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Teaching Students More by Hovering Less with Miriam Plotinsky
45 Plays1 year ago
On today’s episode: Author and instructional specialist Miriam Plotinsky joins us to talk about the ideas in her new book, Teach More, Hover Less. Some teachers can’t resist the urge to hover, but even with the best of intentions, hovering can limit the transformative experiences students might otherwise encounter if they are treated as active participants in the learning process. Listen to Miriam, Ed, and Bo chat about teaching more by hovering less.
Topics:
04:30 Hovering, what it is and looks like
07:20 Changing Teacher Education
10:30 Challenging the blank slate theory
13:10 Underlying philosophy of hovering less
16:30 Experimentation in the classroom
18:45 Warm demanders
22:00 Book banning
26:20 Giving kids choices and intrinsic motivation
For more information about Miriam Plotinsky and her work, visit miriamplotinsky.com. Her book, Teach More, Hover Less is available for purchase on Amazon and W.W. Norton.
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Transcript
Building Connections and Respecting Student Input
00:00:00
Speaker
It's not just about building a personal connection with kids, super important to do that.
00:00:04
Speaker
But are we also then backing that up in the classroom in the way that we talk to them?
00:00:08
Speaker
Yes, I know that you like this band and that you're really into music, but am I also respecting what you have to say about this content area, even if I don't necessarily agree with it, even if it's not what I was trying to teach at this moment?
00:00:22
Speaker
Can we give kids that opportunity?
00:00:24
Speaker
Because until we do that, we can't really back away more to let them do more.
Introduction of Hosts and Guest Speaker
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
00:00:42
Speaker
I'm your host, Ed Madison.
00:00:44
Speaker
I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes, and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
00:01:03
Speaker
And I'm Ed's co-host, Bo Brusco, a former English language arts teacher and multimedia journalist.
00:01:09
Speaker
And it is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you our guest today, Miriam Plotinsky.
Guest's Background in Student-Centered Learning
00:01:14
Speaker
Miriam is an author and instructional specialist who addresses challenges in both teaching and leading across schools with a wide range of differentiated needs.
00:01:23
Speaker
She has taught and led at the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland for more than 20 years and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
00:01:32
Speaker
Her first of three books to come out in the last year, Teach More, Hover Less, How to Stop Micromanaging Your Secondary Classroom, is a practical guide to a student-centered instructional approach that removes the necessity of teacher micromanagement.
00:01:46
Speaker
And I can't wait to dive into that.
00:01:48
Speaker
How's it going, Miriam?
00:01:50
Speaker
It is going well.
00:01:51
Speaker
Thank you for asking.
Inspiration Behind Miriam's Book
00:01:52
Speaker
Let's start about the origins of your book and when you felt the first spark that led to its creation.
00:02:01
Speaker
So essentially it goes back a long way.
00:02:04
Speaker
I was teaching, I'm an ELA, that's my background.
00:02:08
Speaker
And I was teaching, you know, pretty standard ELA classes and a creative writing teacher at the school that I was working in moved on.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I don't know why I asked that day, but I went up to my department chair and I said, Hey, anybody teaching this class?
00:02:23
Speaker
And she asked, do you have any background in creative writing?
00:02:25
Speaker
And I said, no, not really.
00:02:28
Speaker
But somehow it became the class that I was, I was,
00:02:31
Speaker
And what happened in that class, it felt like an accident at first.
00:02:35
Speaker
There are all these projects that students would do, all these writing assignments.
00:02:39
Speaker
And then the first semester or so, I was a lot more prescriptive because that was really the way that I was.
00:02:44
Speaker
That was how I had been trained and thought about teaching.
00:02:48
Speaker
But then I noticed that all the kids in the class were there for the same reason.
00:02:51
Speaker
They had elected, it was an elective.
00:02:53
Speaker
to come into the class and express themselves through writing.
00:02:56
Speaker
And they were saying things like, well, this is not a project I feel really passionate about.
00:03:00
Speaker
What if I write, I'm writing a book, and I would think, wow, you're writing a book.
00:03:04
Speaker
Can I write a chapter and turn that in instead of this other project?
00:03:07
Speaker
And I started to wonder why I kept saying no.
