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Bonus: Summit: Changing the Status Quo Through Effective Research w/ Dr. Susan Engel
10 Plays5 years ago
Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators. Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing.
Dr. Susan Engel is a professor of developmental psychology at Williams College, with a focus on curiosity, school reform, and educational research. Her many works include The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood and The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools. Further, Dr. Engel is co-founder and educational advisor to the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, NY.
In this interactive discussion, we’ll talk the importance of research and dissect how to analyze research results as well as revamping teacher professional development models.
*Apologies for the relatively low audio quality. First time we’ve recorded on Jitsi!
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Transcript
Introduction to Human Restoration Project
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Speaker
Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to summit number seven for January here with the Human Restoration Project.
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Today, we're going to be talking about changing the status quo by reading research.
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I'm super stoked to have this conversation because it's it's very specialized.
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It talks about things that we can actually use.
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It's effective.
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It's just a really interesting thing.
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Once you get past the fact it's just reading research, which might sound kind of boring on its core, but we'll get to it.
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So this is brought to you by our Patreon supporters.
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If you like the work that we're doing and you appreciate free professional development, please check out our Patreon page.
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There will be a link to that in the description of this video or in the show notes if you're listening to this podcast.
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Finally.
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If you would like to participate and join in the discussion, in the bottom left-hand corner, there is a raise hand button.
Introducing Key Speakers: Chris McNutt and Susan
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Just go ahead and hit that hand and I'll invite you to unmute so that way you can talk to us, engage in the conversation, ask some questions, or anything like that.
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Some introductions here.
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I'll start.
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So my name is Chris McNutt.
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I teach graphic design at a public STEM school in Ohio.
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And I'm also the founder of Human Restoration Project.
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And what we do is stuff like this, just free professional development.
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We offer free resources.
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We do a lot of stuff and you can learn more about that on humanrestorationproject.org.
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And I'll toss that over to you, Susan, to introduce yourself.
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Hi, thanks.
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Okay, so I teach developmental psychology at Williams College, and I direct our program in teaching.
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That's a program for all undergraduates at Williams who are interested in education.
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Some of them want to be teachers.
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Some of them just want to study education the way they would want to study history or chemistry.
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And for many, it's a combination of those two things.
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I've taught all ages from three on up.
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I'm a co-founder of an experimental school.
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What else can I say about myself?
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I've written quite a few books about education and about child development.
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I think that's it.
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Yeah, and I'm stoked that you're here to join us because I think that you're underselling those books.
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They're really well written and they're super cool.
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I think that they're like a huge benefit to progressive ed and plus they're really research heavy.
Importance of Educational Research
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Hence, these questions surrounding research because to me, that's a huge thing that we're missing within a lot of school communities is a focus on research and what research matters versus what research doesn't matter or another way to word that would be what research is –
00:02:38
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valuable for what it is that we're trying to do.
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So we have three questions here, and I'll just kind of briefly showcase this, then go back to our kind of normal video view.
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But essentially, what we're looking at here is figuring out how we actually go about doing research, figuring out what misconceptions that are surrounding research, as I see that all the time, and trying to figure out
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How can educators actually utilize this stuff?
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How can they go about finding it?
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How can they go about actually putting it into practice?
00:03:09
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So let's just jump right into this first question, Susan.
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I'll toss it over to you to kind of briefly explain why it matters to know the research that backs education in general.
00:03:21
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Okay.
00:03:21
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Yeah, I'll start actually just telling a little of my own history because it's so related to this question.
00:03:28
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So I was a teacher before I was a researcher, to be totally honest.
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When I was a kid, I ran a summer camp for little children when I was in my teens.
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And like a lot of people who teach, I didn't
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And to begin with, I didn't give it a lot of thought.
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I just knew I loved kids and I had a knack for it.
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Like a lot of teachers, it was just a feeling I had that I was good with kids, that I knew how to make make up fun activities for them or help them do things.
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And I like to be around them.
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And anything more kind of elaborate or for in terms of formal education regarding teaching never occurred to me.
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And then I went to college and I totally fell in love with developmental psychology.
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And all I wanted to do was be a researcher.
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And I studied sort of complicated things, early word acquisition and how children learn to participate in conversations and how...
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concepts first are acquired in the first few years of life and stuff like that.
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And even then, I really didn't think that my work with kids and my work as a researcher had anything to do with each other.
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I went on teaching while I was in college in New York City in public and independent schools, mostly just as a way of making money.
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And I
00:04:42
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I didn't think those two worlds connected until I began to realize that I knew all this cool stuff as a researcher that wasn't making its way into classrooms.
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And when I was in schools working with other teachers, I saw that they often didn't know the most interesting or most relevant research that would help their teaching.
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And it began...
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I began to realize that those two worlds were just too far apart from one another.
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So that's the, and I've spent my grown up life trying to bring those two worlds together, trying to help make the most interesting research accessible to teachers and help teachers figure out what kinds of research would be helpful to them and how to make it useful in their classrooms.
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That's the personal piece of this.
00:05:35
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More broadly, I would say there are two reasons why teachers should know what the good research is all about.
Empowering Educators with Research
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The most important thing is it empowers you as a teacher.
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It's the best tool you could possibly get.
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I promise you that you could go to six workshops on continuing ed days and learn how to make a cool aquarium or how to do a great lesson plan on a certain book or how to set up a project in your classroom.
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And it wouldn't get you a tenth of as far as
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It's not even good English, but it wouldn't get you nearly as far as if you understood how children think, how they learn, how they develop, how they get from being a three-year-old psychologically to being a 12-year-old, what they go through during adolescence.
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Learning those things would be so much more useful and powerful than learning three more, you know, lesson plans.
00:06:32
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So the most important reason for learning the research is it,
00:06:37
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it's the best tool you can have as a teacher to, to make your classroom a wonderful place and to help you, um, reach students and help them thrive and learn.
00:06:47
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The second reason is also really important, which is if you are trying to do things in an interesting way in your classroom, that isn't just following all the rules of your school, or, um, if you're trying to something new, or you have a different idea about how to do things, which I think is certainly true of you, Chris, um,
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and you, Nick, that you need to be able to explain why your practices are a good idea.
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It's not enough to say, trust me, I know it's better to let the kids make up a play than their diagram sentences.
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You have to be able to say why that's so.
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And often, really great practices that look unusual or unexpected and make administrators or parents uneasy are
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They if they understood that the research totally backs up the certain approach, whatever it is, we could get into specifics later.
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Then they're comfortable with it and they're willing to trust it and they're willing to let you have a chance to reach your kids in a different way or set up your classroom in a different way.
00:07:48
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So the second reason is that it it makes you much stronger as an advocate for your own way of doing things in your classroom.
00:07:59
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Yeah.
00:07:59
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And I want to I mean, all that stuff definitely harkens true for a lot of what we believe in.
00:08:05
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And I think it's astonishing for people to figure out how much the obvious stuff that you would think that helps students ends up helping them in research.
00:08:14
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So I mean, by that is things like play or having the ability to choose things they want to do.
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and not just cramming and memorizing things.
00:08:22
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All those things obviously help, and therefore the research supports that.
