaker
I was going to add to that the bit about knowing all the stuff from a bunch of different disciplines.
00:07:32
Speaker
I think we agree that we need disciplinary knowledge across.
00:07:37
Speaker
We don't need to specialize in just one area, but rather than memorization of all the details and facts, like Julie was saying, we're endorsing or really pushing for that deep understanding of concepts so that way they can see what
00:07:50
Speaker
systems, power, sovereignty in how does this look in math or how does this look in a social studies type context?
00:07:56
Speaker
So it's really using those examples and our disciplinary knowledge to unlock situations where it's integrated together versus memorizing for the sake of memorizing.
00:08:06
Speaker
Right, right.
00:08:07
Speaker
And I think that will be a really good segue into the next stage of this podcast, if you will, kind of dividing it up between here's what it is, here's how it's different than what's out there, and then here's how we apply it to active scenarios.
00:08:21
Speaker
And I think that the first thing a lot of people will think when they hear this is the cognitive science movement as a way to redesign learning spaces.
00:08:28
Speaker
And there's a lot of very questionable practices around cognitive load theory, evidence-based learning, behavior management, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:35
Speaker
I'll go through a few of these and you kind of tell me how it's different because it obviously is.
00:08:40
Speaker
The first one that comes up all the time is Hirsch.
00:08:43
Speaker
So Hirsch's work around like core knowledge and that basically if we know a bunch of different stuff that we can recall that stuff quicker and therefore will be easier for us to be competent about other things because we know so much stuff.
00:08:57
Speaker
How is this different than that philosophy?
00:09:00
Speaker
Well, I think the important thing here is that we talk a lot about false dichotomies.
00:09:05
Speaker
In fact, I don't know if you know, Trevor and I have a podcast and we sort of keep coming back to this on our podcast.
00:09:10
Speaker
We keep realizing, oh, there's another sort of false dichotomy.
00:09:14
Speaker
And I think one of the things that is debated is whether or not it's knowledge or sort of transferable critical thinking or problem solving types of ideas.
Teaching Facts vs. Critical Thinking
00:09:24
Speaker
And there's this fight between one or the other.
00:09:26
Speaker
And I suppose my answer would be, well, you can't have one without the other.
00:09:30
Speaker
So, you know, there's some, there's some valid points to, to, I wouldn't say necessarily ED Hirsch, but some of the other people who say, you know, teaching content is teaching reading, for instance, that kids can't unlock a new text, if they only know how to phonetically decode, they need to have sort of background knowledge and
00:09:51
Speaker
and things like that.
00:09:52
Speaker
And they need to know how to decode, right?
00:09:55
Speaker
So I feel like a lot of times these types of debates are sort of ignore the nuance, the interplay between knowledge and sort of conceptual understanding.
00:10:06
Speaker
And so we're not arguing that only, so you can't talk about sovereignty unless you give examples.
00:10:12
Speaker
And so for us, like step one, a big shift in my practice has been instead of first, I'm going to teach you all these facts and then I'm going to get to this cool thing called concepts.
00:10:21
Speaker
Now I start with the concept via illustrative examples of the concept.
00:10:28
Speaker
And so if I'm going to be teaching, so I sort of think, okay, if the standards tell me I need to teach World War II,
00:10:33
Speaker
I think what are at the core, what's at the core of that conflict, sovereignty, authority, alliances is a huge one there.
00:10:41
Speaker
And so I say to my students, okay.
00:10:42
Speaker
And then I start thinking, what do my students know about alliances?
00:10:45
Speaker
What do my students know about authority?
00:10:46
Speaker
They know a lot about alliances and authority in their own lives that have nothing to do with nations and international relationships.
00:10:54
Speaker
But we sort of start there.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I think that's, that's kind of the difference is, is,
00:10:59
Speaker
we're not saying you must know all these dates and battles in order to understand World War II.
00:11:05
Speaker
However, we're also not saying those dates and battles are completely irrelevant.
00:11:10
Speaker
For instance, I was having this conversation with my husband, who's a US diplomat, so we get to talk to all kinds of interesting social studies content all the time.
00:11:18
Speaker
And he says, you know, what could be interesting is seeing like how long it took Germany to take certain steps for students to sort of think
00:11:28
Speaker
looking at a modern situation, looking at where we are in that situation and sort of seeing, okay, it took Germany two years to make these moves.
00:11:36
Speaker
That might be like a decent benchmark.
00:11:39
Speaker
So that's an example of where the facts would inform students' ability to apply that learning to a new situation.
Active Citizenship & Relevance
00:11:47
Speaker
So to me, you can't have facts and concepts alone.
00:11:51
Speaker
You need both.
00:11:52
Speaker
I think that the other thing is that knowledge, those facts, and even to some degree, those concepts are tools for other things.
00:12:01
Speaker
And I think that when you look at the way that, at least the discourse around a lot of the cognitive science that you see, at least on like edu Twitter, the goal is to have kids expand their fact base so they can reach back into their long-term memory, pull something out, put down an answer on a test.