00:03:11
Speaker
Was there a really good reason?
00:03:13
Speaker
Because sometimes when kids ask if they can try alternate pathways, there are very good reasons for saying no.
00:03:18
Speaker
There are some curriculum goals we have to meet and we can get into all that.
00:03:22
Speaker
I was saying no more than I needed to.
00:03:24
Speaker
And so gradually I really let go of a lot of what was happening.
00:03:29
Speaker
And essentially the result was magical.
00:03:31
Speaker
Kids would be so excited and so engaged and so focused.
00:03:35
Speaker
And I started to think, well, what if I do this in my other classes?
00:03:38
Speaker
What if I try this in a more curriculum based class?
00:03:41
Speaker
Again, not necessarily all the time with quite as much freedom, but try to apply what I can, where I can.
00:03:48
Speaker
And that was also really effective.
00:03:50
Speaker
And it got to the point where I would try to, as a school leader, because I moved into school leadership, explain some strategies to teachers.
00:03:56
Speaker
And it just wasn't translating the way I wanted it to.
00:04:00
Speaker
So in a way, I think writing this book was a little bit...
Hovering in Teaching and Learned Helplessness
00:04:07
Speaker
a little selfish maybe because I wanted to communicate something that I hadn't been communicating before, but also really written for the benefit of teachers, which is how do we let go?
00:04:17
Speaker
How do we do that in a very active way?
00:04:19
Speaker
And so the book itself, the way it's structured, really more tools than writing, just so that you can dig in and try a bunch of things.
00:04:27
Speaker
And so it's really illustrative of that approach, of that what I call hover-free approach as opposed to the helicopter teaching model.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:35
Speaker
Well, there's so much in there already that I want to talk about, but let's just start with sort of the basic premise.
00:04:41
Speaker
Can you tell us what hovering is, at least how you define it, and then maybe give us an example of what it might look like in the classroom?
00:04:51
Speaker
Hovering is really exactly what it sounds like.
00:04:54
Speaker
The teacher presence is
00:04:56
Speaker
is far too heavy in a classroom like that.
00:04:59
Speaker
And I feel you are hovering if you are leaving your classroom every day, feeling completely tapped and exhausted, feeling like you are trying to be everywhere
Challenges in Student-Centered Learning
00:05:07
Speaker
at the same time, feeling like you're trying to play a game of whack-a-mole with student engagement or attention.
00:05:12
Speaker
So it really is a trust and a control
00:05:17
Speaker
element of I need to be here every day, making every piece of learning happen.
00:05:21
Speaker
If I'm not, they won't do it.
00:05:24
Speaker
It's really that mindset.
00:05:25
Speaker
And that comes into play.
00:05:27
Speaker
You know, we see that with much more teacher directed methods, with teachers really moving around, not in an intentional way, but maybe in a more frenetic or concerned way, just trying to be everywhere all at once.
00:05:39
Speaker
That's what hovering looks like.
00:05:41
Speaker
What you just described, Miriam, makes me think about how that kind of hovering environment, as you described, is perfect sort of soil to plant the seeds of learned helplessness.
00:05:57
Speaker
Does that sound fair to say?
00:05:59
Speaker
Absolutely fair to say.
00:06:00
Speaker
I mean, the more that we give people,
00:06:02
Speaker
the less we're listening and the less we give them the opportunity.
00:06:05
Speaker
I mean, it's the classic example of why wait time exists.
00:06:08
Speaker
Wait time exists so that when a student is given an opportunity to share what they know, we're supposed to wait five full seconds.
00:06:14
Speaker
We're supposed to actually count to five in our heads before we jump in.
00:06:18
Speaker
But the average teacher waits 0.5 seconds, which is really a much shorter period of time.
00:06:24
Speaker
And they think they're helping.
00:06:25
Speaker
The intent is to help.
00:06:27
Speaker
But what we're really doing is we're cutting off student thought before it can be processed and formed.
00:06:31
Speaker
And that in turn,
00:06:33
Speaker
does create some enabling and some learned helplessness.
00:06:37
Speaker
One of my mentors is Ron Begetto, Professor Ron Begetto at University of Arizona, whose expertise is around creativity in the classroom.
