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33: Timeless Learning w/ Ira Socol
15 Plays6 years ago
Today we’re joined by Ira Socol. Ira is the public education director of Educational Technology and Innovation, a Design Project Manager, Researcher, a specialist in Universal Design technology, Senior Provocateur, among many other titles. Ira’s latest book, written with Dr. Pam Moran and Chad Ratliff, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, explores how maker spaces, project-based learning, and student-centered instruction radically changes schools from assembly lines to a community learning space.
In our discussion, we focus on converting traditional schools to ones that put students first. Often, when we talk about ‘student-centered learning”, we’re really just offering a faux choice designed by teachers. Instead, why not change schools to truly do what students want? Why not completely realign traditional practice to the needs of the 21st century? And what if, despite what everyone may think, students did better on traditional standardized assessment as a result? Ira offers research and anecdotes to help one understand the impact of zero-based thinking and what teachers/administrators/parents/whomever may do to transform their schools to be more human.
Despite some minor connectivity issues, make sure you listen in to this one!
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:08
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Hello and welcome to Things Fall Apart.
00:00:11
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My name's Chris.
00:00:12
Speaker
Thanks for joining me on our podcast today about progressive education.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project, which is brought to you by our patrons, two of which are Nick Covington
00:00:23
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and Jenny Lucas.
00:00:24
Speaker
Thank you so much for your continued support.
00:00:26
Speaker
You can find out more about the Human Restoration Project, as well as all of the great materials we provide, our podcasts, and our thoughts on our website at humanrestorationproject.org or on Twitter at HumeResPro.
Guest Introduction: Ira Sokol
00:00:42
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Ira Sokol.
00:00:45
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Ira is the Public Education Director of Educational Technology and Innovation, a design project manager, a researcher, a specialist in universal design technology, a senior provocateur, among many other titles.
00:00:58
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Ira's latest book, written in part with Pam Moran and Chad Ratliff, is Timeless Learning, How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.
Student-Centered Learning
00:01:08
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It explores how makerspaces, project-based learning, and student-centered instruction radically changes schools from assembly lines to a community learning space.
00:01:16
Speaker
So your book opens up with this idea of student-centered learning, which is something that we often talk about in schools, but really what that translates to is do what I tell you just in an individualized way.
00:01:29
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So can you talk about your goals of student-centered learning and how that relates to the message of timeless learning?
00:01:35
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Well, one of the things that I think the three of us have really come to the conclusion is that individualized ed is still teacher-focused education.
00:01:47
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And, you know, this goes back a long way to me, for me, as from my work in special education, that it isn't the job of the teacher to individualize education.
00:02:02
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It's the job of the student to personalize it.
00:02:06
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and to in in a term i have often used and have written about tool belt theory that students need to not only build their learning by themselves but build the collection of tools they use on a daily or hourly basis and it is in that learning that
00:02:27
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where the student creates the context and the environment that you actually allow the widest range of students to succeed.
00:02:37
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So child-centered learning to us is all about student-created context.
00:02:44
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And that means that it's our job as adults to find the moments to plug in if
00:02:51
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we see content that is missing to plug it into the activities of the
Critique of Standardized Models
00:02:59
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students.
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And that can range from a multi-age elementary school class
00:03:04
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deciding to make a Thanksgiving dinner together and then having teachers realize that they can get measuring into the younger kids and ratios into the older kids.
00:03:17
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Or it can be a group of students, you know, building, as we describe, tree houses in their homes.
00:03:25
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middle school cafeteria and realizing all the math and communication skills and science that can be plugged into that.
00:03:34
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The trick is to say to the students, what do you want to do?
00:03:38
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That's always the first question we hope educators ask.
00:03:44
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But what goes behind that question is what we want our children to be.
00:03:51
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And that's and we wanted them to be independent, collaborative, creative, capable of leading their own lives in a good way.
00:04:01
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And if we do that, we really need to bring the hidden curriculum of schools into, you know, philosophical alignment with
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you know, what we believe we want our children to be.
00:04:16
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And, you know, so schools can often, you know, talk about, well, we're going to, you know, we're going to have a, you know, a genius hour, but when they have the genius hour, kids still have to raise their hands and ask permission to go to the bathroom.
00:04:29
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So that, you know, that's just not student centered.
00:04:33
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I would love to talk about that because it's, it's one of the favorite things that I read when I was reading through your work, which is talking about genius hour.
00:04:40
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I'll just quote you really quickly.
00:04:42
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Authentic opportunities for learners to create, design, build, engineer, and compose cannot truly coexist within the standardization model.
00:04:50
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That's why tinkering around the edges, adding a genius hour to an otherwise unchanged school day accomplishes nothing except to highlight all that's wrong with our schools for this century.
00:05:00
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So you've kind of already touched on it, but could you elaborate further on why it is that genius hour really isn't enough?
00:05:09
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Well, you know, there's the famous Larry Cuban book, Tinkering Towards Utopia.
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When you tinker, all you do is reveal everything that's wrong.
00:05:22
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So if you say to students, during this hour a day or this hour a week or, you know, this two hours a week, we're going to do learning well, what does that do but highlight what you're doing the rest of the week?
00:05:38
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and or the rest of the day and students pick up on this immediately it's it's like saying i need to get you know i need to get to the one class where the teacher cares about me right it highlights what's wrong with all with all the rest so the the problem is is that when
00:05:59
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change just something around a moment and you say this is something we've added in.