00:08:26
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However, what's interesting is I want to dissect that word, relevant research, because I don't know if you're familiar with the quote-unquote research ed movement, but they're a nonprofit, social media-heavy group that believes in...
00:08:47
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quote-unquote research and education.
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And what they state is that we need to go more towards direct instruction, more towards very worksheet-heavy, by-the-book style research because it shows that it increases a student's quote-unquote knowledge.
00:09:03
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And I think a lot of people that tend to read research might get a little confused or have some misconceptions surrounding what it means to learn, which I know that's a huge question.
00:09:14
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But I'm curious...
00:09:16
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Like, how do you how do you differ what research matters versus what doesn't matter when it comes to looking at increasing knowledge, quote unquote?
00:09:24
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Right.
00:09:25
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OK, so it's lucky we have plenty of time because it's complicated to answer that question.
00:09:30
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First of all, because there are two pieces.
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One is deciding what kind of knowledge you want about children and learning.
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And here, what I mean by that is, I think that there's a big tendency in schools and school settings to look for the piece of research that backs up the certain practice you're doing.
00:09:54
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I'll give you a very concrete example.
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If you've been in the last few years reading sort of books about education, then you've read the word mindset like a million times.
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Carol Dweck's world of mindset.
00:10:06
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And the tendency amongst teachers and educators is to quickly look to the end of the book or the end of the article and find the intervention that you can do to give kids a growth mindset.
00:10:19
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And then if you're looking to sort of like this group you're talking about to show why that's a good, those interventions are good to do, you quickly look for the result that shows that it quote unquote works.
00:10:32
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And the mistake of that is, well,
00:10:37
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understanding research usually isn't just grab picking and choosing a piece a study here and a study there and using the technique that's advocated at the end of the study it's understanding what the research tells you about the way that children's minds work and the way that they interact the way their social development unfolds and the way in which their thoughts change as they get older and i know that sounds vague and broad but if you wonder if you have a
00:11:06
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told us about how children grow and learn and develop, then you can be more, what would the word be?
00:11:18
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You can be a little savvier in figuring out which study is worth paying attention to.
00:11:25
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So for instance, in the example you just gave, we know that kids who simply memorize information may do well on a test.
00:11:35
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the week that they need to do well on a test for the school to look good in terms of, you know, state reports.
00:11:41
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But we also know that it has very little long-term impact on them intellectually.
00:11:47
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And much more equally important, it doesn't do anything to make them want to go on learning.
00:11:53
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And we also know from research that getting kids to want to go on learning is the single most powerful thing that can happen to them in school.
00:12:02
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Because, you know, if learnings to do you any good, you have to go on doing it after you're 18.
00:12:08
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If you stop doing all your learning at 18...
00:12:11
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you'd be dead in the water.
00:12:14
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So cramming kids with facts not only doesn't really change the way they think, but it also doesn't work in the long run if in the course of doing that, you didn't help them want to go on learning or help them learn how to be independent learners, to learn on their own.
00:12:31
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You'd have to have some understanding of what it means to grow intellectually to even know that that kind of research isn't useful for you as a teacher.
00:12:40
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So guess what?
00:12:42
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That's a long-winded way of saying that I think that one of the things I would wish that people would get from this podcast or from some of the things that I've written is that reading research is not about finding out the newest technique and the test scores that prove that it works.
00:13:02
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It's about finding out what researchers have learned about what children's minds are like and how they change as they grow and what kinds of influences really matter to them, which influences or practices hurt them and which help them.
00:13:14
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But you have to have a bigger picture in the first place.
00:13:18
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You know, the only thing I think of is like nutrition research.
00:13:21
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If you follow what to eat and what not to eat, and you're always saying, you know, butter's good, butter's bad, whole milk's good, whole milk's bad, carbs are good, carbs are bad.
00:13:31
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You just, as anybody listening knows, you go crazy.
00:13:34
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Every few weeks you change how you eat.
00:13:37
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If you understand something about how the body works,
00:13:40
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You can make better judgments about which nutrition advice, which specific studies are helpful because they make because you you're fitting them into a bigger framework.
00:13:52
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Yeah, that's a fantastic example.
00:13:54
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And it makes me think a lot about the fact that, you know, a key piece of education should be motivation.
00:14:00
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As in, if we teach kids that learning sucks, that it's like this very memorization-based, just really not fun thing to do.
00:14:10
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It's no wonder that we see like a declining reading rates, like a lot of adults don't ever read.
00:14:16
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That's right.
00:14:17
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Or we see a decline in learning.
00:14:20
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Well, there's a little bit of a rise right now, but usually there's been a decline in civic participation in government and voting and things that if taught correctly and what I mean by correctly is I've taught in a way where it makes things interesting and they matter and people see relevance in it and they see it as a fun, engaging activity.
00:14:37
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It would only make sense that people continue to do that well into their adult life, which is what you were just saying.
00:14:43
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Yeah.
00:14:44
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And I think, too, for the teacher's perspective, knowing the research helps us a lot and ensuring that we stay motivated because I constantly feel like I'm doing something wrong because I'm trying something that's kind of against the norm, at least in a very traditional school.
00:15:01
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And I don't have that research to back what it is that I'm doing.
00:15:05
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I'm going to constantly feel like I'm the one in the wrong because a lot of times it is you versus, you know, like a hundred people.
00:15:14
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There aren't a lot of people doing this type of work still.
00:15:19
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It makes it more fun to teach.
00:15:21
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I had an example the other day.
00:15:22
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A first grade teacher was telling me she was wonderful classroom.
00:15:25
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She's a wonderful teacher, but she was telling me, and she was telling me that she was doing an activity with her kids.
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It's a very community minded school.
00:15:33
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And they were going to do, the kids were going to do a little project on the difference between tattling and reporting.
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And she wanted them to understand something about, you know, that reporting is good.
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That's when you tell something worrisome that happened in the class, because you want your friends to be safe or,
00:15:49
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You know, you're worried that something hurtful has happened to somebody.
00:15:52
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And tattling, obviously, is the bad thing where you're rushing around telling the teacher every time you saw another kid, I don't know what, chewing their pencil or whatever.
00:16:02
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And as she told me about the activity, I was thinking, well, that's fun.
00:16:05
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That's nice.
00:16:07
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But what do kids need to develop that would make that more than just a quick little lesson about what you should do and what you shouldn't do?
00:16:16
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And, you know, I'm a developmental psychologist, so I thought, oh, they need to...
00:16:19
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they need to build up their, their inclination and their skill at perspective taking.
00:16:25
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So, and, and that's, what's really key in trying to help kids think about something like when to tattle and when to report, you know, what's tattling and what's reporting.
00:16:34
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So I made a very simple suggestion to her.
00:16:36
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I said, why don't you have each, each kid who's sitting there in the circle tell one time when they tattled and one time when someone tattled about them.
00:16:46
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And it was such a simple little activity.
00:16:49
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She could do it instantly.
00:16:50
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She did it that morning.
00:16:51
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It took 15 minutes.
00:16:53
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The kids loved it because who doesn't want to tell stories about the time you did the bad thing and the time someone did the bad thing to you?
00:17:00
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And she but she would she what she needed that she didn't have was a broader developmental perspective that would let her be creative and thinking about how to reach her educational goal.