00:06:47
Speaker
And he often talks about what he calls the tyranny of the lesson plan in terms of the way teachers are taught to teach that says that if you're not hitting point A, B, and C in that order, something's wrong.
00:07:00
Speaker
And it doesn't leave room for the magic that can happen and any sense of spontaneity to happen.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I think that's basically kind of what you're tapping into and talking about hovering.
00:07:12
Speaker
And so I guess, how do we change teacher education?
Reforming Teacher Education
00:07:17
Speaker
Because that's kind of where these bad habits are born.
00:07:23
Speaker
Teacher education is such an interesting topic because it does vary so widely from district to district and from school to school.
00:07:30
Speaker
I teach teachers.
00:07:31
Speaker
I teach a course in the evenings called the skillful teacher, where we really go back into, you know, it's not teaching 101, but it's how do we put some intention behind what we do?
00:07:42
Speaker
How do we create a classroom space where kids can speak more and we can listen more?
00:07:48
Speaker
And ultimately, what that means is that we embrace the mindset of
00:07:53
Speaker
teaching as I know that we say this, it's a growth process, but we have to continue making space and time for teacher education in ways that teachers really want to approach it.
00:08:03
Speaker
A lot of times, and I talk about this in my second book, professional development is done to teachers.
00:08:07
Speaker
It's not done in collaboration with teachers.
00:08:09
Speaker
We tell people what we think they should learn.
00:08:12
Speaker
They, you know, they either sometimes they care, but most of the time they don't.
00:08:16
Speaker
And sometimes they pretend to care.
00:08:18
Speaker
But whatever's happening, the teacher training, it has to happen on the job and there has to be, you know, an interest in things that directly relate to the teacher's day.
The Role of Choice and Agency in Learning
00:08:27
Speaker
I think the reason that classes that are geared toward teachers for teachers, that teachers also are part of facilitating are such a win is that you need someone in there who really understands the experience and what it's like.
00:08:39
Speaker
So there would have to be a whole other mindset about teacher training, because right now the way that we look at it is,
00:08:44
Speaker
You get your certification one way or another, you go into the classroom, you go through a period of evaluation that is then somewhat intermittent afterward, and then you're done.
00:08:55
Speaker
And that's just not the way we can do this, especially, you know, when we think about what happened in 2020 when we transitioned into online learning, and then we transitioned back into schools with masks and what happened during that time.
00:09:09
Speaker
I think we're still seeing a lot of interesting ripple effects on kids and on teachers.
00:09:14
Speaker
in how we deliver instruction and how kids receive it.
00:09:17
Speaker
We need some reminders about student-centered learning.
00:09:20
Speaker
It's really fallen by the wayside.
00:09:21
Speaker
We all know it's a good idea, but we haven't been doing as much of it.
00:09:24
Speaker
And there are reasons for that.
00:09:27
Speaker
I was just going to say with the Art Effective Communicators course, one of the things we talk about is how journalistic learning kind of helps you make that shift where instead of being the sage on a stage as a teacher, you become the guide on the side.
00:09:45
Speaker
And one of the things I want to kind of dive in here is really the student benefits of
00:09:53
Speaker
hovering less and thereby teaching more because like we talked about earlier, when it's so rigid and there's too much scaffolding, not only is there learned helplessness, but it really kind of dissolves any opportunity for spontaneity and awe in the classroom.
00:10:10
Speaker
And often it's the unexpected student-led experiences that really are so impactful and really have a big effect on students.
Recognizing Students' Pre-existing Knowledge
00:10:22
Speaker
Well, to do that, you have to approach with a mindset of of kids already coming to you with knowledge.
00:10:29
Speaker
They're already coming to you with something to contribute.
00:10:32
Speaker
I read this really terrible article several months ago.
00:10:36
Speaker
There was a I think it was a Harvard professor.
00:10:38
Speaker
who did a bunch of research.
00:10:39
Speaker
And one of his big points with that student-centered learning is ruining American education because children are blank slates.
00:10:46
Speaker
That's what he called them.
00:10:48
Speaker
Are you serious?
00:10:49
Speaker
I'm serious.