00:06:06
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What it does for students is it shows the gap between what education could be and what it currently is.
Innovative Educational Changes
00:06:16
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I'm not saying you can't use that as a star to help teachers learn to let go, which is really what it's all about, letting the adults in the school learn to give up the control that they usually guard so jealously.
00:06:32
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You can use that if you have a plan to go further.
00:06:36
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But if your plan is to have a genius hour or an after school robotics club or, you know, or this or that, you know, maker time or whatever you want to call it, then you will never get any further down the road.
00:06:52
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So one of the things I usually try to do in Alamo County was to say if if someone came to me and said, we really want to do, say, a robotics club after school.
00:07:05
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I would say, well, I'll support that.
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I'll get you money for the kids.
00:07:09
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I'll even help you arrange transportation so that any kid who wants to participate can, and it's not just those with middle-class parents.
00:07:20
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But before I do that, you need to come to me with a plan for how this robotics club is going to, in two years, be robotics and coding infused in all math instruction.
00:07:35
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in every classroom.
00:07:36
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So it's the trick of saying, you know, you can tinker around the edges if you have a plan to get, you know, things mentally changed.
00:07:47
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The other part of this that I think is really important is that people will always say, school leaders will often say,
00:07:56
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Well, we can't change everything at once, but the trick is you need to change everything.
00:08:01
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I worked with a professor when I was at Michigan State, and she always used to say the hidden curriculum is the curriculum.
00:08:11
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Students don't learn the content of school, they learn the context.
00:08:15
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And so if you are adding a genius hour, say in
00:08:21
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middle school and you still have bells if you are adding you know maker moments into elementary school but you still say this five minutes is purely about reading you're defeating what your what you're trying to teach with the structures that you're maintaining so that's why we say
00:08:43
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You know, it is about many
Teacher Innovation and Historical Perspective
00:08:45
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things.
00:08:45
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It's about time.
00:08:47
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It's about policies regarding behavior.
00:08:51
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It's about spaces.
00:08:53
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It's about technology and it's about practice.
00:08:57
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The idea of taking a giant leap instead of a small step, I think is something that we could all get behind.
00:09:03
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And I really like that point that you just made about like finding ways to introduce teachers into taking that large step without necessarily
00:09:12
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ostracizing them for it so like the idea of like the robotics club i'm curious how then do we encourage the majority of teachers and administrators that taking that large step is valuable um without i guess demeaning them because sometimes people will take the hidden curriculum if you bring it up or if you talk about critical pedagogy or anything of that nature as a personal attack or like an attack like on their beliefs um
00:09:38
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How do you go about convincing them that this is the right thing to do?
00:09:42
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Well, you know, a long time ago when I first started working alongside Chad and Pam, Chad said to me, one of the things you do well, Ira, is that you put the philosophies that teachers come with, the belief systems that they come with, into a historical context so that they can understand where their beliefs come from.
00:10:09
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always try to point out to teachers is that the American education system was designed in the late 19th century to succeed with 20% of children.
00:10:22
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The whole goal of grade level standards and the first through eight grades was designed to get 80% of the kids filtered out of the education system so that you could invest in the 20% that would go to high school, which was
00:10:37
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you know, high school attendance at the start of World War I. So we have this system that's designed to do certain things that we no longer believe in.
Diversity and System Reimagining
00:10:50
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What I always say to teachers and administrators, it's remarkable that we have the success we have, considering that we are starting from a
00:11:02
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place where 20% was the goal.
00:11:05
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So, you know, we do better than that.
00:11:06
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And we only do better than that by the sort of sweat of the teachers, you know, to get more kids involved.
00:11:15
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So it's not the teacher's fault that they believe this.
00:11:19
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This is what they've been shown and taught all along.
00:11:23
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For administrators, though, you have to build the environment where they understand that traditionally,
00:11:30
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success in the education profession is predicated on success as a student in the existing system so you know I used to when I was at Michigan State I used to make this very strong argument that what we needed was a much higher level of academic diversity in teacher education programs in administrative learning programs because if you don't have a
00:11:58
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a mix of people who did well in school and people who did badly in school for a variety of reasons, you will never develop a change-driven cohort because people need to understand the disconnect between success in life and success in school as we know it.
00:12:18
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So, you know, we try to we've tried to make this not about a blame game, except to blame the historical system, which, you know, so it's it's important for people to know that everything we do, you know, in terms of those traditional practices was originally designed around a really bad intention.
00:12:40
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something we would now sort of recoil from if we listen to it.
00:12:45
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I wrote a dissertation on the history of American education, and what's fascinating about 19th century writers who created the system we have now is that they were very, very blunt about the purpose.
00:12:59
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They wanted to make sure to lead people out.
00:13:03
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You know, if you go back to the 18, say between 1840 and 1875, you know, the primary goal of public education was to destroy the native culture of Catholic immigrants coming to the country.
00:13:20
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There were, you know, and that's our whole class environment was built around that concept.
00:13:26
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So if we can explain to people
00:13:29
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what the history of education in this country is about we can win them over we can get them to say oh you know okay because teachers have been abused by this system as badly as students have how does the concept of i mean you might want to define it as well but the concept of zero-based thinking play into all of this
00:13:52
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Zero-based thinking is something I latched onto a long time ago.
