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Eric Walters says teaching is real-world storytelling
19 Plays1 hour ago
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewaltersscience/
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning. Sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Fromert.
00:00:14
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In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom. This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large. The Learner Centered Spaces podcast is a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
00:00:40
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Get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guest.
Guest Introduction: Eric Walters
00:00:47
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We are so excited to have Eric Walters on our show today. He is the director of STEM education at Marymount, New York. Formerly, he was the science chair at Marymount. We asked him about his passion and purpose. and He says for students to learn how to solve problems they've never seen before.
00:01:06
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For students to understand physics in a real world context. When we asked him about his hobbies and any interesting facts, he said that he is an aspiring TV show writer and currently pitching two TV shows.
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He's a 21st generation Swiss and his favorite place to chill is Los Angeles. He's also an Apple Distinguished Educator. We are honored to have Eric on the show today.
00:01:31
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Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Eric's Journey into Writing and Teaching
00:01:35
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So, Eric, usually start with like the education journey, but I want to know a little bit more about your screenwriting. Oh, sure. um It's something that I've always wanted to do.
00:01:50
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And about, there's a long story behind it, which would fill up probably another podcast. um But about 10 years ago, a friend of mine challenged me to because i i was always saying like i i want to write for tv and he finally said put your money where your mouth is so i i've done the writing program at ucla and right now i'm pitching one comedy and one drama so um it's a great creative outlet i love to write um
00:02:28
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I love immersing myself with my characters and seeing where I can take them. um It's one of the best things ever. I'll say it's it changed my life in a way that completely surprised me.
Teaching Philosophy: Storytelling in Physics
00:02:42
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i I really love that. um My son is studying environmental law right now, and he loves to write and thought that maybe he write might write science fiction at some point.
00:02:53
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And, you know, using his science understanding and also his love of writing fiction. And it just really always makes me happy to hear that folks are...
00:03:04
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Writing in their spare time as as a writer myself as a writing teacher It just makes me really happy when I hear people finding joy in writing instead of fearing it So thank you so much for sharing that with us and I have all kinds of curiosity about if that impacts your work in the classroom as well um Absolutely um when I when you asked me um what's one sentence on my purpose or passion um i always go back to the idea that teaching is really about telling a story and for students learning is about telling a story and you hope that the story that you're trying to convey and the story that the students write in response to that
00:03:58
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align really nicely. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But I've always believed that all education is, is you're telling a story, it doesn't matter what discipline it is.
00:04:11
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um And you can weave really any narrative ah into ah whatever it is that you're teaching. So just as an example, i teach physics, um I could easily
00:04:28
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write an assessment that was um generic problems about generic cars and generic roadways doing generic things um all of my assessments and all of my problems in class they're all little stories they're a narrative about traveling through los angeles and people do things that are physics related and basically as a student you have to figure out um the physics behind what they're doing.
00:05:00
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That's really cool. It sounds like a science class I would really enjoy being in. And to that end, thinking about, you know, your specific classroom environment, how would someone who walks into your classroom, your learning space, how would they describe what they see and feel to build off of what you were just sharing with the storytelling?
00:05:22
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Yeah.
00:05:26
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I always go back to a visitor that we had, i don't remember how many years ago, but it was a Klingenstein Fellow. And the the focus of their research was on the student-teacher dynamic. And what the fellow did was he sat in my class for about a week, and all he did was count either how many times I asked a question or how many times a student asked a question.
00:05:54
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And on average in class, um it was about 40 questions a class.
Classroom Dynamics and Homework Approach
00:06:02
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And I think in thinking about if somebody came into my class, what they would see is it's really a dialogue between the teacher and the students.
00:06:12
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um And it's not just the teacher driving the dialogue. um It can be the students doing it as well. And the more that the students can do that, the better.
00:06:24
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um I do a lot of labs in my classes because they just think that's essential to students developing their understanding of physics concepts as opposed to me just explaining to them how to do problems um we also do a lot of whiteboarding we use these like two foot by three foot whiteboards so when students are solving problems they're not doing it in their notebook but they're they're out of their seats um they're collaborating in small groups and i think one of the great
00:06:58
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benefits of of using those whiteboards is that students can erase their mistakes. um Nothing is permanent. And to give them that message that learning is an iterative process, especially girls in physics, I think that's sort of the one thing I really want them to leave my class with. And that's what I would hope someone coming into my class would say.
00:07:23
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um my I'm always a big proponent of students belonging and specifically girls belonging in STEM. So the more opportunities that they can do that both in the class and out of the class, ah the better it is for them.
00:07:41
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And Eric, as I mentioned, we work at the same school and I hear about your class. I think we have some shared students and the girls do talk about your class and I'm always inspired. I definitely need to come watch you teach.