00:10:51
Speaker
A 94-year-old professor decided that kids are blank because that used to be the philosophy of education that kids really needed to be filled as though they were these vessels.
00:10:59
Speaker
And he said they were really coming to us with nothing.
00:11:02
Speaker
And I remember thinking, who comes to us
00:11:05
Speaker
with nothing.
00:11:06
Speaker
Like really, really you're saying nothing.
00:11:08
Speaker
And the way that kids can really dig in is, is to be seen on some level, not just as they're not experts.
00:11:16
Speaker
No one's saying go that far necessarily.
00:11:18
Speaker
Although they may be experts at certain things that we're not, I'm constantly in awe of what kids can do, but that they are valid.
00:11:25
Speaker
They have brains that we value.
00:11:27
Speaker
They have ideas that we value.
00:11:29
Speaker
that they are scholars and thinkers and we're not just, and I talk about this a lot in chapter three, and this is what my third book is about.
00:11:37
Speaker
It's not just about building a personal connection with kids, super important to do that.
00:11:41
Speaker
But are we also then backing that up in the classroom in the way that we talk to them?
00:11:46
Speaker
Yes, I know that you like this band and that you're really into music, but am I also respecting what you have to say about this content area, even if I don't necessarily agree with it, even if it's not what I was trying to teach at this moment,
00:11:59
Speaker
can we give kids that opportunity?
00:12:01
Speaker
Because until we do that, we can't really back away more to let them do more.
00:12:08
Speaker
I think that's why a lot of our work is predicated on this notion of student choice and agency.
Misconceptions in Student-Centered Learning
00:12:16
Speaker
Often we cite self-determination theory, which basically talks about agency, competency, and relatedness.
00:12:23
Speaker
And they're almost like
00:12:24
Speaker
three legs of a tripod.
00:12:25
Speaker
And if any one of those has a deficit, like the tripod will probably topple over.
00:12:29
Speaker
So, you know, this sense that you're not only just a passive learner sitting in a seat waiting to raise your hand to respond to a question, but that you're actually
00:12:41
Speaker
generating some of the curricular content and having choices and say and the kinds of topics and subjects that you're learning about.
00:12:50
Speaker
It's a it's a whole shift that seems like sort of commonsensical, but, you know, it does.
00:12:59
Speaker
It's also so misunderstood because the biggest pushback I've gotten from this this book is, well, so kids are the teachers now.
00:13:06
Speaker
You're just going to sit back and be lazy.
00:13:08
Speaker
And I've heard that, you know, from a lot of quarters and I've said, I think you're under misunderstanding the fundamental philosophy behind this teachers are still planning and executing the lessons.
00:13:19
Speaker
They are the experts.
00:13:20
Speaker
They are the content drivers, if you will.
00:13:23
Speaker
They're the ones who have studied curriculum and instruction.
00:13:26
Speaker
But the how behind how that happens, how we deliver that and how kids receive it and how well we listen to them.
00:13:34
Speaker
If we decide every single time that we're the ones who have to give every piece of instruction and that kids can't do anything at all, especially as kids get older and older, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because they are capable of making choices and decisions from a very young age.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, I can see where there might be a little bit of pushback in the sense of crowded classrooms where there's more than maybe 30 or 32 students.
Managing Large Classrooms with Student Choice
00:13:59
Speaker
And it sounds like what you're suggesting is a much more individualized approach because students do have different interests.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so how do you respond to that for teachers who might be in situations where
00:14:11
Speaker
You know, they're saying, this all sounds great, but, you know, I'm just barely getting through the day.
00:14:16
Speaker
And, you know, what I would ask is, is it easier to get through the day teaching 36 kids the same thing at the same time?
00:14:24
Speaker
Or is it easier to divide that group of 36 kids into three groups and have them rotating through what you were going to do anyway, but just perhaps on different days or at different times or saying, hey, you know, here are the three things we have to do by the end of this week.
00:14:39
Speaker
Wednesday is a choice day.
00:14:41
Speaker
You can pick one of the three to work toward and you can then as a teacher have space to move about the cabin.
00:14:46
Speaker
So it's, you know, it's really about how you're structuring, organizing the same thing that you would have done anyway.
00:14:51
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Katlyn Tucker.