00:13:57
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And it comes from originally zero-based budgeting back during the Reagan administration, the idea that you should start every year at zero so you can decide, am I putting money where I want it to be, where it will accomplish what I want?
00:14:17
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Zero-based thinking in education is, to use Pam's term, you know, all about the Bell Labs moment.
00:14:26
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And she tells the story better than I do, but there's that moment in the early 50s when the head of AT&T goes out to Bell Labs in New Jersey and says, okay, this is what we're going to do this year.
00:14:38
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We're going to imagine that the phone system of the United States has been completely destroyed.
00:14:43
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And you now have to come up with a plan to reconstruct the communications network.
00:14:49
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And over the next year, the engineers at Bell Labs developed at least concepts of everything we use today.
00:14:58
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Cell phones and wireless and microwave transmission and
00:15:04
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just dialing by putting buttons instead of spinning a rotary clicker.
00:15:10
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They just imagined into being this entirely new thing because they said, well, why would we ever put wires up again?
00:15:20
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That seems like a really bad idea.
00:15:22
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And so...
00:15:24
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Our translation of that is imagine if you've never seen a school, you'd never heard of a school, but you had to get kids from age four to say 18 or 22, what would you do?
00:15:37
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And if you can think with that blank slate, you sort of get to your point.
00:15:43
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North star of thinking this is where I want to go.
00:15:47
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We can't make that leap all in one shot.
00:15:49
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It's not possible.
00:15:51
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You know, we have all this existing infrastructure and things like that in place and the phone company couldn't make the leap in less than 40 years either, you know, when it really came down to it.
00:16:01
Speaker
But if you have that
00:16:03
Speaker
North Star as your goal, then your tinkering will be done with a purpose to move you toward that.
Innovative Classroom Designs
00:16:12
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So, you know, what we can say, for example, is, and I think this is now four years ago, but
00:16:18
Speaker
We were faced with needing to add six classrooms to an urban elementary school.
00:16:26
Speaker
And what we did instead of adding six classrooms is we built this very complex space for the equivalent of six classes of children.
00:16:39
Speaker
K through five with six teachers, you know, all interacting built around a kitchen in the middle because that's sort of the hearth of the home kind of learning environment with lots of ability to flow in or out.
00:16:52
Speaker
The space has multiple levels because hills are part of the world and, you know, it has nooks to hide in and big spaces to gather in and all sorts of things like that.
00:17:08
Speaker
We did away with the concept of age based grades.
00:17:11
Speaker
That is, we said, you know, kids might cluster around and sort of home teachers as a thing.
00:17:20
Speaker
But but basically it would be this interconnected flow of things based on the idea of, you know, the aspirational peer, you know, which means the kid who can do just the next step that you can't so you can, you know, imitate and follow and learn from.
00:17:38
Speaker
So we created this as a total change center, but at the same time, we went around the rest of that school and we changed not every bit of furniture, but certain chunks of furniture, certain places.
00:17:53
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We developed a long-term plan that if this was a great success, we would be able to knock down walls in a variety of other places to create more environments like this.
00:18:05
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it reimagining this and led us to you know this this radically different space now we didn't make this radically different space for all 7 000 of our elementary school kids but we made it for we made it with a plan and so since that time we've converted up an entire rural elementary school into this pattern we just rebuilt um
00:18:35
Speaker
another urban elementary school and in this case we we had learned enough to know that we had to redo the entire building as we added on we had to add on 16 classrooms we but we rebuilt the other 24 you know at the same time and so so it led us into a
00:18:56
Speaker
into a place.
Insights from Irish Schools
00:18:57
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And, you know, but I will say that part of this comes from how widely do you spread your learning?
00:19:03
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One of the things that I did with Dr. Moran five or six years ago is we toured a whole bunch of schools in Ireland
00:19:11
Speaker
And we saw that, you know, they don't think of dividing elementary school kids up by age.
00:19:19
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And so we saw this, you know, marvelous level of interconnected learning.
00:19:24
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And one of the things that struck us was
00:19:28
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Pam said to a teacher, wouldn't it be easier if you just had a room full of eight year olds?
00:19:33
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And she just looked at us and said, I don't understand.
00:19:36
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If you had a room full of eight year olds, how would anyone learn to be nine?
00:19:42
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But you think about the way people learn outside of school, how they learn in families, how they learn from play with other kids, and suddenly it all opens up to you that you can do something radically different.
00:19:57
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The zero-based thinking is not to say we're going to throw everything out tomorrow because one of the things that we often focus on is that concept of aim small, miss small at the start.
00:20:09
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Don't do a LAUSD iPad moment where you put something out to everyone and it doesn't work.
00:20:18
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But start with your goal, which gives you the plan that allows your pilots to be
00:20:27
Speaker
a real opportunity to learn from.
00:20:32
Speaker
Hey there, we hope you're enjoying the podcast.
00:20:35
Speaker
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00:20:39
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:20:59
Speaker
So I honestly hate talking about this because I feel like it's always gross because I feel like I bring it up every single time.
00:21:05
Speaker
But it's how do you couple that with state mandates?
Balancing Innovation with Mandates
00:21:10
Speaker
So standardized testing or like seat time and an administrator or someone who comes in who's freaking out like this is not meeting the minimum requirements for X, you know, some really outlandish traditional policy.
00:21:25
Speaker
So how do you couple together these really cool, innovative ideas while simultaneously meeting the demands of the outdated system that exists?