00:17:12
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And when you don't know the research and you don't have that bigger picture about development, you're always just following rules.
00:17:18
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You're doing what the lesson book says or what the head of your school or the state says in terms of curriculum.
00:17:25
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If you understand something about what kids are really like and how development unfolds, the sky's the limit in terms of thinking of fun curricular ideas to meet their needs.
00:17:37
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Exactly.
00:17:38
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Yeah.
00:17:39
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And something that you brought up earlier that heavily relates to that is that fad trap that we sometimes get stuck in as educators.
00:17:46
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And when we have a tendency to kind of reinvent the wheel over and over again in different forms.
00:17:54
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So when I think of like experiential learning, there's seriously like probably 30 or 40 different frameworks and acronyms that are essentially experiential learning.
00:18:02
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We've just rewritten it.
00:18:04
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Um, in my opinion, at many points to, for people to make money, um, because I can resell a lot of curriculum materials if I reinvent the framework.
Challenges in Applying Research
00:18:12
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Um, but going along with that too, though, um, it has a tendency, I think for people to ignore that practice or to write off that practice, even though at its core, it is a good practice.
00:18:25
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So what I mean by that is, is that if you take experiential learning, that's been well documented to be beneficial.
00:18:31
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It's been around for
00:18:32
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I mean, literally centuries, it's like a really old practice.
00:18:36
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But yet, if you're a veteran educator or even someone new to the field that works in a certain environment and someone comes around and says, you know, we're going to start doing inquiry based learning.
00:18:46
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And there's like a 50 slide thing on the value of inquiry based learning, which is almost the exact same thing.
00:18:52
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I might just go like, well, you know, that's not going to work.
00:18:55
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I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing because it's going to be gone in a year anyway.
00:18:58
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It has a tendency to jade us.
00:19:00
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Yeah.
00:19:02
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Even though the underlying idea might be good.
00:19:06
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Yeah.
00:19:06
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So that at times I feel like a lot of people are missing the point because we're either trying to tie test scores to something that works inherently as in we shouldn't necessarily be looking at the test score component of it.
00:19:19
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We should be looking at everything else that increases test scores.
00:19:22
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That's great.
00:19:22
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Yeah.
00:19:22
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Yeah.
00:19:24
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But to my understanding and reading research, it also helps us ensure that we can diagnose those things as they come up.
00:19:31
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As when I see the slideshow, I'm like, oh, it's it's actually this.
00:19:35
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But it's being packaged curriculum.
00:19:38
Speaker
What are your thoughts?
00:19:39
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I know you wrote like an entire book on this, essentially.
00:19:43
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But what are your thoughts on the kind of that corporate influence when it comes to research?
00:19:48
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Because there are a lot of, I guess, test prep companies that highly benefit from the fact that, you know, they can read research in a certain way in order to prop up their financial gain.
00:20:01
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Okay.
00:20:02
Speaker
Well, can you tell me what you mean by that last part?
00:20:05
Speaker
Sure.
00:20:05
Speaker
So being able to kind of selectively read research as a corporation to sell a curriculum package or to sell a keynote speech.
00:20:16
Speaker
Because I feel like you can't talk about effective researching without – we're going to dive into a bunch of different topics here without talking about like neoliberalism.
00:20:25
Speaker
We're talking about the capitalistic influence on everything it is that we do in our daily lives.
00:20:33
Speaker
So I don't know if this is going to answer your question, but...
00:20:39
Speaker
One of the tricky things, you've already said this, Chris, is that, you know, everyone can find a study that shows the thing they wanted to show.
00:20:48
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Because, you know, I have to say this, and this is going to make me sound like I'm betraying my own field of science.
00:20:56
Speaker
But there's a lot of good research out there, but there's a lot of bad research, too.
00:21:01
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And one of the reasons teachers should have more time,
00:21:05
Speaker
be offered more time and encouragement to read the research itself is so they can begin to make distinctions for themselves about what's the good research and what's the bad research.
00:21:15
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And because there's a lot of research that gets cited by money hungry corporations or publishing houses or the places selling these, you know, canned curriculum that are citing research that's just badly done.
00:21:31
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And it's worth noting, and I was going to give another example later, that there's a difference between research that simply tests an intervention or a practice and research that we call it basic science that seeks to understand the way that the human organism thinks and learns and changes over time.
00:21:56
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And it's really important that there's no reason why teachers can't know that as well as any other scientist, that they should be looking for basic research, that there's so much that we're still learning about how children think, how they experience the world, which aspects of their daily lives really shape them, which things can change and which can't.
00:22:19
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I'll give you an example.
00:22:20
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Shyness is something which doesn't change much.
00:22:23
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So all the teachers who write in all the reports, I wish that Jimmy would be a little less shy.
00:22:29
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Jimmy's not going to be a little less shy.
00:22:31
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And if you read research on personality and temperament, you'll see that it's quite, quite stable.
00:22:38
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Sometimes that's a good thing.
00:22:39
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Like a kid who's got a pretty easygoing temperament is probably going to stay that way.
00:22:43
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And thank God that means that you can't screw it up much with whatever you do.
00:22:48
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But by the same token,
00:22:50
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The kid who's shy or is nervous in crowds is probably going to be that way no matter what.
00:22:57
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The reason I bring that up is it would be better for teachers to have access to research that shows those basic characteristics of children and their lives over time and less time looking at the sort of often shitty research.
00:23:13
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Whoops, sorry.
00:23:15
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That's fine.
00:23:16
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Yeah.
00:23:18
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the less well-done research that's looking at the little technique that makes kids unshy, which is not based on any real model of human development and is often not worth paying much attention to.
00:23:34
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So that was a digression.
00:23:37
Speaker
Your point, I'm going to say something totally different too, which is that given that you can find research to support anything, it's not all equally good research, but you can
00:23:46
Speaker
find it.
00:23:47
Speaker
It doesn't mean it was well done or that it's worth paying attention to, but it's out there and it can be cited.
00:23:52
Speaker
The real question, the other question that research alone can't answer is what are your values about education?
00:24:00
Speaker
And for teachers who are listening to this, you have to keep asking yourself, why am I doing this?
00:24:06
Speaker
What is it I really want these kids to end up with that I can have an impact on?
00:24:12
Speaker
And that's a big piece of it.
00:24:14
Speaker
So I always say to teachers, you know, what do you want for your students by the end of the year?
00:24:18
Speaker
And they'll say, I want them to love learning or I want them to be eager for information or I want them to feel good about themselves or I want them to know a lot or whatever it is they they want.
00:24:29
Speaker
And the next question I always ask is, which of those things do you think you can have an impact on?
00:24:34
Speaker
Because teachers can't have an impact on everything.
00:24:37
Speaker
I mean, thank God, because what a burden that would be.
00:24:39
Speaker
But.
00:24:41
Speaker
you can only have an impact on certain things.
00:24:43
Speaker
And so before you begin figuring out how to have an impact on those things, which things you are going to influence in a child's life or a teenager's life, if you're a high school teacher, you have to decide what it is you really seek.
00:24:57
Speaker
And this goes back, Chris, to your question.