00:12:17
Speaker
And it's sort of like maximizing the utility of that time to ensure that they can memorize the most stuff.
00:12:23
Speaker
For us, you got to know stuff and there is a purpose in understanding and having automaticity, but why?
00:12:28
Speaker
What is the purpose of that knowledge?
00:12:30
Speaker
How is it used?
00:12:31
Speaker
How is it useful?
00:12:32
Speaker
What is its function and purpose and role in your life?
00:12:35
Speaker
And how can you use it to be a more active and engaged citizen?
00:12:39
Speaker
How can you use it to make sense of your life?
00:12:41
Speaker
How can you use it to make and construct meaning alongside others in your community?
00:12:45
Speaker
And I think that that is the big difference.
00:12:47
Speaker
And for us, it's the conversation, the framing, the focus, the discourse around knowledge that's the issue when it comes to a lot of the way that cognitive science is talked about.
00:12:58
Speaker
but not necessarily the research itself.
00:13:00
Speaker
And there's another piece to it, which is a lot of the research that we sort of base our stuff on is around like analogical thinking.
00:13:07
Speaker
So basically our brains are hardwired to recognize patterns.
00:13:10
Speaker
When we see something new, we think about, oh, how does this look like this other thing that I know?
00:13:15
Speaker
And that's sort of how we build schema.
00:13:17
Speaker
That's how we kind of make sense of things.
00:13:18
Speaker
And the goal for that isn't just to have students be able to answer the most test questions.
00:13:23
Speaker
The goal for that is to equip students with the ability to encounter a new complex situation.
00:13:28
Speaker
And that could be, I've had my students talk about how they use understanding for my class to navigate coming up with a new cheer routine because they had a really authoritarian coach and they were trying to work with her.
00:13:38
Speaker
I've had students talk about how they were watching a play.
00:13:41
Speaker
with their parents, and they were able to sort of connect the dots and see the deeper themes.
00:13:45
Speaker
And they had a beautiful conversation with their parents about it.
00:13:48
Speaker
And the goal is to have that knowledge belong to the students.
00:13:53
Speaker
They construct it themselves and they use it themselves in interesting and powerful ways.
00:13:57
Speaker
So I think that it's really about thinking, how do we organize the way that instruction is
00:14:04
Speaker
delivered to students, and then how can we give them opportunities to use it for meaningful purposes?
00:14:11
Speaker
Again, it's not just the test.
00:14:13
Speaker
We say that memorization, the automaticity is the floor.
00:14:17
Speaker
It's not the ceiling.
00:14:18
Speaker
And when we approach it that way, the learning that students engage in, it's not just about engagement.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's about investment.
00:14:27
Speaker
And that's something that I really try to focus on with my students is I don't want to engage them with kitschy, you know, like phrases or sayings or pop culture.
00:14:35
Speaker
I want them to be invested in their learning and see like, wow, these conversations we're having in class are relevant to me, my life, my friends, my family, my community.
00:14:44
Speaker
And that is, I think, the biggest difference is how that knowledge and understanding is used.
00:14:49
Speaker
So the goal, especially for us, and this is one of the things they're really advocating for by focusing on transfer, is
00:14:54
Speaker
is the goal isn't to have students understand concepts.
00:14:56
Speaker
The goal is have students use conceptual understanding to make sense of new situations.
00:15:01
Speaker
So that way, the learning that they engage in has a function outside of just whatever the next assessment is.
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that a big shift is that partnership versus the student teacher kind of, they had their separate roles, they're more partners in the classroom.
00:15:20
Speaker
And it's really about students, we've talked about accessing their prior knowledge, but leaning into their strengths also and thinking about what are they interested in, what are their passions.
00:15:29
Speaker
And so in the classroom, we're facilitating and designing these experiences where
00:15:35
Speaker
They're exploring different concepts that maybe are related to the standards, but also connect to these other ideas that go beyond just that core knowledge.
00:15:45
Speaker
And there's tons of conversation.
00:15:47
Speaker
There has to be that community aspect, kind of like what Julie was saying, where
00:15:52
Speaker
students are free to share opinions, even if they're diverse perspectives, they learn how to have those conversations with each other versus only agreeing with what the teacher said or going along with what each other said, because that's what's the nice thing to do.
00:16:05
Speaker
And so really facilitating those conversations, exploring together, and then finding ways, like Julie said, for us to transfer this to some crazy situation.
00:16:17
Speaker
Like it's
00:16:18
Speaker
a community, kind of a community event.
00:16:20
Speaker
And then students are able to look at their individual passions and interests and transfer and apply in creative and unique ways, because we've set that culture of lean into your strengths, really look for those connections, take risks and
00:16:35
Speaker
then see what can happen.
00:16:36
Speaker
If it doesn't work, then you have your peers to go back to and try again.
00:16:41
Speaker
There's a lot there.
00:16:42
Speaker
I'm going to attempt to synthesize my thoughts here.
00:16:45
Speaker
So first off, I like the idea of, and you're highly alluding to this, you're basically, instead of starting with the baseline knowledge being that
00:16:52
Speaker
Students know nothing.