00:21:35
Speaker
It's a complicated road for administrators.
00:21:40
Speaker
I'm not going to pretend it's easy.
00:21:43
Speaker
But I always think back to one of the things that we saw in Ireland and I have seen that other trips there is that though their primary schools, their pre-K through six experiences are fabulous.
00:21:56
Speaker
Their secondary experiences, which
00:21:59
Speaker
were really only introduced.
00:22:02
Speaker
Secondary education was really rare in Ireland until the 1970s when they joined the European Union.
00:22:10
Speaker
They adopted the British system, and it's awful.
00:22:14
Speaker
And so we'd have these discussions with these principals, and they'd say, well, but
00:22:19
Speaker
the inspectors will come around and so finally I said how often the inspector do the inspectors come around they said once every seven years and I said do you know they're coming and they said yeah I said well you know a little courage here you know you can fake it when you have to and it is thing about courage and the willingness you know in the words of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner to be subversive
00:22:47
Speaker
your teaching there are a couple of things that you know we've tried to accomplish and one of the things is when you do pilots of radical change you have to document this really well I'm a person who argues and I think the data backs me up that
00:23:05
Speaker
you know that 70s early 80s open education all the things that people tend to knock now you know whole language and and new math and all those things was was the only time in history when you saw progress by standardized testing in every group all across america i'll also point out that group is the group that co-age cohort is the group that
00:23:32
Speaker
you know, made the internet what it is now, developed the personal computer, you know, built the, you know, if you think of our titanic leaders of the moment, they're all people educated in that supposedly failing way.
00:23:48
Speaker
You have to prove success.
00:23:50
Speaker
One of the things that we demonstrated with that first big multi-age space was we there was a random group of students picked to be in there a little heavy on the behavioral issues but otherwise pretty much like the school we picked the matching cohort in the same school and
00:24:11
Speaker
and we thought that was a really fine school, you know, in terms of what we're trying to do.
00:24:17
Speaker
Anyway, we picked a matching cohort, and then we compared their score, you know, on the state test.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, without any teaching to the test, those kids in that multi-age space
00:24:29
Speaker
did as well on Virginia's tests as the wealthiest students in the school district.
00:24:38
Speaker
You don't have to teach the test to succeed on the test.
00:24:42
Speaker
What you need to do is get kids learning and understanding what's going on and
00:24:47
Speaker
and practice.
00:24:48
Speaker
So you have to create proof.
00:24:52
Speaker
The other thing, you know, another example of that is we had a principal of our largest high school after watching the film Most Likely to Succeed, he said to Pam and I, I got to do something different.
00:25:05
Speaker
And he developed a program called the team program that took, and I hate to use this term, but took the 60 incoming freshmen least likely to incoming ninth graders, kids who had major attendance problems and performance problems and stuff like that in middle school.
00:25:24
Speaker
And he built a program where they spent half of every day with four teachers doing integrated content delivery and then had the afternoon
00:25:35
Speaker
to take whatever electives they had.
00:25:36
Speaker
So we eliminated double-blocking algebra, double-blocking language arts, all the horrible things that schools do to kids who are in trouble.
00:25:46
Speaker
Suddenly, the attendance problems disappeared, the behavior problems disappeared, and those kids have done fine on the tests.
00:25:53
Speaker
And what that led us to do is to introduce that sort of across steadily across the board over a couple of years since.
00:26:01
Speaker
because it just makes sense.
00:26:03
Speaker
It builds the relationships kids have.
00:26:05
Speaker
And it has led us to a thing where we talked about high school 2022, where your ninth grade year is all about working together, finding out what you wanna do and sort of working in these cohorts.
00:26:23
Speaker
And then you go off and make your choices for how you wanna spend the next three years on your own.
00:26:29
Speaker
But you have to be able to produce evidence that this is working.
Courage and Success in Education
00:26:35
Speaker
Now, when we've gone to the state Department of Education and we're going to waive seat time, this, this and this, or Virginia actually had a rule that
00:26:49
Speaker
required us to in grade point averages weight AP classes and got a waiver last year to eliminate that so you can create a true environment if you're willing to be brave and do it but I think that willing to be somewhat subversive teachers do all sorts of things once they're in their own classroom and
00:27:19
Speaker
I'd say one of our best middle school language arts teachers, seventh grade, opens every class with a maker 10 minutes, build whatever things you want.
00:27:30
Speaker
And she said she does this primarily because middle school kids have a horrible time during passing times or they just had a bad time in the class before or they just had a fight with someone at lunch or whatever it is.
00:27:44
Speaker
She wants to break them of that and let them free.
00:27:47
Speaker
she's also furnished a room entirely with found furniture um it's all couches and you know different chairs and and things like that and you know she creates an environment now you'd say does that necessarily have an impact on
00:28:04
Speaker
you know, student success.
00:28:05
Speaker
Well, of course it does.
00:28:07
Speaker
You eliminate all the silly little things teachers and kids fight about all day by making the world more comfortable for them.
00:28:14
Speaker
So I think we can all do this from both directions, but it does indeed require courage.
00:28:21
Speaker
You have to have the courage to say that doing the right things for kids is what most matters to me.
00:28:30
Speaker
That's fascinating to me.
00:28:31
Speaker
It reminds me of a thing that happened to me last year at our school.
00:28:35
Speaker
Our school has always been very concerned that the state will come in and say something or
00:28:39
Speaker
You know, it'd be like, what the hell are you guys doing?