00:07:54
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I think we have a lot in common and that we're both STEM type people. We teach STEM classes. subjects, but we bring in storytelling. And I also have my students up at the boards writing.
00:08:07
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And i think that's why I was drawn to like, okay, I need to talk to this guy more. I need to have him on the podcast because we have so much in common. Another thing that we have in common is our philosophies around formal grading and homework.
00:08:20
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So tell us more about what you're doing with homework right now. you you said you were influenced by Alfie Cohn. Is that right? ah Indirectly. um So I'm really cognizant the fact that if you look at a student's schedule, the amount of homework they have to do is really off the charts.
00:08:43
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And Alfie Cohen always said that what we asked students to do is we asked them to come in and work a regular shift with a regular schedule every day. And then we send them home and we have them work a second shift.
00:08:57
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And We wouldn't do that to ourselves. We wouldn't do that to people we know. So why are we doing that to students? And that's why he advocated for for students not having homework.
00:09:11
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So that's always been in the back of my mind about thinking about if I'm going to give students homework, I really want it to be meaningful. I want them to be applying what they've learned in class.
00:09:22
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I don't want them to just be doing like at the end of chapter the chapter, do like problems one through five, because the real world doesn't work that way.
00:09:34
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Um, as a teacher, nobody says to me, go home and do the end of the chapter. Like, why we asking kids to do that? So quite fortuitously, and a lot of the defining moments of my educational journey had been fortuitous ones.
00:09:51
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Uh, A close friend of mine lives in London and I was talking, helping his son do some physics. um And we just sort of got to talking about homework and stuff like that. And um the idea about how much homework students have to do during the course of the week came up and he didn't really have a lot of homework during the week.
00:10:15
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So i happened upon a website for um the Ashfield school, which is in Kirby and Ashfield in the UK.
00:10:27
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And because i I was curious about school policies around homework and I mean, I could have looked at the United States, but I know how homework is in the United States. I wanted a different view.
00:10:41
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And their perspective is that their students have no more than 45 minutes of homework per week, per class, not per night, but per week. And I really thought about that as to how I could implement that. And quite frankly, I just about almost two years ago, I did it. And I said, this is the new policy, no more than 45 minutes of homework per week.
00:11:06
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I've done my absolute best to stick to that. And what I found as a result of that, couple of things, I've moved more of the work that the students are doing into class The work that they do outside of class is either finishing a lab report or i give them optional practice problems.
00:11:27
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And as a result, because we're doing more work in class, they're more confident in asking questions. And the feedback I've gotten from them is that if they're doing work at home and they get stuck and they send me an email and I don't respond right away, like their learning experience stops.
00:11:51
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By working on stuff in class, if they have a question, we can address it as a group because they often have the same questions about things. And we've built a much stronger community of learners because everybody's addressing the same issues. Everybody's...
00:12:11
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building the same level of proficiency because we're all discussing things together. I've also noticed personally the number of emails I get outside of class about labs and other assignments has gone down substantially.
00:12:27
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They're also much more confident about coming into my office and asking a question as opposed to just sending an email.
00:12:37
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I think you and I agree a lot on the homework idea that in my own classroom, homework is pretty much optional. And it's, I think less is more. And I even teach math, which is a lot of, not a lot of math teachers who think that. So yeah.
00:12:53
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um So we have some shared opinions on that. So my next question for you, you've been teaching for quite some time. So what advice would you have for someone who's maybe new to the field or they've been in kind of a traditional environment for many years and they're not used to the storytelling approach or used to letting students have more voice in
Authentic Learning and Real-World Connections
00:13:13
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the classroom? What advice would you have for them?
00:13:17
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ah
00:13:20
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Take a deep breath. and I'll quote one of my students, like, dip your toe in the water, see how it goes. I think one of the big challenges with like educational reforms is teachers and schools feel like they have to jump in like 110%, and that never works.
00:13:41
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So if you want to build in authentic learning experiences into your class, First of all, that doesn't mean having students do a PowerPoint, um but it means thinking about, to me, how are you connecting what they're doing with what's going on in there what either in their world or in the you know the outside world?
00:14:05
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And start small. So you know of if you're teaching physics, the easiest way to do that is just tell ask the kids when you're coming to school and when you're going home to from school,
00:14:18
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look around you and see, like if you're doing motion in one direction, can you find examples of motion in one direction that they'll come back and say, yes, we did. And then the next step is, okay, on your way home from school or on your way to school, when you see those examples, I want you to take out your phone and record them.