00:16:53
Speaker
They need to know what's heavily critiqued as this very white-centric curriculum, like middle-class curriculum.
00:17:00
Speaker
And instead, we're starting with, here's what the students know, and here's how those ideas can be then applied to some stuff that the teacher thinks is important, some stuff that the student thinks that's important, and blending that all together.
00:17:11
Speaker
The main issue I take with the core knowledge curriculum is that it implies that, or it doesn't just imply, I mean, Hirsch has a book list of books that he deems important that you have to read.
00:17:20
Speaker
And they're all like...
00:17:22
Speaker
old school classical ed.
00:17:24
Speaker
If I don't read The Giver, somehow I'm ill prepared for life and I won't be able to recall information.
00:17:29
Speaker
The big issue there for me isn't the idea that you have kids read The Giver, which is kind of boring, but whatever.
00:17:34
Speaker
The big issue is, is that from like a theoretical standpoint as a teacher, I'm assuming that everyone in the room is dumb and they don't know anything.
00:17:42
Speaker
And that's going to extend how I treat them and the power dynamics.
00:17:45
Speaker
I mean, there's a innate connection between cognitive load theory and
00:17:49
Speaker
and like behaviorism right like the teach like a champion style teaching where you have to control everyone in the rooms they learn their their rote based knowledge they have to get their sit and get in order to pass those tests whereas what you're describing is a lot different what would a classroom look like that embraces these principles how would it be different than like the more test-based approach
00:18:11
Speaker
Well, we talk a lot about thinking classrooms that, you know, foundationally, it has to be about intellectual growth.
Collaborative vs. Traditional Learning
00:18:19
Speaker
It has to be a community.
00:18:21
Speaker
It has to be a place where everyone is valued, where students' prior knowledge and experiences are valued.
00:18:26
Speaker
So sort of before we even get into the actual pedagogy, we talk a lot about what is the role of the teacher?
00:18:33
Speaker
What is the role of the student?
00:18:35
Speaker
And really shifting, you know, that comes a lot from a lot of our consulting.
00:18:40
Speaker
So Kayla and I do, I'm a full-time consultant.
00:18:42
Speaker
I work with schools all over the world.
00:18:43
Speaker
And Kayla is a full-time instructional coach for a large school district.
00:18:47
Speaker
How many campuses do you work with Kayla?
00:18:48
Speaker
And how many teachers grade levels?
00:18:51
Speaker
I mean, it's a huge school district.
00:18:53
Speaker
And so what we realized is like,
00:18:56
Speaker
oh gosh, snap, if you're still using assessments to try to motivate your kids to pay attention, this is not going to work.
00:19:03
Speaker
If you still think you have to know everything that the students need to know, this is probably not going to work.
00:19:10
Speaker
So we kind of started with like,
00:19:13
Speaker
the second chapter of our book is shifts, key shifts that need to be made.
00:19:17
Speaker
And so the vast majority of the teachers that we work with know, you know, they fundamentally agree, like the teacher is no longer the sage on the stage.
00:19:25
Speaker
The teacher is a facilitator of learning, a designer of powerful learning experiences, a curator of everything that's out there to put in front of students, you know, that sort of shift is
00:19:36
Speaker
is kind of like step one before we even start talking about what a classroom looks like.
00:19:41
Speaker
And so I think we love visible thinking strategies, things where we have a bit of a problem with sticky notes, our budget for sticky notes and whiteboarding and things like that is out the window.
00:19:55
Speaker
But we really want to get students thinking out into the world.
00:20:01
Speaker
And have lots of deep conversations among the students.
00:20:05
Speaker
And so I think that's what a classroom looks like.
00:20:08
Speaker
Now, ideally, we're getting to a... So it depends.
00:20:11
Speaker
It depends on where the school is and where they might start.
00:20:14
Speaker
So they might start with, okay, if I'm teaching World War II, I'm going to consider sovereignty and things of that nature.
00:20:19
Speaker
At the same time, the possibilities are so important.
00:20:25
Speaker
For instance, there's a book that Trevor got us reading called The Medici Effect.
00:20:30
Speaker
And that book talks about how concepts and their connections really spawn world-changing innovation.
00:20:38
Speaker
And one of the most famous examples from that book is...
00:20:41
Speaker
this architect from Zimbabwe studied termites because he had to figure out how to design a building that didn't have electricity in Zimbabwe.
00:20:51
Speaker
And so how in the world was he going to do this to design a building that would stay cool year round?
00:20:58
Speaker
Well, termites do these elaborate mounds to keep their eggs at a constant temperature.
00:21:03
Speaker
So he looked at how those were designed and designed a building
00:21:09
Speaker
Based on that, now he's a super famous architect, but there's tons of examples of innovation happening where we can think about situations that have seemingly nothing to do with one another.
00:21:23
Speaker
But if we ask ourselves, okay, what are the core concepts?
00:21:25
Speaker
Design, temperature, airflow, things of that nature, we can pull out the common principles and apply them to new situations.