00:28:41
Speaker
That kind of thing.
00:28:42
Speaker
And we were doing a project last year, a couple other teachers and I, where we were building a giant two-story marble run.
00:28:50
Speaker
So, you know, those marbles, like they come down like this giant thing.
00:28:52
Speaker
It was representing agriculture, which is something that kids are interested in.
00:28:56
Speaker
We're like a FFA-based school, if you will.
00:28:59
Speaker
Really kind of bizarre.
00:29:00
Speaker
But we were doing this crazy projecting government class.
00:29:03
Speaker
And there was some government in there, but I mean, 80% of it was woodworking.
00:29:09
Speaker
And the state came to visit randomly out of nowhere, like inspectors.
00:29:13
Speaker
And they saw us doing this project for three hours.
00:29:16
Speaker
And what was interesting was that they weren't mad.
00:29:19
Speaker
They thought it was incredible.
00:29:20
Speaker
They were like, this is the coolest thing ever.
00:29:22
Speaker
You have kids doing this, and they're sanding things and cutting things, and you're not doing it for them.
00:29:27
Speaker
And they wanted to interview us and put it on their website.
00:29:30
Speaker
And the whole time, I was just thinking to myself, like...
00:29:33
Speaker
this is so far against what it says on uh ohio department of education's website on what we are supposed to be doing um and for the state inspectors it's actually what they want us to be doing so sometimes i wonder too if maybe they just don't know what they want because it's just it's so outside of the norm it's so not what they expect um because i think the perception is is that if you're
00:29:57
Speaker
trying to teach the test and you're not teaching the test very well, that's a lot different than if you're not teaching the test whatsoever, but you're doing really cool stuff.
00:30:06
Speaker
I think everyone, including the people at state ed departments, I sort of believe in people's best intentions.
00:30:15
Speaker
I don't think anybody's out there to hurt kids.
00:30:18
Speaker
I don't think anybody in education comes to work and says, I'm going to make kids move today.
00:30:23
Speaker
So I think we often realize that we need to realize that we can talk back to power and make our arguments convincing.
00:30:34
Speaker
Last year, we spent two weeks with our technology department proving to the state that our kids could dictate the writing portions of the middle school program.
00:30:48
Speaker
know language arts test and uh it would still meet all their standards but we did it you know they we got the state to come out and watch us you know work through this and stuff like that but people often use that as an excuse and i have this this story from and this goes back like seven years but i was working with a group of our middle school teachers and you know my plan for professional learning that day was i would collect
00:31:16
Speaker
whole bunch of teachers and their kids and say let's try to do something different together and see what we learn from it we were doing a science thing and it was the International Space Station had just made that video they made first or a bit celebrating you know Yuri Gagarin's first first flight into space and it was a fascinating lesson because you know kids these days had no idea why
00:31:44
Speaker
they hadn't heard about this before and why this wasn't celebrated in this country.
00:31:48
Speaker
And when you said, well, it was Russia, that made no sense to them because it was no big deal.
00:31:53
Speaker
And they were one of the things just and this is all big, but the kids were most fascinated by was that there were times when control couldn't talk to him.
00:32:04
Speaker
And one kid said, wait, I don't think they could shoot someone into space, but they couldn't get the radios to work.
00:32:11
Speaker
You know, like,
00:32:13
Speaker
But we're doing this lesson with the kids and Pam has sort of snuck in the back of the room because she's always wandering.
00:32:23
Speaker
And she's sitting there and this teacher says, well, this is all fine and good, but downtown won't let us do this.
00:32:29
Speaker
And Pam just says, wait a second, I am downtown.
00:32:33
Speaker
I'm paying this guy to help you do this, you know.
00:32:37
Speaker
But people build this world of excuses because it makes their life easier if it's someone else's fault.
00:32:45
Speaker
Because changing your practice is not easy.
00:32:48
Speaker
You know, and moving to a model where the teacher works much less hard during the school day, but much, much harder to prepare is a difficult jump for people because it's not easy.
00:33:04
Speaker
But you have to get away from blaming someone else.
00:33:08
Speaker
And this is through of everybody at every level.
00:33:11
Speaker
If your school environment is problematic, really that falls on you if you're the principal.
Equitable Educational Environments
00:33:19
Speaker
If your classroom behavior is problematic, that falls to the teacher to solve.
00:33:26
Speaker
um you can we can spend a lot of time blaming outside influences and lord knows we live in a world of you know incredible challenges from poverty and violence and all the things that impact how our kids arrive at school but um that's not an excuse for us not taking action on our own yeah let's let's talk about that because that's that's a huge portion of your book and i
00:33:53
Speaker
want to ensure that we get to it and that's that's the structured and unstructured and equity you talk about a lot so people coming from you know impoverished communities they have this label before they even get into school and many schools in impoverished communities i mean really don't have a lot of resources and that's going to lead between you know a much larger gap between those that have and those that have not
00:34:17
Speaker
even in how much they learn or what their education environments like how do we go about leading change towards those equitable classrooms whether or not we're in those classrooms or not challenges are you know and I've I've I've worked in troubled neighborhoods communities for for most of my most of my adult life in the 1980s
00:34:44
Speaker
I worked in an education program for a homeless service agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
00:34:52
Speaker
I worked with Schools in Trouble and Albemarle County
00:34:55
Speaker
you know, has in the top 3% of counties in America for income inequity.