00:14:54
Speaker
She does a lot with blended learning, but she talks about the concept of taking your agenda and turning it sideways, which is you're taking everything you were going to do anyway.
00:15:02
Speaker
But each of those agenda items becomes a separate station or choice based opportunity for kids.
00:15:08
Speaker
So your lesson planning process isn't that different.
00:15:10
Speaker
It's just what it looks like spatially in a classroom.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I'm not sure if one's easier than the other.
00:15:16
Speaker
I mean, yes, you're all packed in there like sardines if there are 36 of you, but you're going to be packed in there like sardines no matter what.
00:15:22
Speaker
So it's really are you are you doing are you providing at some point, not every day, not every moment, but at some point in the week, are you giving kids a chance to make some?
00:15:33
Speaker
choices and how they learn.
00:15:35
Speaker
Because as adults, we take this for granted.
00:15:37
Speaker
I do this every day.
00:15:38
Speaker
I wake up, I write in the early hours of the day because that's when it happens.
00:15:41
Speaker
I know that if I wait, it's not going to work so well.
00:15:45
Speaker
I have that luxury.
00:15:46
Speaker
I make decisions about my own process.
00:15:48
Speaker
Kids don't have that.
00:15:50
Speaker
We don't give that to them.
00:15:51
Speaker
We tell them when to work and how to work.
00:15:53
Speaker
And then we're surprised when we don't always get the best results.
Encouraging Experimentation in Teaching
00:15:58
Speaker
What you're talking about right now regarding changing tactics in the classroom to hover less and teach more, something implicit in that and something you touched on in your book is the importance of experimentation.
00:16:15
Speaker
And I think that was an important part of the origins of this work too was your experimentation in multiple classrooms.
00:16:23
Speaker
And, you know, we were talking about, you know, young teachers who are really just trying their best and really do care about the kids or maybe like we mentioned with a Harvard professor, older teachers who might be stuck in their ways and a little bit more traditional.
00:16:35
Speaker
What advice do you have to them when it comes to experimentation in the classroom and changing things up?
00:16:42
Speaker
Because it, you know, it might be hard and it can feel really defeating at times.
00:16:46
Speaker
So, yeah, what kind of insight do you have in that regards?
00:16:50
Speaker
Teaching is by nature experimental.
00:16:52
Speaker
I don't know that many effective teachers who do the same thing every year.
00:16:55
Speaker
They don't pick up their lesson plans and plop them into the next year and just keep chugging away.
00:16:59
Speaker
I mean, they might take pieces and bits of what they've done before, but, but we are in a profession where we believe that failure is the way to learning.
00:17:08
Speaker
We believe that mistakes are to be celebrated.
00:17:11
Speaker
And you know, that happens all the time.
00:17:13
Speaker
The best lesson plan in the world that we love so much explodes or implodes, whatever the word is.
00:17:18
Speaker
And we think, oh no,
00:17:20
Speaker
But we also know that it's not that the whole lesson needs to be thrown away.
00:17:24
Speaker
We need to re-examine it and figure out why it went wrong and where it went wrong.
00:17:27
Speaker
And something that works first period might not work seventh period.
00:17:30
Speaker
That also happens.
00:17:31
Speaker
And why?
00:17:32
Speaker
We're analytical like that.
00:17:33
Speaker
We're reflective.
00:17:34
Speaker
We talk shop with our colleagues.
00:17:36
Speaker
So the whole idea of experimentation, that is teaching.
00:17:41
Speaker
That's actually the glory.
00:17:42
Speaker
It's also the exhaustion, but it's the glory that we have the opportunity every single day to try this again.
00:17:49
Speaker
And, you know, again, that can lead to some other pitfalls.
00:17:51
Speaker
You know, teaching is second only to air traffic controlling and the most number of decisions made per day.
00:17:57
Speaker
We make on average 1500 decisions a day, it's four per minute.
00:18:00
Speaker
No wonder you're tired and you go home not wanting to talk to anybody.
00:18:04
Speaker
But regardless of how you're doing it, that's going to be a natural, it's just a natural byproduct of the profession.