00:21:35
Speaker
So what can we learn from termites about architecture?
00:21:37
Speaker
That's pretty awesome.
00:21:39
Speaker
And so I think the teachers who most embrace this, that's what their classroom can look like.
00:21:45
Speaker
Students can be going all kinds of crazy places.
00:21:48
Speaker
So one of the things that we do in the book is we have a classroom A and a classroom B sort of comparison.
00:21:53
Speaker
And I'll use myself as an example.
00:21:55
Speaker
My first year teaching, I taught 12th grade English language arts and we had like our Beowulf unit.
00:22:02
Speaker
So my kids read Beowulf.
00:22:04
Speaker
I dragged them through it.
00:22:05
Speaker
I knew that it was painful, but I was like, it's on the curriculum.
00:22:08
Speaker
I got to do it.
00:22:08
Speaker
They made like a little shield with their family crest on the end.
00:22:12
Speaker
And, you know, they took a multiple choice test.
00:22:15
Speaker
And it was horrible.
00:22:17
Speaker
I could feel their pain and I tried to make it fun.
00:22:19
Speaker
I'd use memes and videos and pop culture references and really try to just like make it tolerable.
00:22:27
Speaker
But since Encountering Julie's work and sort of developing the learning that transfers method, what I realized is I really didn't care that much if my kids knew who Wiglath was or if they remembered the battle between Beowulf and the monster.
00:22:42
Speaker
What I was really...
00:22:43
Speaker
thinking about what really mattered was do students have an understanding of the way that stories can shape a culture, the way that heroes and villains interact in complex ways, the way that the stories that are told in history shape the cultural
Exploring Concepts in Class
00:22:58
Speaker
reality of today.
00:22:58
Speaker
That's what I cared about.
00:23:00
Speaker
So I then sort of my most recent unit, this was 2019, time is bleeding together when I think about that COVID year that got chopped in half.
00:23:12
Speaker
Instead of spending so much time on Beowulf, we did a flyby of it.
00:23:17
Speaker
But then what we spent some time doing was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther graphic novel series.
00:23:22
Speaker
And what that did is it, A, brought in some different diverse perspectives where we're not just talking about like, you know, the dead white Anglo-Saxon males.
00:23:30
Speaker
We were having that same conversation, though, about how history, culture and stories shapes the heroes.
00:23:35
Speaker
But instead, we were looking at it from the sort of like African diaspora perspective that Black Panther sort of meant to illustrate.
00:23:42
Speaker
And instead of organizing my instruction around this individual text, I'm teaching Beowulf, or even I'm teaching this Black Panther graphic novel series, but we're really teaching and learning about and exploring together was the relationship between heroes, villains, culture, perspective, conflict, narrative.
00:23:58
Speaker
And just to show the kind of flexibility that can lead to is...
00:24:03
Speaker
It was the day after the US launched the strike on Iran and killed General Soleimani.
00:24:09
Speaker
And World War III was trending on Twitter.
00:24:12
Speaker
My students came in and they were kind of freaked out.
00:24:14
Speaker
They're like, you know, are we going to go to war?
00:24:16
Speaker
What's happening?
00:24:18
Speaker
Can we just talk about this?
00:24:19
Speaker
So typically, if I were to think back to my classroom A self, I would have been, well, kids, we're learning about Beowulf.
00:24:25
Speaker
So there's not really much connective tissue between dead Anglo-Saxons and our geopolitical reality right now.
00:24:31
Speaker
But instead, because we were focusing on heroes, villains, power, narratives, perspectives, we were able to take their understanding of those big ideas, of those concepts, and have a dialogue about how they can use those ideas to make sense of what was happening, geopolitically, but also themselves.
00:24:48
Speaker
And that turned into a conversation about how generations of these students use technology as a way to communicate and feel like they have some sort of power in the big, scary things that are happening.
00:24:58
Speaker
in the world, which again is so far afield from Beowulf.
00:25:03
Speaker
But when you're thinking about these big organizing ideas, you can bring in a whole bunch of different types of texts and you can have students like leverage that conversation and really be agile and nimble.
00:25:14
Speaker
I think that's a big focus of the work is being agile and nimble so you can use students understanding to respond to what's happening in their lives, what's happening in their communities.
00:25:25
Speaker
I like using the word that we're moving away from as making learning tolerable.
00:25:30
Speaker
I've been guilty of that as well.
00:25:32
Speaker
I used to be much more of a classroom A teacher.
00:25:34
Speaker
I remember developing the Minecraft unit to teach something like the Industrial Revolution or something.
00:25:41
Speaker
And it was
00:25:41
Speaker
It was cool.
00:25:42
Speaker
I mean, the kids liked it more than PowerPoint.
00:25:45
Speaker
But at the end of the day, it was a ton of work to basically teach kids how to use Minecraft.
00:25:50
Speaker
It was all right.
00:25:50
Speaker
It could be better.
00:25:51
Speaker
Regardless, I think what you all are getting at that's super important to recognize is that I think when people associate school with learning, a lot of students have now associated learning with something that's bad or not fun or boring, etc.