00:35:02
Speaker
So it's, you know, it's a huge problem.
00:35:05
Speaker
So we have kids who go home to houses where the parents literally play polo.
00:35:12
Speaker
And we have kids who go home to dirt floor shacks with no indoor plumbing.
00:35:18
Speaker
and and everything in between we have 70 something languages spoken in our schools it's you know we face all of those things there are there are a couple of things that I think are essential in terms of how you challenge the inequities one is and
00:35:38
Speaker
I had a kind of contested exchange with the XQ Super Schools Foundation a few months ago where I said to them, I don't think you understand.
00:35:49
Speaker
You're handing out $10 million grants to build great schools.
00:35:53
Speaker
There are great schools all over the country.
00:35:55
Speaker
That's not what we're lacking.
00:35:57
Speaker
What we're lacking is great systems where every kid in a system has the same opportunities.
00:36:05
Speaker
And that's the difficult thing to create.
00:36:10
Speaker
So there's a belief in, A, the structures of inequity, but there's also the philosophy of inequity.
00:36:17
Speaker
And I say a lot, and we even ask this in job interviews, even for people who are becoming technicians for our technology department.
00:36:26
Speaker
You know, I say all the time, kids in poverty don't come to school knowing less, they know different.
00:36:34
Speaker
and how do you support that difference so long ago i was in one of our highest poverty rural schools and
00:36:45
Speaker
You know, and you know this kind of school, it's where you not only get breakfast, but you send home dinner for the family every day.
00:36:52
Speaker
Right.
00:36:54
Speaker
And all weekend long.
00:36:55
Speaker
And so you understand this and we all understand what this kind of place looks like.
00:37:01
Speaker
But Pam had just given me a kid's book about the ship's cat on the Titanic.
00:37:09
Speaker
and so i i walked into the school i said the librarian this was sort of you know just uh off the cuff moment i said christy i want you to read this book with the kids and while they're doing it i'm going to teach them how to multitask and she was like what
00:37:26
Speaker
I said, let's go get a class, somebody who's we get right now.
00:37:30
Speaker
And we grabbed this group of fourth grade with a substitute teacher, had no idea what to do.
00:37:35
Speaker
So it was probably really unfair.
00:37:37
Speaker
But we passed out laptops to the kids, not enough for everyone to have one.
00:37:42
Speaker
And we did that.
00:37:43
Speaker
deliberately so kids had to share and work together and I said to the kids we're gonna do what everyone does now which is when they're listening to something they look up what they don't know you know and they and they you know spread that knowledge around so
00:38:00
Speaker
The book opens in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and the first question was, it said UK, and somebody said, what does UK mean?
00:38:09
Speaker
And one kid yells, University of Kentucky.
00:38:13
Speaker
And then this other girl says, well, that's stupid.
00:38:15
Speaker
Kentucky doesn't have an ocean.
00:38:17
Speaker
And I'll point out that you don't need a whole lot of background knowledge to make the leap into where you're going.
00:38:26
Speaker
So just knowing that Kentucky didn't have an ocean
00:38:29
Speaker
was enough to get this group through community cognition into a different place.
00:38:34
Speaker
And they kept moving through this and people were shouting out possibilities and answers.
00:38:41
Speaker
It was absolutely fascinating.
00:38:43
Speaker
The kids were, once they connected with the whole Google Earth thing, they were looking up Belfast and Southampton in England and of course houses and you say, well, that's okay because that's part of the learning.
00:39:00
Speaker
When it was done, the teacher just grabbed the laptop, told the kids not to log out.
00:39:04
Speaker
She looked through the search histories and she said everyone was on task.
00:39:09
Speaker
And I said, of course, they were sort of interested as a thing.
00:39:13
Speaker
She was so excited by it, she called up a friend who was a librarian
00:39:17
Speaker
highest average income school and said, you got to try this.
00:39:21
Speaker
You know, this is so great.
00:39:24
Speaker
And two days later, I get an email back from that other librarian who says, my kids can't do it.
00:39:30
Speaker
I said, what do you mean they can't do it?
00:39:32
Speaker
She said, they're not willing to take the chance of giving a wrong answer.
00:39:38
Speaker
Right.
00:39:40
Speaker
Kids in that community are are raised to believe that there's only a right answer to things and their judgment skills are way below the judgment skills of kids who come from impoverished at risk homes.
00:39:55
Speaker
where judgment is what keeps them alive, right?
00:39:58
Speaker
So you have to look at what the capabilities are that come with kids' backgrounds and jump with it.
Empowering Students with Minimal Resources
00:40:06
Speaker
Pam and I often show a picture when we do presentations that freaks people out.
00:40:12
Speaker
It's an eight-year-old on a chop saw.
00:40:18
Speaker
But there are a couple of things about this picture that are okay.
00:40:21
Speaker
So...
00:40:23
Speaker
Say to the kid, well, this is really interesting.
00:40:26
Speaker
Do you think you need an adult with you?
00:40:29
Speaker
And there were adults in sight, but the kid, I don't know why.
00:40:34
Speaker
I'm the expert.
00:40:36
Speaker
Now this is again a rural kid, but who knows about tools, you know?
00:40:40
Speaker
And what he was doing was building a giant Jenga set for the kindergarten at his school.