00:18:10
Speaker
So what I say to people is when they're thinking about trying things from my book,
00:18:17
Speaker
If you're happy with how you're teaching and you think it's going great, if you truly think that, then don't do anything.
00:18:22
Speaker
However, if you are going home exhausted every day or you do feel like you're stagnating or kids aren't doing what they used to do for you or, you know, just keep going with this whole train of thought, maybe it's time to try just one thing, like one little thing and see where it leads.
00:18:37
Speaker
Can't hurt my health.
00:18:40
Speaker
You use the term warm demander.
The 'Warm Demander' Teaching Approach
00:18:45
Speaker
What do you mean by that?
00:18:46
Speaker
Warm demander is also one of those really big misunderstood terms in education.
00:18:50
Speaker
So when we look at like a grid, so teachers who hold their students to high standards and high expectations are the most ideal kinds of teachers.
00:18:58
Speaker
They believe their students can meet the standard of learning and they expect them to do that.
00:19:02
Speaker
They believe in them.
00:19:04
Speaker
When we're warm demanders, we have those lovely beliefs in student learning.
00:19:08
Speaker
We express those, we're very affirming.
00:19:11
Speaker
But demander means we are not lowering that standard.
00:19:14
Speaker
We're keeping it where it belongs.
00:19:16
Speaker
where things get real tricky is when people do the warm without the demander.
00:19:21
Speaker
So I don't really believe my kids can do it.
00:19:23
Speaker
So I'm going to lower that standard just a little bit and they'll meet that.
00:19:27
Speaker
And they'll be like, Hey, good for you.
00:19:29
Speaker
That's not warm demanding.
00:19:30
Speaker
Warm demanding is the high standard and the high expectation together.
00:19:34
Speaker
You don't let that go.
00:19:35
Speaker
And no matter how you're teaching, hovering or not, that's your standard.
00:19:39
Speaker
It can't, it can't move.
00:19:41
Speaker
Well, and I think that has a great psychological effect on students too, because some of the, you know, I guess there are probably a good many students who maybe don't have that kind of push from any adults, you know, whether they're a coach or their own parents or family members.
00:20:02
Speaker
And so getting that kind of push, that warm, gentle expectation demanding, I suppose, from a teacher can be transformative, wouldn't you say?
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:14
Speaker
One question I always ask my adult students, my adult learners when I'm teaching a class, because this is the very beginning of our learning trajectory, is did you have a teacher who believed in you?
00:20:26
Speaker
when you were in school.
00:20:27
Speaker
And it's always pretty evenly split.
00:20:29
Speaker
I did or I didn't.
00:20:30
Speaker
I became a teacher because I did or I became a teacher because I didn't.
00:20:33
Speaker
It's amazing how that can be a motivator one way or another.
00:20:37
Speaker
But it's so important for kids to have an experience with an adult in the school building who does show that belief in their learning capacity.
00:20:45
Speaker
Otherwise, we have mindset difficulty.
00:20:46
Speaker
And that's why the first stage of have a free teaching in the book is mindset.
00:20:50
Speaker
And you're taking all these mindset quizzes.
00:20:51
Speaker
What do I really think about the kids in front of me?
00:20:53
Speaker
And you're challenging, maybe I have beliefs, but they're contradicted in action.
00:20:57
Speaker
And is that a problem that I have as a teacher?
00:20:59
Speaker
Because a lot of the time we say something or we feel something, we say all the right things, but then we get in the classroom and we don't see how it's not necessarily playing out the way we think it is.
00:21:12
Speaker
curious about where you are weighing in on some of the culture wars that are going on, banning of books and without getting political here, but it's a tough time to be a teacher.
Impact of Book Banning on Education
00:21:27
Speaker
I can imagine being a social studies teacher right now as we enter another presidential election that's bound to be
00:21:38
Speaker
complicated.
00:21:39
Speaker
A doozy.
00:21:39
Speaker
That's what I'd like to say.
00:21:40
Speaker
It's going to be a doozy.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:43
Speaker
Well, we're an ELA teacher.
00:21:44
Speaker
I wrote about, I wrote an article in education week about this about a year ago, maybe more time is, time is subjective these days about book banning.