00:26:03
Speaker
Whereas learning anything is naturally interesting if it has a point to it.
00:26:08
Speaker
I'm going to do a brief promotion here.
00:26:10
Speaker
We had a podcast a while back.
00:26:12
Speaker
This was like early last year.
00:26:14
Speaker
The CEO of Butterscotch Synanigans, who's a game developer who has really successful mobile games.
00:26:20
Speaker
And he was talking about how in their research for creating this game that's about like basically conquering an alien planet, they studied monkey movements on like this jungle plane and how they move throughout the world and gathered resources.
00:26:35
Speaker
It was just all this random, completely random stuff from like biology textbooks, social sciences textbooks.
00:26:42
Speaker
And they were into it.
00:26:43
Speaker
And this is a guy who hated science in school, who hated like learning about this kind of stuff.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I myself do a lot of game development, PBL type stuff for kids that are interested.
00:26:52
Speaker
And it's always the kids that tend to not really like traditional academics.
00:26:56
Speaker
But all of a sudden they're like, we watch like videos by Will Wright, the guy that made the Sims and all the SimCity games.
00:27:03
Speaker
And the dude literally has a pile of books that he reads in order to learn this stuff.
00:27:08
Speaker
And all of a sudden, the kids are picking up books and learn about all this scientific theory.
00:27:12
Speaker
The fact of the matter is, as long as the thing itself that we're building into is interesting, we understand the relevance of it.
00:27:18
Speaker
Humans like learning things.
00:27:20
Speaker
It's fun to learn about things.
00:27:21
Speaker
But if I don't see the relevance of it or I just don't care or someone's telling me exactly what to do every single step of the way, it no longer has that beautiful connection.
00:27:31
Speaker
It's the exact same reason why, you know, when we're in elementary school, everyone tends to raise their hand.
00:27:36
Speaker
And then as we go over and over again, we stop talking about dinosaurs in space and it just gets boring.
00:27:41
Speaker
I like that idea and how that connects.
00:27:44
Speaker
As you're embracing these different principles, do you want to relate them to perhaps other things that are in like a more progressive pedagogy?
00:27:52
Speaker
So things like maybe like critical pedagogy, student voice, anti-racism, that kind of stuff.
00:27:56
Speaker
How does it connect to like the broader social picture or power picture?
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think that there was so many ways, but just sort of going back to your example that you were giving and also that one that Trevor gave, I think one of the things, sort of the false dichotomies that we find out there is like, should we keep teaching this sort of core knowledge back to referencing Edie Hirsch, that everybody in society agrees and we all know about this stuff versus throw it all out and just put a 3D printer down?
00:28:24
Speaker
in an iPad in the room, and then we've got this 21st century learning.
00:28:28
Speaker
And neither of those seems like a good idea to me, that we march students through this sort of required knowledge that everybody in the culture or society agrees is, or I guess the people in power agree is the most important.
00:28:44
Speaker
But really sort of looking at how do we help students acquire understanding of individual concepts that are transferable?
00:28:50
Speaker
How do we help them connect those in relationship and then transfer to new situations?
00:28:54
Speaker
It's also building a culture of transfer because ultimately we want students to recognize the deeper structural patterns of any new situation.
00:29:03
Speaker
And so I feel like there's sort of two ways in which, and maybe, I don't know, I would love to hear Kayla and Trevor's thoughts about this too, but when I think, when I hear sort of critical race theory or anti-racist education, things like that, I sort of think of two ways.
00:29:19
Speaker
One is,
00:29:20
Speaker
Of course, students can access those things via, they can access sort of a diversity of perspectives, text, point of view, like Trevor gave with that example of Beowulf and Black Panther.
00:29:32
Speaker
So that's like step one is sort of among the different situations, the fact-rich context that students bring to a situation, their prior experiences they bring to situations.
00:29:42
Speaker
concepts allow students to, and teachers, a lot of flexibility.
00:29:46
Speaker
As long as students are looking at sort of the relationship between and among concepts, they can go study whatever they want to study.
00:29:54
Speaker
And so one of the things I love that Trevor just came up with recently is
00:29:58
Speaker
Looking on, we have a continuum of academic transfer to real world transfer.
00:30:02
Speaker
And if you're thinking about English language arts and a product would be like an academic discourse, like a Socratic seminar or something like that, which are still important.
00:30:11
Speaker
And Trevor still does a lot of that in his classroom.
00:30:14
Speaker
But students could transfer to a podcast, to a YouTube video, to whatever it is they want to do and even analyze a particular YouTuber,
00:30:25
Speaker
that the teacher has no idea who this is or what this is, and the student becomes sort of the expert in that particular context, but the concepts are what sort of link those.
00:30:38
Speaker
So I think that's kind of one way in which this really aligns with those particular pedagogies that you mentioned.
Integrating Modern Theories
00:30:45
Speaker
In another way, what we're trying to do is move teachers from I teach...