00:24:59
Speaker
If you seek a high test score and that's your main goal as a teacher, you might approach things one way.
00:25:07
Speaker
If your real goal is to go back to something you said, Chris, to help students sort of attain a really sturdy, long-lasting love of learning, you're going to do things in a different way in your classroom.
00:25:21
Speaker
And you have to decide that first.
00:25:23
Speaker
Then you can say to yourself, so if that's so important to me, what will I do in this classroom to ensure that kids leave this year?
00:25:31
Speaker
In June, they love learning a little more than they did in September.
00:25:36
Speaker
That's a fantastic point.
00:25:37
Speaker
I think that pedagogical framework, I mean, that makes all the difference.
00:25:40
Speaker
And I wish that teacher training programs really emphasize that even more.
00:25:47
Speaker
I'm not sure if my experience is universal, but for the most part, teacher training for me was very rote and kind of like how to write a lesson plan more than it was.
00:25:57
Speaker
Why is it that you teach and how do you incorporate those values in the teaching?
00:26:01
Speaker
And I appreciate your example, too, of the introverted kid because that was me.
00:26:04
Speaker
Oh,
00:26:05
Speaker
And if you want to talk about like not feeling good at school, nothing feels worse than like every single teacher telling you that there's something implied wrong with you because you don't talk to people very often.
00:26:18
Speaker
What a terrible feeling.
00:26:19
Speaker
You know, it's interesting.
00:26:20
Speaker
One of the kinds of research I was going to talk about today is research on the value of a sense of security.
00:26:28
Speaker
and that covers a lot of different things.
00:26:31
Speaker
If you're not secure about where your next meal is coming from or you're not secure that your home field is safe,
00:26:37
Speaker
That's one thing.
00:26:38
Speaker
If your walk to school or your bus ride to school is not safe because of the neighborhoods you go through or the other people you encounter, that's another kind of insecurity.
00:26:47
Speaker
But there's also a security like that you have a secure relationship either with the people in your home life, but also with a teacher, that there's someone at school that you feel you can count on and that you know you have, you know, unconditional regard from.
00:27:02
Speaker
It's very powerful.
00:27:03
Speaker
And research shows that you can't really learn without it.
00:27:08
Speaker
And the reason is learning involves paying attention to uncertainty.
00:27:12
Speaker
And, you know, as you know, Chris, I do research.
00:27:16
Speaker
I wrote a book on curiosity.
00:27:18
Speaker
Curiosity involves uncertainty.
00:27:20
Speaker
sort of relishing a moment of uncertainty and then wanting to reduce the uncertainty by, so you're uncertain about, you know, what's under that rock or how do cells divide or what happens when you multiply three numbers.
00:27:31
Speaker
All of those are examples of moments when you feel, if you don't know the answer, what you feel is uncertainty.
00:27:36
Speaker
And what you want the student to do is like that feeling enough to go out and try to resolve the uncertainty by getting the answer.
00:27:44
Speaker
And every teacher listening to this knows what it looks like when a student experiences uncertainty and then shuts it down because it feels so bad to them.
00:27:52
Speaker
They don't want to get the answer.
00:27:54
Speaker
They don't want to resolve the uncertainty.
00:27:55
Speaker
They just want to move away from the feeling.
00:27:58
Speaker
And that's what it looks like when a kid doesn't like learning.
00:28:02
Speaker
But if you don't know the research that shows how important, how pivotal a sense of security is,
00:28:09
Speaker
in pursuing and being, what did you call it before, inquiry-based learning, in paying attention to your own curiosity, your own sense of the things you don't know the answer to.
00:28:20
Speaker
If you don't know how important that security is, you don't know what to do to encourage your kids to like learning.
00:28:26
Speaker
And so if you know the research about the role of security and secure attachment and the sense of safety,
00:28:34
Speaker
You'll do different things as a teacher.
00:28:36
Speaker
You'll say, okay, the first thing I have to do is make sure that the kids in my classroom have some sense of safety and security and well-being so that when they come across something they don't know the answer to, they'll enjoy it and want to get the answer rather than shutting down.
00:28:52
Speaker
So that was circuitous what I just said.
00:28:55
Speaker
But it's a way of talking about how if you know what your real goal is and then you know something about research,
00:29:04
Speaker
you know, what you need to know about the kids in your room and what makes them thrive.
00:29:08
Speaker
When you put those two things together, then you can do almost anything.
00:29:12
Speaker
You can try anything in the classroom because you have the building blocks to figure out what, you know, what activities to do or how to structure the room or whatever.
00:29:21
Speaker
Exactly.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:22
Speaker
And what you're saying, too, rings true.
00:29:24
Speaker
I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it is something to be said that there is some responsibility on teachers to share that research as well for social or political reasons, because a teacher can only do so much with inside their classroom.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
Kids coming to school who are impoverished or live in a very inequitable society.
00:29:48
Speaker
It's very, very difficult as a teacher to solve those issues.
00:29:54
Speaker
And if we had a little more support for those students at home, then you would see drastic changes within school and so many opportunities to young people.
00:30:05
Speaker
And so I don't want to go too far down that because that's like a whole other discussion around surrounding political movements and change.
00:30:12
Speaker
It's true, but it's also important.
00:30:15
Speaker
You know, I think it's so easy to feel beleaguered as a teacher and to feel like you're being asked to do all these things that feel almost impossible to do.
00:30:23
Speaker
And part of the reason they feel impossible to do is because of the things you just alluded to, that we've put all of society's problems on the shoulders of teachers.
00:30:31
Speaker
You know, you take these kids who live in a tough,
00:30:34
Speaker
setting or are the targets of, you know, bigotry and inequity.
00:30:40
Speaker
And you should make them want to learn and make them good at learning and make them behave and make them have high aspirations.
00:30:47
Speaker
And, you know, one thing after another.
00:30:49
Speaker
And it's not a reasonable set of expectations.
00:30:53
Speaker
And so one thing was yet another reason why it's important to know the research is so the teachers can be realistic and fair with themselves about what they can and can't achieve.
00:31:04
Speaker
Um, yeah, yeah.
00:31:05
Speaker
And speaking to that point too, that you stated about, um, the idea of having a, a sense of safety or a sense of connection with the teacher in the room.
00:31:12
Speaker
Um, I think it's important that we understand too, that the way that you develop that relationship tends to be by being very authentic and very welcoming and very friendly, um, not by trying to manipulate, um,
00:31:25
Speaker
like your social ability in order to connect with every single student.
00:31:29
Speaker
I think kids see right through that.
00:31:31
Speaker
And what goes along with that too is recognizing that you're probably not going to connect with every single student.
00:31:36
Speaker
Like I would rather have a very authentic relationship with the kids that know that I'm being authentic with them and have another teacher have an authentic relationship with the kids that just don't, we just, we just don't share that connection because we're just different types of people.
00:31:48
Speaker
I totally agree with that.
00:31:51
Speaker
Can I go back one more time?
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead.
00:31:53
Speaker
I just want to suggest something.
00:31:57
Speaker
I just want to encourage anybody who liked what we were just talking about a few minutes ago.
00:32:02
Speaker
I love the idea of starting the year by making a little note on which kids in your class like learning and which don't.