00:21:54
Speaker
Because, you know, as someone who works in English language arts and who believes, obviously we're pretty much against book censorship, we think it's a bad thing.
00:22:03
Speaker
The way that people, the reasoning they have behind banning books is, is so,
00:22:09
Speaker
illustrative of the lack of recognition that educators get as experts.
00:22:14
Speaker
And what I mean by that is when we approve books for curriculum, whether they're in social studies or ELA or what have you, we're doing it to match content standards.
00:22:22
Speaker
We don't teach books, we teach standards.
00:22:25
Speaker
We teach skills and the books and the content and the articles are used to get kids to a certain place.
00:22:31
Speaker
And when, you know, very often school boards or parent groups, and I wrote this article around the time that the Tennessee school board banned mouse.
00:22:38
Speaker
Emma us by Alan Spiegelman was a graphic novel about the Holocaust and they were saying that it was highly inappropriate.
00:22:44
Speaker
Now, mind you, all the images in the book are animals, not people, because it's allegorical in that sense.
00:22:51
Speaker
They were objecting to all sorts of things, but they didn't really understand the book or the content standards that it met or why that book would be picked as opposed to a different book.
00:22:59
Speaker
They didn't have that expert lens.
00:23:01
Speaker
And so what's happening is that people are having knee-jerk reactions to things.
00:23:04
Speaker
And half the time when you talk to people who want to ban books, they'll admit freely that they haven't read the book.
00:23:11
Speaker
Or they have maybe only read a summary or a piece of it.
00:23:13
Speaker
They really don't know a whole lot about what they're objecting to.
00:23:16
Speaker
And a question I also have is, what do you think your kids are doing in their free time?
00:23:23
Speaker
You know, whether it's TikTok or other social media, anything they're accessing without adult supervision after hours or before hours or the cyberbullying they're experiencing.
00:23:33
Speaker
We can make a giant list.
00:23:35
Speaker
It's a whole lot more harmful than the book they're accessing in class with a teacher to guide them through any of the controversy and to frame it for them.
00:23:43
Speaker
So, you know, you're right.
00:23:46
Speaker
Ed, it's not a good time to be a teacher.
00:23:48
Speaker
If I'm in Florida, it's not a good time to be a teacher and some of our other states, because, you know, one of the big things that happened the last couple of weeks was this AP psychology.
00:23:57
Speaker
First of all, being removed from the Florida curriculum, then last minute being put back, but you can't teach this part of it.
00:24:03
Speaker
And I was talking about this with my, my teenager.
00:24:05
Speaker
I have a few teenagers at home.
00:24:07
Speaker
And one of them was saying, well, if you're not teaching that unit, because the state won't let you, what happens when you take the AP test?
00:24:14
Speaker
If they have a question,
00:24:15
Speaker
that relates to that unit.
00:24:16
Speaker
Do you just fail that part of the test?
00:24:19
Speaker
It's like, yeah, we're curating, we're curating thought in a way that's very, yeah, go ahead.
00:24:26
Speaker
But we also know the very thing that you ban or say you shouldn't read is the one thing that the students all look to go make sure that they do read.
00:24:33
Speaker
And so it's kind of almost, you know, it doesn't make sense to call attention to these issues.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:44
Speaker
It's a prime example of reverse psychology, right?
00:24:48
Speaker
Right.
00:24:48
Speaker
Exactly.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:51
Speaker
And what I was saying was that, you know, the very thing that we we we ban is the thing that kids go seek to find.
00:25:01
Speaker
You know, so it's yes.
00:25:04
Speaker
My dream is for my books to get banned.
00:25:07
Speaker
I will get so much traffic and so many readers that people will just ban my books.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:13
Speaker
Well, don't go read her book, guys.
00:25:15
Speaker
It's just full of nonsense.
00:25:17
Speaker
It'll give you brain worms.
00:25:19
Speaker
It's dangerous.
00:25:20
Speaker
It's so dangerous.
00:25:21
Speaker
It's a woman thinking.
00:25:22
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:25:22
Speaker
Don't let a woman think.
00:25:25
Speaker
I don't know if you've seen the Barbie movie, but that was also a lot of commentary there in that movie.
00:25:29
Speaker
Well, yeah.