00:40:46
Speaker
So there's empathy, there's, you know, brilliant level of measuring, there's letting him be the expert in that situation and finding the success.
00:40:57
Speaker
One of the things we found when we converted all our summer schools into maker camps,
00:41:03
Speaker
realizing that summer school accomplishes almost nothing for anybody when it's untraditionally.
00:41:10
Speaker
Because doubling down on what didn't work all year rarely has a successful end to it.
00:41:19
Speaker
So we eliminated the apparent academic content.
00:41:26
Speaker
A whole group of kids who had never seen success before found it and ran with it.
00:41:34
Speaker
And then when they came back to come back to school in the fall, they have the ability to be leaders and to be fully sort of accepted in things.
00:41:44
Speaker
The other thing that I'll say is you don't need a ton of resources to pull everything off.
00:41:51
Speaker
We, Alamo County, you know, what makes it a decent test bed is it's the median size school district in the country with the median amount of funding.
00:42:01
Speaker
But that means half the schools in the country have less, sometimes way, way less.
00:42:06
Speaker
However, our most successful things are done because you change the attitude.
00:42:12
Speaker
One of our first real classroom transformations
00:42:16
Speaker
When a third-grade teacher said to me eight years ago, he said, I got two questions for you.
00:42:22
Speaker
He said, I don't know how much furniture I need in my room.
00:42:25
Speaker
And he said, I need more whiteboards.
00:42:27
Speaker
And so I looked around the room and said, Michael, why don't you get rid of three-quarters of the furniture you have?
00:42:34
Speaker
Your kids are more comfortable on the floor anyway.
00:42:37
Speaker
And I said, and by the way, the floor looks wide enough to me to use as a whiteboard.
00:42:42
Speaker
And that simple act
00:42:45
Speaker
getting rid of stuff and saying it's okay to write on the floor we can clean it up later changed everything about that room and I remember just a little lesson that happened say a month earlier a month later kids were talking about communities and Michael said the teacher said well you know you get into groups and start drawing maps of your community on the floor well the kids were all over the floor they're drawing all these streets and buildings and stuff and
00:43:15
Speaker
Two groups bang into each other as they're expanding out and they get into a fight over who's ground it is that requires the other two groups in the class to mediate.
00:43:26
Speaker
Well, you couldn't have a better activity.
00:43:31
Speaker
So it's not like you need to go buy steel case furniture.
00:43:36
Speaker
That's not the thing.
00:43:39
Speaker
arduinos cost 15 a piece you know and kids can program anything they want with it there are ways to do things much less expensively we we did a big project this summer
00:43:56
Speaker
opening a new high school center that's another pilot, a school without classrooms or classes.
00:44:05
Speaker
The furniture came from Wayfair and IKEA commercial primarily.
00:44:10
Speaker
They're commercial entities.
00:44:14
Speaker
We had an interior designer who wanted to spend half a million dollars on furniture.
00:44:19
Speaker
In the end, we spent $70,000.
00:44:22
Speaker
You do what you can.
00:44:25
Speaker
And, you know, it's in 2013, well, in 2012, we did a thing where we simply pulled all the money left in everybody's budgets in January, whether it was technology or building services or instruction.
00:44:44
Speaker
And we gathered.
00:44:46
Speaker
We hired for 26 schools.
00:44:48
Speaker
We gathered together like a million, $1.2 million.
00:44:51
Speaker
And we said to all 26, tell us what you want to do that will allow kids to do something they couldn't do before.
00:45:00
Speaker
And it wasn't a competitive grant thing because we funded every school.
00:45:05
Speaker
It didn't matter what the project for now, $1.2 million spread across 26 schools is not very much money.
00:45:12
Speaker
Right.
00:45:13
Speaker
But one school that's majority Spanish speaking sent teachers to a Central American language immersion camp.
00:45:23
Speaker
Others knocked down walls.
00:45:25
Speaker
Others bought technology.
00:45:26
Speaker
Some bought furniture.
00:45:29
Speaker
But we wanted to show that with very little money, we could drive change in significant ways.
00:45:37
Speaker
And if you realize that you can furnish a school, and by the way, this wasn't just a school.
00:45:42
Speaker
There were three projects together in that $70,000.
00:45:48
Speaker
a whole office suite and a whole professional learning center were also in that.
00:45:53
Speaker
If you say this is how much money you have, you can figure out how to get where you need to go.
00:46:00
Speaker
But the other thing that's critical is
00:46:04
Speaker
It's not the stuff that makes the biggest difference.
00:46:07
Speaker
It's the philosophy.
00:46:09
Speaker
And I knew we had made a transformation down here, and it was in 2013 that one of the assistant superintendents said to me, Ira, somebody's building a new house near where I am, and there's all this stuff out there, lumber and cardboard.
00:46:26
Speaker
He said, I loaded it all up in the back of my pickup truck.
00:46:29
Speaker
Who do you want me to give it to, right?
00:46:33
Speaker
You know, so cardboard and the little blades they make for saber saws that you can buy like 20 for $2 at Lowe's.
00:46:44
Speaker
You know, and kids can build anything.
00:46:48
Speaker
You don't need the resources.
00:46:50
Speaker
You have to trust childhood and adolescent curiosity.
00:46:55
Speaker
and, you know, the native drive to learn that's in all humans.
00:47:02
Speaker
Let's kind of wrap up with basically selling your book, if you will, because I think it's well written.