00:32:09
Speaker
And pay attention to what what clues are telling you that.
00:32:13
Speaker
Like, how are you deciding that?
00:32:15
Speaker
And then decide what you as the teacher are going to do to get all the kids to move the needle just a little bit from where they are.
00:32:24
Speaker
And then take their temperature again in three months and then in six months.
00:32:30
Speaker
Because it wouldn't be an impossible thing to measure in your classroom.
00:32:34
Speaker
And it would change everything if you kept a record of it and thought, this is my real goal.
00:32:40
Speaker
And every kid could move a little bit.
00:32:42
Speaker
The kid who already likes learning could like it even more or could get even better at fulfilling their, you know, their curiosity or their hunger for learning.
00:32:49
Speaker
And the kid who seems to shut down totally and have no interest in learning, if you could get them to like it just a little bit, you'd have done a lot.
00:32:56
Speaker
So I just wanted to plant that seed.
00:32:59
Speaker
I think that's a really important point because if you get bogged down and staring at the grade book when it comes to certain students, you turn them into a number.
00:33:08
Speaker
I think it misses out on a lot of the hope and change that you feel when you see students embrace that.
00:33:15
Speaker
Actually, this week, I've been teaching photography recently.
00:33:19
Speaker
We went on a photography tour.
00:33:21
Speaker
Downtown is a mile from where I work.
00:33:24
Speaker
Um, and I have a student who has not been doing well pretty much in any class.
00:33:28
Speaker
She's really struggling, but outside downtown taking pictures and that kind of stuff.
00:33:33
Speaker
It was like one of the most drastic transformations I've ever seen of a student really engaged in learning.
00:33:40
Speaker
And even though it sounds kind of bad, even though that might not necessarily change what that grade book might look like at the end of the year, even though we're mostly gradeless, we still have to report a grade.
00:33:51
Speaker
We've at least identified something that we can we can be proud of.
00:33:54
Speaker
We can share with her that we can maybe find other ways to engage in like a more active outside approach, if that's what it is, or maybe it's something else.
00:34:03
Speaker
But it's something.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:04
Speaker
And when you reflect on those things, I mean, that makes a huge difference.
00:34:07
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:34:09
Speaker
Definitely, if you reflect on it and make it a deliberate goal, like it's not just that some kids like learning and some don't.
00:34:14
Speaker
I can do something to help the ones who don't seem to like it a little more.
00:34:19
Speaker
And, you know, engagement is one of these other things that the research is so clear about the power of engagement, really being immersed in something.
00:34:28
Speaker
And not every kid can be engaged in everything they learn.
00:34:30
Speaker
But if every kid has something in the day that they find really challenging and engaging, like that young person found photography to be, it changes their experience of school.
00:34:42
Speaker
Let's shift into like the meat of the discussion.
00:34:45
Speaker
This is something that we were talking about kind of a little bit before we went on the recording, which is how do you actually go about finding the research?
00:34:54
Speaker
It's one thing to say, like, read the research, but it's, I mean,
00:34:57
Speaker
It's kind of the wild west out there.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's very hard to find.
00:35:01
Speaker
Because not only do you have to, you know, not only do you define the research, you also define the research that's effective.
00:35:06
Speaker
Then you have like a normal research article is fairly long.
00:35:10
Speaker
You know, teachers have limited time.
00:35:13
Speaker
It's not necessarily supported through professional development to do independent research, even though I think it should be.
00:35:21
Speaker
Like the idea of like self-sustaining professional development.
00:35:23
Speaker
So go ahead.
00:35:24
Speaker
I have some concrete ideas.
00:35:25
Speaker
The first you just alluded to.
00:35:27
Speaker
I think every teacher should try to push their school for their next professional development to drop all the workshops on how to, you know, all those things that you learn in those workshops, how to use a new kind of whiteboard in your room and blah, blah, and learn how to read research that's relevant to your work as a professional.
00:35:49
Speaker
A lot of the research is in education journals, but I'm going to say, and I'm biased about this because I'm a psychologist, I'm a developmental psychologist, a lot of the best research is in psychology journals.
00:36:02
Speaker
And I'm going to say something more about that in a minute.
00:36:05
Speaker
But one cool thing that you just gave me the idea of, why not spend a professional development day each reading one research article in an area that interests you, and then
00:36:15
Speaker
reporting it to your little team that you're in a group with for professional development day and learning together how to be discerning consumers of research.
00:36:23
Speaker
For one thing, many, many teachers should be able to, should know that because they're teaching students how to be discerning consumers of information.
00:36:32
Speaker
So you should, everyone should be able to do it for themselves and understanding.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
I mean, get the science teachers in your school to lead the
00:36:39
Speaker
to lead that seminar, they know that a good piece of research should have a clear hypothesis and have a method for testing the hypothesis that's well thought through and that the measures should match what the questions were.
00:36:54
Speaker
I mean, some of it is stuff that everybody should know because that's what everybody should be teaching their students.
00:37:01
Speaker
So one thing is to push a little harder for that to be part of professional development.
00:37:07
Speaker
Um,
00:37:08
Speaker
That's I just think I didn't think of that until you said what you said.
00:37:12
Speaker
But but I think that would be so much more effective and far reaching in terms of how it would help teachers in their daily practice.
00:37:22
Speaker
I want to interrupt you really quickly because there's a question here talking about what you just were talking about from Monica in the chat here.
00:37:30
Speaker
She asked if you recommend any specific psychology journals that you would trust.
00:37:35
Speaker
I was just going to say that.
00:37:37
Speaker
That was going to be my next part of my answer.
00:37:39
Speaker
Go ahead.
00:37:40
Speaker
Thank you, Monica.
00:37:42
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:37:44
Speaker
So, that's the other thing.
00:37:45
Speaker
So, everybody…
00:37:48
Speaker
In the sciences, in every field in science, there are the sort of top tier journals and they're the best ones to read because they are peer reviewed.
00:37:55
Speaker
So every no article gets published if other researchers didn't read the research without knowing the name of the scientist.
00:38:02
Speaker
So it's not about who you like and who you're friends with.
00:38:06
Speaker
It's just about whether you think the research is good.
00:38:08
Speaker
And it's worth looking at those top tier journals.
00:38:13
Speaker
So educational psychology put out by...
00:38:17
Speaker
APA, American Psychological Association, is a very good journal.
00:38:21
Speaker
Child Development is a very good journal.
00:38:24
Speaker
I know less about
00:38:26
Speaker
These days, I haven't been reading much about adolescent development.
00:38:30
Speaker
There used to be a good journal of adolescent development, but there's plenty on adolescence in the child development.
00:38:38
Speaker
That's what it's called, the journal, child development.
00:38:42
Speaker
So those are two that I think are really good, educational psychology and child development.
00:38:48
Speaker
Because of Google Scholar, you all know that you can type in a search word
00:38:54
Speaker
and come up with any number of articles.
00:38:56
Speaker
But, you know, my mom is 95 and she's incredibly savvy and she actually started schools in her life.
00:39:05
Speaker
And, you know, she and I talk about education all the time.
00:39:09
Speaker
She's a very well-read woman and very astute.
00:39:12
Speaker
But even so, she's always saying to me, well, I found it on Google.