Promoting Engagement Through Student Choice
00:25:31
Speaker
One of the things I wanted to talk about with Teach More and Hovering Less is one of the techniques used, or I guess one of the techniques you suggest using in the classroom to sort of promote student agency, and also a technique that's just been around for a while, if you go back and look at like
00:25:49
Speaker
teaching with love and logic that got really popular in the 80s is this idea of just giving students choice, you know, students' choices.
00:25:58
Speaker
And it doesn't even have to be like big choices necessarily, but just like, hey, do you guys want to...
00:26:05
Speaker
Would you like to write your assignment in a blue pen or a black pen today?
00:26:09
Speaker
You know, when you turn in your assignment or when you complete the assignment, do you want to draw me a picture on the back or start reading a book?
00:26:16
Speaker
You know, just small choices like that.
00:26:18
Speaker
Right.
00:26:18
Speaker
But that can be powerful.
00:26:20
Speaker
It doesn't have to be big.
00:26:22
Speaker
Well, exactly.
00:26:22
Speaker
This is one thing also that I say to people who say, oh, but student-centered learning, making that shift is such a big thing.
00:26:27
Speaker
And it could be if you really want to do it that way.
00:26:31
Speaker
OK.
00:26:31
Speaker
But my method is to try one thing at a time.
00:26:35
Speaker
Pick one strategy, see if it works, go from there, just little baby steps.
00:26:38
Speaker
And then, you know, and this is actually what the book that I'm writing is about, the smaller our habits are as we stack them on top of each other, it turns into something big before we even realize what's happening.
00:26:49
Speaker
So the more accustomed you get to giving kids choice, the more likely it is that you'll keep incorporating that and you'll become more successful with it and more comfortable with it because it doesn't happen overnight.
Fostering Intrinsic Motivation
00:26:59
Speaker
And if you have that expectation, you're probably setting yourself up.
00:27:02
Speaker
But one of the things we think is really powerful about our journalistic learning initiative with the Effective Communicators course is that they choose a topic that is of interest to them and that's relevant to them.
00:27:16
Speaker
And I think that is so important when it comes to teaching more and hovering less because
00:27:23
Speaker
in order to lead the students along, they have to have that intrinsic motivation.
00:27:26
Speaker
They have to have that choice, right?
00:27:29
Speaker
And maybe that's where the last bit of discussion we have here is the importance of intrinsic motivation in the classroom.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those things that people say that, you know, how do I shift motivation from being intrinsic to extrinsic?
00:27:45
Speaker
But I'm going right back to habits for a second, because I think that
00:27:48
Speaker
motivation is hard to, you can't force intrinsic motivation on somebody.
00:27:52
Speaker
You can create habits that will make that more likely to occur in a natural way.
00:27:57
Speaker
So, you know, once kids realize that they have some, some value that you see them as being valuable and that you're giving them chances to do that.
00:28:07
Speaker
In so many classes, we only see one side of a kid and it's often not the best side just because it might not be their favorite content area, or it might be the wrong time of day, or there are all sorts of things that are playing into what we see.
00:28:17
Speaker
So the more we can uncover their layers of what kids really appreciate, the more they will rise to meet expectation and really become more intrinsically motivated to do the work.
00:28:31
Speaker
But a huge part of that is us meeting them and saying, okay, well, every week I'm going to ask you to lead part of this, or every week we're going to try doing this together.
00:28:41
Speaker
We're going to create some shared responsibility in this classroom and you'll meet me.
00:28:44
Speaker
more and more with each passing week.
00:28:46
Speaker
So there has to be that gradual handing off a little bit of the control that you so much hold onto as a teacher, you gotta let go a little bit.
00:28:56
Speaker
But I mean, how important is that to helping humans, right?
Encouragement to Explore Further Reading
00:29:01
Speaker
It's just such an essential human experience that I think educators and leaders such as yourself are providing them.
00:29:11
Speaker
And yeah, it's really great.
00:29:14
Speaker
Great work.
00:29:15
Speaker
And again, Miriam's book out right now is Teach More, Hover Less.
00:29:21
Speaker
You can get it pretty much everywhere books are sold.
00:29:29
Speaker
How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:29:32
Speaker
For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.