00:30:52
Speaker
and I've got to teach the quadratic formula to I teach students about data and data literacy and quantitative reasoning and sort of expanding the idea of what it is that I teach, especially for secondary teachers.
00:31:09
Speaker
And so basically chapter three of our book is called Disciplinary Literacy and how do we look at the purpose of our discipline in the world?
00:31:18
Speaker
And chapter four is what we've termed, a new term we've deemed, modern literacies.
00:31:22
Speaker
And so what we encourage teachers to do is consider their students, consider their school, say if they're an IB school, they've got the IB learner profile, consider their students, consider their school, consider their passions as educators, and choose one or two
00:31:40
Speaker
Modern literacies, which is our bucket, you know, our umbrella term for anything outside of the traditional disciplines or standards that you feel kids need to navigate this complex world.
00:31:51
Speaker
So it could be digital citizenship.
00:31:53
Speaker
It could be critical theory.
00:31:54
Speaker
It could be so many different aspects and choose one of those.
00:31:58
Speaker
And then you can do the same exact thing that we're advocating you do with math and science, et cetera, which is what are the most fundamental concepts within that field?
00:32:08
Speaker
How do they connect and how do they transfer?
00:32:11
Speaker
How do they play out in different situations?
00:32:13
Speaker
And so I think really helping teachers to say, look, pick something.
00:32:19
Speaker
And if you don't want to, you don't have to, but we're very flexible.
00:32:23
Speaker
Most teachers are, it's freeing for, especially people who write books about curriculum design and are hired by their school to do training, to come in and say, do you have something that you're really, really think like design thinking?
00:32:35
Speaker
Do you have something that you really feel students need to navigate this complex world?
00:32:40
Speaker
And maybe it is critical race theory.
00:32:43
Speaker
Then break them down into concepts, teach the concepts, teach students how to connect them and how to transfer them to new situations.
00:32:50
Speaker
And it becomes sort of the same exact model that teachers can apply to teach all of those things.
00:32:57
Speaker
So that's also really cool.
00:32:58
Speaker
I think some other big pedagogical kind of focuses, especially if you're on Twitter, of being mastery-based or student ownership or these authentic experiences.
Assessment as Feedback
00:33:10
Speaker
Going in that realm, I think that we hit on that a lot with our assessment chapter.
00:33:16
Speaker
We don't mention grading because grading is just that conversation that is different no matter where you are.
00:33:21
Speaker
But our whole purpose of assessment and what leans into that mastery mindset is we're a system of feedback and not just isolated bits.
00:33:30
Speaker
And so I feel like that's a connection that is really that connects so nicely throughout our stuff.
00:33:36
Speaker
It's not
00:33:37
Speaker
Again, the memorization of the concepts.
00:33:40
Speaker
I can tell you the definition.
00:33:41
Speaker
Oh, I can give you one example.
00:33:43
Speaker
So check, I got that right.
00:33:44
Speaker
But how do we have this system of feedback in place?
00:33:48
Speaker
So we really help students see their level of mastery.
00:33:51
Speaker
They can self-assess.
00:33:52
Speaker
They can see how well they can connect or transfer concepts.
00:33:55
Speaker
And in that,
00:33:57
Speaker
And there's again that student ownership or that partnership piece where like they both mentioned, it doesn't matter the context necessarily, as long as we have these conceptual connections and students have that as their focus, they can really kind of design their own learning experiences and
00:34:14
Speaker
And keep that piece at the concepts at the center of that.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so then the teacher is just helping facilitate, give them resources if needed, or give them feedback if needed.
00:34:26
Speaker
And then I think everything we're doing is leaning into experiences versus just learning.
00:34:32
Speaker
being in class.
00:34:33
Speaker
It's really a more active versus passive kind of mindset that we really want students to embrace.
00:34:40
Speaker
And so just adding on to some of the other things that are kind of like the buzzwords that are hopping around, I feel like we're really connecting into those all from that strength space of students are coming to the table with a wide variety of strengths and expertise in their own right.
00:34:57
Speaker
And then we're going to help them use that to unlock those new situations.
00:35:01
Speaker
And if you think about some of those things that you were bringing up, like critical race theory, anti-racism, these are incredibly complex systemic societal things.
00:35:10
Speaker
And if we're to help students make sense and make meaning of them, the acquire, connect, transfer sort of model is a really helpful way to break down complex interactions between systems.
00:35:23
Speaker
So it's a way to organize information.
00:35:26
Speaker
And when you're dealing with something as complex as critical race theory, making that accessible to students is really important.
00:35:32
Speaker
So I taught the critical lenses to my high school sophomores, for example.
00:35:39
Speaker
But what I ended up finding was they were getting sort of trapped and lost in the theoretical jargon.
00:35:43
Speaker
You know, am I using the Marxist lens or am I using the feminist lens or the colonial lens?
00:35:48
Speaker
And like that wasn't my goal.
00:35:49
Speaker
It wasn't goal for them to have an understanding of these things.
00:35:53
Speaker
sort of more theoretical technical jargon that they might encounter in like a college literature course.