00:39:16
Speaker
Now, I know she's 95 and probably your listeners are not 95.
00:39:20
Speaker
But the reason I tell that is it worries me that she still doesn't get that just because it popped up when she did a Google search doesn't mean it's a reputable source.
00:39:32
Speaker
So look for...
00:39:34
Speaker
studies that were done at well-known universities and look for journals, articles that were published, you know, in, if not educational psychology or child development, some other, you know, highly regarded journal, the Merrill Palmer quarterly is another one.
00:39:54
Speaker
That's very good.
00:39:56
Speaker
There's a very good journal called cognitive development.
00:39:59
Speaker
It's put out by the Jean Piaget Society.
00:40:01
Speaker
Now, a lot of this is sort of pitched towards elementary, preschool and elementary school.
00:40:06
Speaker
But but some of it's about adolescence.
Addressing Gaps in Adolescent Research
00:40:09
Speaker
There's a weird paucity of research on adolescent development.
00:40:13
Speaker
There's just not enough that's done in that area, in my view.
00:40:16
Speaker
Maybe we'll see a revival of that.
00:40:20
Speaker
But those are the journals that I think are really are really good.
00:40:27
Speaker
And so, but also you could do a Google, you could go into Google Scholar and see what articles come up, but then pay attention to where they were published and whether the people who did the research were
00:40:39
Speaker
you know, whether they're at, you know, reputable institutions.
00:40:43
Speaker
And that's not about snob factor.
00:40:45
Speaker
That's about making sure that the research was done in a, you know, in a rigorous way and an honest and reliable way.
00:40:55
Speaker
And then pay attention to how the research was done.
00:40:58
Speaker
Because you would want your students to pay attention to that.
00:41:00
Speaker
So why shouldn't all of us pay attention to that?
00:41:03
Speaker
You know, whether there were the subjects were chosen in a smart way, whether the question is an interesting, reasonable one and whether the measures make sense to you.
00:41:13
Speaker
It's beneficial for teachers to have that list on hand because there is not.
00:41:18
Speaker
At least as far as I know, not a place where you can find all that information.
00:41:21
Speaker
That's what we were just talking about a few minutes ago.
00:41:25
Speaker
But I mean, it's difficult to know.
00:41:27
Speaker
I'm very motivated by this conversation to try to start something like that because I think it's shocking there isn't.
00:41:35
Speaker
I did – for people who teach elementary school, I wrote a book that came out last year.
00:41:39
Speaker
about child development for teachers, but it's mostly about elementary school.
00:41:43
Speaker
So for those of you who are high school teachers, it still might be interesting to you because it sort of frames the basic process of development and it makes the distinction between learning and development that's interesting no matter what age you teach.
00:41:57
Speaker
But for any elementary school teachers who are listening, that book might be helpful to them.
00:42:02
Speaker
Because it synthesizes a lot of what I consider to be the best research.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it kind of pops the bubble.
00:42:08
Speaker
Is that the burst the bubble about research that, as you said, is faddish, but not really very good or useful.
00:42:15
Speaker
Hmm.
00:42:16
Speaker
And to that point, too, of allowing teachers time at work or acknowledging the work of research through professional development.
00:42:26
Speaker
It's interesting to note that when you do a practice like that where you have teachers going out and doing kind of independent or group study and sharing it out and working on their own, you're mirroring the exact same techniques that you would want to see in a classroom with students.
00:42:42
Speaker
What I mean by that is, is that we have a tendency to
00:42:44
Speaker
Like we're all people who study education, but yet the way that teachers tend to be taught is incredibly backwards.
00:42:52
Speaker
A lot of like 50 to 60 slides with just three bullet points on them and just reading off for hours on end.
00:42:59
Speaker
And as a result, I mean, obviously you're not going to learn as much as if you were passionate about the idea that you're pursuing, that you're working in groups, that you get to move around, that you're respected as an individual.
00:43:10
Speaker
Because a lot of times it's demeaning to do PD.
00:43:13
Speaker
Like it feels like you're being treated like you're dumb.
00:43:18
Speaker
So it's no wonder if you're, you know, a student in a classroom listening to a 60 minute PowerPoint about something, or if you're a teacher listening to a 60 minute PowerPoint about something else, even if it's in your field, it's no wonder people become demotivated and don't want to do this kind of stuff because that's what we know as teachers.
00:43:35
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:37
Speaker
You know, it's interesting.
00:43:38
Speaker
A few years ago, I took a year sabbatical and I worked as the director of learning and teaching for a public school system.
00:43:44
Speaker
And I was in charge, among other things, of the PD.
00:43:48
Speaker
And for the first PD day that I had for the district, I got rid of all the workshops and the seminars and the PowerPoints you were just referring to and the kind of cool, neat activities and
00:44:02
Speaker
And instead, I had them each observe another teacher in the school system.
00:44:06
Speaker
And the only rule was you couldn't observe someone in your own grade level or your own field if you were a high school teacher.
00:44:13
Speaker
So if you were an English teacher, you couldn't observe another high school English teacher.
00:44:17
Speaker
And if you were a third grade teacher, you couldn't observe another third grade teacher.
00:44:20
Speaker
You had to observe someone in another area.
00:44:24
Speaker
And basically, we devoted that year to doing observations like that and then sharing our insights.
00:44:29
Speaker
And eventually, we built it into doing small studies together, collecting data to answer various empirical questions.
00:44:37
Speaker
And at first, the teachers were very resistant, I have to say.
00:44:41
Speaker
They didn't get how that was going to quickly show up as having an effect in their classroom.
00:44:48
Speaker
And I was trying to do what we're trying to do in this conversation right now, which is change the way teachers thought about what would help make them better teachers.
00:44:58
Speaker
And over time, they got to love it because who, as the teacher,
00:45:03
Speaker
who wouldn't like the chance to really watch kids in action in somebody else's classroom and be the one watching rather than the one doing and begin to kind of draw your own conclusions about any number of things, whether there are gender differences in the classroom or whether there are certain parts of the classroom that seem more active than other parts or what it looks like when kids are
Innovative Professional Development Approaches
00:45:25
Speaker
concentrating.
00:45:25
Speaker
I mean, there are a million interesting questions a teacher could ask
00:45:29
Speaker
and use observations as a means of answering that question.
00:45:33
Speaker
But you can't do that if you don't actually practice it.
00:45:37
Speaker
And so PD is a wonderful place to make some of these shifts.
00:45:42
Speaker
And that just involves getting your school to agree to do it differently.
00:45:46
Speaker
I mean, because I've never heard a teacher say what you just said, but I bet you're right that it often feels demeaning in those PDs.
00:45:55
Speaker
I mean, I've rarely gone to a PD that I've enjoyed.
00:46:00
Speaker
So that sounds really bad.
00:46:02
Speaker
I've been teaching for six years and maybe two have felt meaningful.
00:46:10
Speaker
If you could have your dream PD, what would it be?
00:46:14
Speaker
My dream PD would be something that's going to sound so self-promotional because that's something that we're working on a human restoration project to do.
00:46:20
Speaker
But it's the reason why I think it's important, which is allowing teachers to choose their own path on what is they want to do and then working with administration to come up with that plan and there's an acting on it.