00:47:09
Speaker
Again, I want to emphasize how cool it is.
00:47:12
Speaker
A lot of times when you read books about innovative schools and they talk about cool things going on and design thinking and all that kind of stuff, a lot of times you walk away going, well, that's pretty cool.
00:47:22
Speaker
I should go visit that school.
00:47:23
Speaker
Not necessarily,
00:47:25
Speaker
What can I do differently and like reflect on and change in my classroom or as administrator or whatever position I am?
00:47:31
Speaker
And I really like the fact that it has you question things like there's actual built-in reflection.
00:47:37
Speaker
I think that's really important.
00:47:38
Speaker
So essentially Tell us why you should buy your book
00:47:42
Speaker
Well, you know, I really struggled with the idea of writing a book at the beginning, and I think Chad did as
Timeless Learning and Educational Philosophy
00:47:52
Speaker
well.
00:47:52
Speaker
You know, I give Pam a whole lot of credit for sort of cracking the whip and getting us to work on it.
00:47:59
Speaker
But none of us wanted to write a how-to.
00:48:03
Speaker
None of us wanted to write a 10 great stuff.
00:48:06
Speaker
the great schools.
00:48:07
Speaker
What we wanted to do was first to tell our story, how we came to think about these things, and then to show that this was a conversation as it
00:48:22
Speaker
What has been since 2000 among the three of us and a little longer for Chad and I who actually used to fight on Twitter every night before we ever ended up working together.
00:48:35
Speaker
The and the final thing was to say.
00:48:39
Speaker
let us help you start to think.
00:48:42
Speaker
Not let us tell you how to do it, but let us tell you how to start to think.
00:48:47
Speaker
And so we wrote a book that I think is based in storytelling and the way
00:48:55
Speaker
we tell stories which is recursive and complicated and sort of all over the map because that's the way we think and we think there's an advantage to that nonlinear thinking.
00:49:07
Speaker
But then the next step is how do we bring
00:49:10
Speaker
you into this in a way that can work.
00:49:12
Speaker
So I think, you know, whether you're a superintendent or an ed prof or a principal or a teacher or want to be a teacher, there's something in here that can get your thinking going around what kind of changes are necessary.
00:49:30
Speaker
And I think of those ending questions and
00:49:36
Speaker
sort of activity thoughts are based in things we've done informally with teachers over the years.
00:49:45
Speaker
So I'll tell, you know, this quick story about, you know, the absolute nightmare for a first day teacher.
00:49:54
Speaker
We had this, like I said, this tiny rural elementary school in the mountains.
00:49:59
Speaker
And there's a new first grade teacher, brand new to teaching, you know, just out of college.
00:50:07
Speaker
At one moment, both Pam and I arrive at this classroom at the same time.
00:50:13
Speaker
So she's got the superintendent and some guy who she's not sure of, but it's clearly central office, you know, in a room at the same time.
00:50:21
Speaker
And she has, you know, wherever this came from in her teacher training, she has a bunch of comfortable furniture because we've tried to get that in most places.
00:50:31
Speaker
But she has it roped off, as she says, until the kids will learn to use it.
00:50:36
Speaker
And there's one boy who keeps falling out of his chair, you know, and she gets, is getting over and over exasperated as we're watching.
00:50:48
Speaker
And finally, Pam just grabs her arm and says, you know, I think he needs a different chair, right?
00:50:57
Speaker
I felt so bad for this teacher, but there's this lesson there about, first about how Pam Chad and I have wandered schools and watched them and helped people learn to watch them.
00:51:10
Speaker
But the other thing is the simple act of saying what you see as a behavioral problem is actually
00:51:17
Speaker
a choice in comfort, a furniture problem that needs to be addressed in this radically different way.
00:51:24
Speaker
And I think in our questions, what we're trying to get people is to question the beliefs they have that they don't even know where they come from.
00:51:34
Speaker
We asked a group of superintendents in Iowa last week, what
00:51:40
Speaker
what do you do in your schools that you've never even thought about, right?
00:51:46
Speaker
You know, what happens in your schools that you've never thought about?
00:51:49
Speaker
One of the things that we had is we have one middle school that has never used bells to mark the ends of classes.
00:51:56
Speaker
And what was great about having that is we could ask the principals of the other four plus our high schools, well, why do you need bells if these guys don't need them, right?
00:52:06
Speaker
Now, you've never thought about that before, but just think about that.
00:52:12
Speaker
We just want people to think deeply about how to bring their practice in alignment with what they believe children are.
00:52:22
Speaker
should have the opportunities to do.
00:52:24
Speaker
And so I love the storytelling and I love the possibilities and you know it's a book that I had to listen to after it was all done before I decided I liked it.
00:52:39
Speaker
People may not know this but I don't read very much that's not auditory because I really struggle with, I've always struggled with reading.
00:52:48
Speaker
So it has more of a we're talking to you tone of voice than I think, you know, we're handing it up to.
00:52:55
Speaker
So I hope people like it.
00:52:57
Speaker
And I hope we, you know, we are helping the national conversation about what schools need to be for kids in this century to succeed.
00:53:10
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed this podcast.
00:53:12
Speaker
We want to connect with you and hear your thoughts.
00:53:14
Speaker
Follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and other social media, and be sure to check us out on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:53:21
Speaker
If you want to support us in our endeavor of starting a movement towards progressive ed through high-quality resources, consider supporting us on Patreon.