00:35:57
Speaker
What I really wanted them to understand was the relationship between individuals, groups, and systems and the role that power plays and the experiences of those people within those systems.
00:36:06
Speaker
So I sort of centered that as the essential question for my year.
00:36:11
Speaker
That was the question that we explored and that was the lens that we viewed all the texts that we read through.
00:36:16
Speaker
So by doing that, it's a way to make those sort of complex theoretical ideas and concepts accessible for students and to give them ownership of them and to see how those things are playing out in their daily life, how they're playing out in the content that you're reading or exploring in class.
00:36:32
Speaker
And
00:36:34
Speaker
it was just really cool to see my students sort of take on ownership of that understanding and not being like, am I using the correct word to describe this thing that Mr. Elio told me?
00:36:43
Speaker
And more being like, okay, what is the role of power if we're looking at gender dynamics?
00:36:49
Speaker
or if we were looking at race.
00:36:53
Speaker
So over the course of the year, my students read a variety of these different texts and stories, but throughout the whole thing, they were always asking themselves, what's the relationship between individuals, groups, and systems, and what role does power play?
00:37:03
Speaker
And that accomplished my goal of having my students evaluate and interrogate the sort of systems and structures that shape our lives and experiences without feeling like they had to tap into this highly theoretical sort of language that I was presenting to them.
00:37:18
Speaker
So it's really when you're focusing on giving students ownership of that, it's a sort of Kayla's point.
00:37:24
Speaker
Once students understood that, they had a kind of quick design thinking unit where they had to go out into their community and try to figure out how what was their role as an individual.
00:37:35
Speaker
to interact and have a conversation with a group of people who had power within a system.
00:37:40
Speaker
So I had students try to get like a speed bump taken down in their neighborhood.
00:37:45
Speaker
The woman that they called at the HOA actually laughed at them when they first tried because they didn't think that they were being serious.
00:37:50
Speaker
I had students who tried to advocate for better mental health support at our school.
00:37:56
Speaker
We had a student who had taken their life earlier in the year and students were kind of upset at the lack of support that they felt like that they were getting.
00:38:02
Speaker
So when you're focusing on these sort of
00:38:05
Speaker
big transferable concepts.
00:38:07
Speaker
It's a way to help students leverage their prior knowledge and feel like I know, I understand what power looks like.
00:38:13
Speaker
I've been in a situation where I have felt like the other based on my race, class, gender, etc.
00:38:19
Speaker
And I can use that understanding and that knowledge to access complex ideas in the stories I read in class or complex situations and things that I'm seeing on the news.
00:38:27
Speaker
So what's great about it is it's just a way to break down complex situations.
00:38:32
Speaker
And it's a way to make those ideas and goals for students to really empower them and give them that ownership.
00:38:40
Speaker
I think two other ways I was thinking of as we were speaking that I just feel like I have to be explicit about, we've alluded to them, but the importance of iterative learning or cyclical learning, that it's not linear.
00:38:52
Speaker
And that, so, you know, we're very explicit over and over again that we have to tell our students that learning is not one and done.
00:39:00
Speaker
Learning is not, do I know it, do I not know it?
00:39:02
Speaker
But it's a constant lifelong endeavor of considering what we understand and
00:39:09
Speaker
comparing it to what we are learning right now and refining things.
00:39:14
Speaker
our prior understanding.
00:39:16
Speaker
And that's crucial because nobody knows what the solution is to inequity, for instance, right off the bat.
00:39:26
Speaker
And it's thorny, it's tricky, there's a lot going on.
00:39:31
Speaker
And so how do you bring that into the classroom where the teacher is relatively neutral?
00:39:36
Speaker
So I do think that it is, as a social studies teacher, I do think it is important that we are there sort of providing these
00:39:43
Speaker
controversial conversations for our students and sort of taking somewhat of a less opinionated stance, bringing in different videos, things of that nature.
00:39:52
Speaker
We're really asking our students
00:39:54
Speaker
even in math and science, so not just in the humanities, which is mostly where critical race theory might sit, is, okay, how does your understanding of gravity change now that we've looked at it in this situation?
00:40:05
Speaker
How does your understanding of kinetic energy sort of refined or deepened now that we've looked at it in this situation?
00:40:11
Speaker
And so like the whole pedagogical approach of, like Trevor gave that example of, here's this big overarching question.
00:40:18
Speaker
And we're going to keep coming back to it because when we look at how these concepts play out in these other situations, it makes us pause and it makes us say, wait, wait, wait, what I thought I understood is not quite, it's not quite right.
00:40:31
Speaker
Let me kind of come back and refine my thinking.
00:40:34
Speaker
And so I think that's huge.
00:40:35
Speaker
The other piece I really want to mention is that if kids cannot transfer their understanding from
00:40:43
Speaker
about bias, about racism, about stereotypes to new situations, then all this, or even teachers for that matter, then all the training that a lot of people are going through right now is for naught.
00:40:54
Speaker
And so I think that's the other piece is that by creating this culture of transfer, you're not just saying, hey, let's learn about redlining.