00:46:33
Speaker
I like being able to go out with a team of, you know, one, two, three other people and say, okay, here's what I want to look into.
00:46:40
Speaker
Let's learn more about it.
00:46:41
Speaker
Gather all that information, make some kind of report on it, then share it out.
00:46:45
Speaker
Very simple.
00:46:46
Speaker
Like, I mean, it could be as, as simple as like reading about it or like going to visit other schools, but having free reign on what schools we pick.
00:46:55
Speaker
Um, or even, um, something that I was thinking about when you were talking about observing other teachers, um,
00:46:59
Speaker
Something that was very beneficial to me when I was in college was they had us do the shadow a student challenge or whatever you want to call it, where you just follow a student period to period out of high school.
00:47:09
Speaker
That's cool.
00:47:11
Speaker
And I don't want to sound cynical because I'm not blaming teachers, but it really lets you remember what it was like to be in high school because I think we sometimes forget when we become teachers what it was like or we like to see ourselves as doing it a lot better.
00:47:27
Speaker
Right.
00:47:27
Speaker
um than what it was like um yeah but i mean it was it was rough like it doesn't feel good like if you have like a a bathroom policy where it's like you can only go once a day or like in your three minute break between periods like there's these like small things that we forget about from when we were in school and just how controlling it was um and how little opportunity we had to make choices um that nowadays i don't even like
00:47:52
Speaker
Like it doesn't cross my mind that these policies exist and it helps us to rethink about the structure of school because if I don't like it now, it must be really bad when at least now I have a choice.
00:48:02
Speaker
Like if I have a restrictive policy, I can go somewhere else and I can make that decision.
00:48:07
Speaker
But as a student, I can't.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
So from a PD standpoint, I think it would be beneficial for teachers to be exposed to a lot of different things, have the opportunity to take with that and run with it, and then share that information out with others in a way where it's incredibly independent.
00:48:24
Speaker
Because there's also a respect issue there as well.
00:48:28
Speaker
Teachers are supposed to be, at least, very well trained in reading, writing, and reading research.
00:48:33
Speaker
That's literally the entire degree for the most part.
00:48:38
Speaker
And we don't really get a huge opportunity to do those things outside of when we're in college.
00:48:43
Speaker
So by giving teachers those skills and the ability to enact on them, not only are you respecting them, but you're letting them maintain that practice.
00:48:50
Speaker
That way they can use it in the future.
00:48:51
Speaker
You're still learning when you're a teacher.
00:48:54
Speaker
Because the whole idea of those professional development days is to build in sort of to make teachers.
00:49:02
Speaker
You know how all schools have these mission statements that say lifelong learners?
00:49:07
Speaker
But then when you think about it, many schools don't even do their part to help their teachers be lifelong learners.
00:49:14
Speaker
So if you thought of, I'm just building on what you said, if you thought of professional development, or even if you get time as a team, let's say a grade level team or a subject area team,
00:49:24
Speaker
To work together, that should be thought of as a time to be scholars, to be learners, to what you referred to the college atmosphere.
00:49:36
Speaker
It should be that.
00:49:37
Speaker
And what it ends up being instead are these little quick fixes, something to fill up that professional development day or teach you the new technique or give you some new skill you needed.
00:49:50
Speaker
Instead of using it as a time to create a community of learners and thinkers amongst the teachers.
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:59
Speaker
And I think, too, that some of that is just kind of recognizing the value of independent PD as a way to recognize things like what we're doing right now.
00:50:09
Speaker
So, like, for example, like if you're listening to this right now, there's a form on our website that is like a certificate, like you would get at a traditional, like at the end of a traditional PD session that says, like,
00:50:21
Speaker
like reflect on one side, the other side has like my signature and says that you did this activity.
00:50:27
Speaker
Yes, it's not the traditional like you go sit in a room for without 30 other people.
00:50:31
Speaker
And, you know, you get your little printed off certificate that says that you did it.
00:50:35
Speaker
It's not like that.
00:50:36
Speaker
It is virtual, but it should just have just as much power and influence because you're making the decision to do it.
00:50:41
Speaker
So you go download that printed off.
00:50:43
Speaker
show your ad in this YouTube video and say, hey, like, this is a real thing that you can do.
00:50:48
Speaker
And Nick just linked it there in chat, too.
00:50:50
Speaker
This is, I think, goes, though, for, like, listening to podcasts or reading a book, like, literally just checking out a book from the library from a reputable author and reading it and doing a book report is, like, old school as that sounds.
00:51:05
Speaker
You know, that kind of stuff matters.
00:51:06
Speaker
Well, the other thing we...
00:51:08
Speaker
when I was doing that thing in the school system, we gave teachers stipends to form book clubs with each other.
00:51:16
Speaker
And the books they read didn't have to even be about education.
00:51:20
Speaker
It was so much fun.
00:51:22
Speaker
The teachers loved it.
00:51:23
Speaker
And they loved the chance to talk to one another about things they were reading.
00:51:27
Speaker
They had to agree.
00:51:28
Speaker
I forget how we did it, but they agreed on the books and they read three books over a certain period of time.
00:51:32
Speaker
And
00:51:33
Speaker
Maybe two of them we wanted to be about education or psychology, but one could be something else altogether because why not?
00:51:41
Speaker
And that was one of the most powerful things we did.
00:51:47
Speaker
And it's just what you're saying.
00:51:49
Speaker
It just supported teachers, you know, their need and their right to spend time with each other talking about interesting things.
00:51:59
Speaker
I like that point that you bring up too about stipends, because even though teaching isn't about the money, I think there is value in financially rewarding someone for going that extra mile.
00:52:08
Speaker
Totally.
00:52:10
Speaker
Especially if there isn't time being given to do these things at the workplace.
00:52:16
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:52:16
Speaker
Because we were actually talking about this on the phone, I think, the other day, like maybe last month or the month before, but you were talking about –
00:52:24
Speaker
the LinkedIn founder and that idea of being paid for connections or something like that.
00:52:28
Speaker
It was basically the value of extrinsic motivation to get someone to start doing something.
00:52:34
Speaker
Because I think there are a lot of teachers out there that maybe, like, I've never really thought that they want to do these things or maybe they forgot that they want to do these things.
00:52:42
Speaker
Or if you told me, like, hey, I'll give you 100, 200 bucks to go do this, that might spark curiosity that is more lifelong after you start doing it.
00:52:52
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:52:53
Speaker
And it means that the administration or the community or wherever the money is coming from is making it clear.
00:52:59
Speaker
They're putting their money where their mouth is.
00:53:01
Speaker
They're saying, we value you as teachers and we're going to show that we value it when you are really professional, when you're thoughtful, when you're curious, when you want to share ideas with each other.
00:53:15
Speaker
So it's not only an incentive for the teachers when they get the money, but it strengthens
00:53:22
Speaker
the overall kind of commitment of the educational organization to that, to teachers doing their very best.
00:53:31
Speaker
Exactly.
00:53:32
Speaker
And really quick too, I want to, there's a question.
00:53:35
Speaker
When you were talking about the book that you had written that was great for elementary ed educators, what was the title of that book?
00:53:43
Speaker
It's called The Children You Teach.