00:14:40
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And then they'll come in with their examples and say, okay, well, now what we can do is we can take that your video footage and we can analyze it and let's see what we can figure out based on um
00:14:56
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what you've recorded. And I think like I'm a big proponent of like just easing into things and thinking about, i always say like, I'm always looking for new ways of doing old things.
00:15:10
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And I think you can do that, but you know, it's when somebody says to me, in my role of overseeing like instructional technology, like I'm going to adopt like nine new things this year. And I'm like, no, you're not.
00:15:23
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um You know, go for one and do it well. And then maybe after that, do the second one. But that's my recommendation. Start small, let it grow, and then be willing to
00:15:37
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Let go of the control that you have in the classroom and let the students build their voice and build their agency that way. And you'll find that the students often have a lot of really good ideas.
00:15:50
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I saw that firsthand because um I've never taught at a school that's so close to a park. And we were very close to Central Park. And I took my geometry classes over to the playground. And we saw acute angles. We saw hexagons.
00:16:06
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We saw vertical angles. We saw so many geometry concepts that we've been talking about for so long. And I think it was great. They got to use their phones and take photos of all of these different concepts on the playground. And it was great fun. So um yeah it's something small. And I don't do that every day, of course, but it's something small that we could try.
00:16:25
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I have to admit that I pretty much do it every day, like myself personally. um It's a good way to aggravate friends and family is I'll be we'll be i'll be going somewhere, or we'll be going somewhere and I'll be like, oh wait, we have to stop so Mr. Walters can like record that carousel or that car going down the street.
00:16:45
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um I've been known to put a GoPro, like if ah I spend a lot of time in Southern California, I've been known to put a GoPro camera on the dashboard of the car and record my record us like driving down the freeway.
00:17:01
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But then on my phone, I have one of those runners apps that records motion. And I use that in class because it's like, here's real world data that you can analyze. So that's like, honestly, as a non science or math person listening to this kind of stuff as a humanities person just makes my heart really happy.
00:17:26
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So it's thrilling to hear how we can make things so real for kids. And I think that that's the missing element in so much of, like, I guess it's my misconception is in math and science, although I think science more so with all the science folks I know, like there's the phenomena is happening around us all the time. And I think kids will buy in more when they're more aware of how those two things connect.
00:17:52
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Absolutely. Absolutely.
Eric's Influences and Inspirations
00:17:55
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So as we start to wrap up, do you have any folks you want to shout out, Eric, that really do a good job of all the things that you're talking about and who have inspired you to do the work that you're doing?
00:18:10
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I do. um Crystal's one. um I just like what Crystal posts on LinkedIn is always interesting.
00:18:24
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thought-provoking. um And I would have said that if this was on somebody else's podcast as well. Thank you. And I mean that. I'm not just saying that.
00:18:36
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um And I just, like, the people that I work with in my department in creative technology at Marymount are, I couldn't ask for a better team of people to work for, to work with.
00:18:52
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um That's why um we did as our summer reading the book NeuroTeach. And it's been transformative for us as a department because, first of all, it sort of gave a research base to everything that we believed in.
00:19:09
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And it's really motivating us to think about
00:19:15
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like how how the brain helps students learn and how we're helping to develop that in our students and why we should be developing that in our students.
00:19:27
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um
00:19:29
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This will sound probably not too surprising, but our current head of school, Concepcion Alvaro, basically lets me and my department do what we wanna do and supports us and all of that.
00:19:49
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um But I would say, this'll probably sound sappy, but I think every teacher that I've interacted with that's been a good teacher has influenced me somehow. And it's one of the reasons I love going to conferences because,
00:20:12
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I love hearing about what other people are doing and I love thinking about how what they're doing can influence my students as well. So I think that's why, again, it comes back to like what I said at the beginning, every teacher has a story and hearing those stories and asking questions about those stories is really, really important. There are so many good teachers out there whose stories we never hear.
00:20:43
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And um that to me is the most important thing. Well, thank you. That is what we aim to do on the show is to bring in teachers who can share what they're doing and hopefully inspire each other and share great ideas. So Eric, you were definitely one of those. We have had a great conversation.
Connect with Eric and Mastery Portfolio
00:21:01
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And where could listeners find you online if they wanted to connect with you? ah The easiest place to find me is on ah LinkedIn, um which I believe you'll probably put in the post but um when this is released. But just search me. Ewalter Science on LinkedIn is the best place to find me.
00:21:24
Speaker
Well, thank you. This has been a great conversation and we appreciate your time. it's been my pleasure. I could have talked to you all day. We would love that. Thank you. Thanks, Eric.
00:21:48
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Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com. You can follow us on X at Mastery for All and LinkedIn in our Mastery Portfolio page.
00:22:03
Speaker
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