00:41:00
Speaker
Let's learn about all these things that happened in the past that were horrible and how do they impact today.
00:41:04
Speaker
But we're really sort of making sure students can recognize that
00:41:09
Speaker
all the isms in a new situation.
00:41:11
Speaker
They can recognize sexism.
00:41:13
Speaker
They can recognize racism because we've sort of taught them this culture of transfer where they can look and say, ooh, I'm seeing an injustice here.
00:41:21
Speaker
I'm seeing inequality here in this completely new situation that my teacher has not ever told me explicitly about.
00:41:29
Speaker
So that sort of culture of transfer really allows students to obviously to transfer their learning to new situations to see things
00:41:38
Speaker
that we want them to see when they encounter new situations.
00:41:42
Speaker
What you all are talking about is something that always comes up whenever we talk about progressive education in general, which is if I walk into a classroom and my goal is to teach something regarding social justice, for example, racism, classrooms, et cetera,
00:41:57
Speaker
and I just do a lesson plan, and it's a traditional lesson plan about those topics, I'm not actually teaching that much about the injustice because the system that I'm working in is still inherently oppressive.
00:42:09
Speaker
And as a result, the students probably aren't going to take that much away from that lesson as if it were taught from a conceptual lens.
00:42:15
Speaker
So if we were to teach it as students have the voice and choice, they are the ones that are kind of in control of this project or unit, and they are the ones going out and experiencing that and talking about their past experiences, that has way more resonance and a connection.
00:42:28
Speaker
And it also, in terms of like critical race theory, critical pedagogy, it's kind of meta.
00:42:33
Speaker
You're changing the classroom management and classroom style to reflect the systems that you want to see in the world.
00:42:40
Speaker
And we're kind of balancing out like, I guess, like the Delpit argument of,
00:42:45
Speaker
You need to hold students to a high standard and they need to have some knowledge equipped like in their back pocket that if they go off into the quote unquote real world, they're ready to go.
00:42:54
Speaker
On the other hand, we also have to ensure that from like, I guess, like a Garou or Hook standpoint that
00:43:01
Speaker
You're also equipping students with the necessary knowledge and necessary anti-authoritarianism that they can also go out and change that world.
00:43:10
Speaker
Our goal isn't necessarily to prepare students for the world that it is today.
00:43:12
Speaker
Our goal is to change how they actually view the world so that they can change it later.
00:43:16
Speaker
And by changing these systems and focusing on concepts,
00:43:20
Speaker
that meta side of things is what's really going to do that, not the explicit here's this, this, and this.
00:43:26
Speaker
Delicious.
00:43:27
Speaker
The listeners can't see, but we're all nodding our heads as you're saying the part about the goal is not for students to navigate the world that exists, but to create the worlds that should exist, that they think, not we think, should exist.
00:43:40
Speaker
And so I think that's just delicious.
00:43:44
Speaker
And I think that
00:43:46
Speaker
Going back to Julie's reference to our disciplinary literacy chapter and our modern literacy chapter, that really is where we kind of flesh out that balance between the sort of like Delpit versus Hooks sort of dynamic where students need to have access to academic discourses in order to enter into those spaces where they can make systemic change.
00:44:03
Speaker
But at the same time, if all you do is give them access to those without also empowering them to change them, you aren't changing anything.
00:44:10
Speaker
So that disciplinary literacy is really thinking about how can we teach students in ways that allow them to construct and build knowledge in the way that experts in the field would
00:44:19
Speaker
That's where the teacher has expertise in creating learning experiences.
00:44:23
Speaker
But then our modern literacies chapter is based off a lot of research from people like James Paul Gee, Langshere and Noble, Bill Cope and Mary Clansis around this thing emerging called new literacies, which is this idea that there are all of these new discourses and bodies of knowledge that our students have access to that we don't.
00:44:41
Speaker
But if you think about concepts, patterns, and structures, students can take what they learn about collaboration, communication, negotiation, and inquiry in a more traditional sort of academic context, like a Socratic seminar or some sort of research presentation.
00:44:58
Speaker
But then also keeping in mind, the goal is to have them then transfer that understanding of those concepts and structures to, I've had students produce a podcast.
00:45:07
Speaker
So like they have the academic discourse, but then it's like, okay, so you take these concepts that we've talked about and you're going to pick a book that you are interested in that explore these themes.
00:45:17
Speaker
And now you're gonna create a podcast, but they're still, because they're working in a group, because they're having conversation, because they are collaborating with one another and asking questions, they're still using those same concepts, those same structures, but they become the expert because they understand how the different stylistics behind the way those conversations play out in their favorite podcasts or on their favorite YouTube channels.
00:45:36
Speaker
So it's really creating a bridge between those two sort of seemingly dichotomous things.
00:45:41
Speaker
And it's more about thinking about them on a continuum.
00:45:44
Speaker
And how can we sort of oscillate back and forth between those two things to satisfy the realities that teachers have in the classroom, while also empowering a generation of students who can change those realities to be more accessible and open.
00:46:02
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
00:46:05
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:46:09
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.