00:53:46
Speaker
And I think the subtitle, it's embarrassing that I can't remember, but I think it's something like using a developmental framework in the classroom.
00:53:54
Speaker
Sure.
00:53:54
Speaker
Cool.
00:53:55
Speaker
And they just linked it.
00:53:57
Speaker
in chat there.
00:53:59
Speaker
Nick's on it.
00:54:00
Speaker
Nick's also linked a bunch of you're on it, man.
00:54:03
Speaker
Influencer or not, he's ready to go.
00:54:06
Speaker
Really pushing through.
00:54:08
Speaker
So we only have like five minutes left and I kind of deviated this conversation from just reading research to a lot of other different things.
00:54:16
Speaker
But in our last five minutes that we have, is there anything else that you want to say on this subject that you think is incredibly important that everyone really needs to know that we've missed?
00:54:30
Speaker
No, we've talked about, I mean, I had made a list of some of the places where reading the research in a superficial way got people into trouble.
00:54:38
Speaker
But I don't want to end, well, I said mindset.
00:54:41
Speaker
So the mindset research is interesting because the real research is really fabulous.
00:54:45
Speaker
Carol Dweck's original research.
00:54:47
Speaker
And the idea that it's mindset is,
00:54:50
Speaker
has a huge influence on what they'll learn and how long they'll go on learning.
00:54:54
Speaker
That's really great.
00:54:56
Speaker
But when it all got turned into quick interventions that would change everybody's mindset forever and got sort of filtered down into schools in a kind of superficial
Mindset Research and Intellectual Conversations
00:55:08
Speaker
way, it undermined the value of the original research and it was the wrong way to take that research.
00:55:16
Speaker
So what was a really interesting paradigm and some beautiful original empirical work got sort of overly digested and kind of distorted in a way that I think has not been at all useful.
00:55:31
Speaker
Another example is I have never gone to a school where someone didn't talk to me about learning styles, but there's absolutely no research to support the idea that there are different learning styles in any important way.
00:55:44
Speaker
which is not to say that kids don't learn in different ways and that every, you know, people are individuals, but there's no body of research that shows that there's this, you know, fundamental thing called learning styles or that attending to them has some measurable impact.
00:56:00
Speaker
And that's an example of where teachers were susceptible to kind of shoddy interpretation of shoddy research because they didn't have access to the research themselves.
00:56:12
Speaker
And on a plus note, because I don't want to end in a negative way, there's all this cool research out there that teachers would love to read about, like this fabulous work showing the way in which your hand gestures can augment and sort of exponentially increase the power of teaching math.
00:56:32
Speaker
And it's something people spontaneously do, use their hands to gesture.
00:56:36
Speaker
And it turns out with just a little awareness of how that plays out in natural settings, it can be this powerful weapon in the classroom.
00:56:43
Speaker
Weapon in a good way.
00:56:44
Speaker
I don't mean weapon.
00:56:46
Speaker
I mean this powerful tool.
00:56:49
Speaker
Or the research on conversation.
00:56:51
Speaker
I'll end with that because it's my favorite topic in the world.
00:56:54
Speaker
If teachers knew more about all the incredibly beautiful research on the way in which conversations
00:57:02
Speaker
are the cornerstone of intellectual development.
00:57:05
Speaker
It would be so liberating for them because half the time that they were doing some tedious, onerous activity with kids that was supposed to help kids become readers or become critical thinkers, they could skip that and just have some really great conversations with the kids.
00:57:21
Speaker
And if they knew the research, not only could they do it, but they could justify it and explain it to skeptical administrators and parents.
00:57:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same thing that we've done recently with – there was a thing that Alfie Kohn published, I want to say last year, maybe it was 2018, starting this idea of a Y sheet, which is like a really simplified double-sided sheet of paper where you –
00:57:47
Speaker
explain the practice that you're doing so that parents and administrators don't freak out when you try to change the system that has all that research in there.
00:57:56
Speaker
So we shifted to a portfolio system instead of giving grades.
00:57:59
Speaker
So even though it's required by the state to give grades, there isn't a formal grade until the end of the year.
00:58:05
Speaker
We've gotten virtually rid of all homework.
00:58:08
Speaker
But if you just like walk in day one on your syllabus, there's no grades and no homework.
00:58:14
Speaker
That might not come across very well to some people that have grown up in a traditional system, but they just.
00:58:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:21
Speaker
So well, so let's end on one more practical suggestion.
00:58:25
Speaker
Another use of PD would be for teams of teachers who are like minded to sit together and build a Y sheet for themselves on a certain practice.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:58:35
Speaker
And for anyone listening to the.
00:58:42
Speaker
Well, that would just that would be a cool thing to do and really build community amongst teachers.
00:58:48
Speaker
And you'd each have to come up with one piece of research or one idea from from, you know, psychology and educational research that would you could use on the Y sheet.
00:58:57
Speaker
And then you all could use that Y sheet.
00:59:00
Speaker
And shameless self-promotion.
00:59:02
Speaker
There's two of those on Human Restoration Project's website.
00:59:06
Speaker
As well as I've linked on our website to the International School of Uganda.
00:59:12
Speaker
They actually came together and did this in PD.
00:59:15
Speaker
So they actually took that exact idea that you're talking about.
00:59:17
Speaker
And they published...
00:59:19
Speaker
I want to say like five or six of these and they're all really well done, like play, authentic relationships in the classroom.
00:59:27
Speaker
There's a bunch of them.
00:59:29
Speaker
They all talk about just different pillars of their school, but showcase the research surrounding it.
00:59:34
Speaker
It's really interesting.
00:59:35
Speaker
Let me end then with one last piece of advice for teachers.
00:59:39
Speaker
If you read those Y sheets that Chris, you and Nick put up on the thing,
00:59:43
Speaker
Fine, but every teacher should at least track down one of the studies cited in the Y sheet and read the study itself.
00:59:51
Speaker
And let us know if it's bad so we could change it because there's no promises.
00:59:57
Speaker
So, yeah, thank you again, Susan, for joining us today.
01:00:01
Speaker
I love having these conversations because I think that there are just so many teachers out there that feel like they're stuck in a rut.
01:00:08
Speaker
And it really does like refill our glass or refill our cup, I mean, to have conversations like this
Conclusion: Revitalizing Teaching Through Research
01:00:16
Speaker
and to listen into them.
01:00:16
Speaker
I get messages all the time.
01:00:18
Speaker
like emails, like probably weekly from people that say, you know, being able to listen and read this stuff really reminds me on why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place.
01:00:28
Speaker
Because you can get trapped really quick.
01:00:32
Speaker
If you, you know, don't, if you aren't around other individuals who are thinking the same exact way as you or that value the same exact things or haven't forgotten.
01:00:41
Speaker
So I appreciate you having this conversation with us.
01:00:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:44
Speaker
Even if they don't agree with you, they can talk to you about it.
01:00:48
Speaker
Sure.
01:00:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:50
Speaker
So, yeah, we'll call it there and wrap things up.
01:00:54
Speaker
And again, I sincerely appreciate your time for anyone listening.
01:00:57
Speaker
This will be available on YouTube so you can watch the video version or on our podcast.