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89: Rebuilding After 2020-2021 w/ Dr. Ilana Horn
26 Plays4 years ago
Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation, we are joined by Dr. Ilana Horn. Dr. Horn is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, who focuses on serving disenfranchised youth through authentic mathematics. She leads the Teacher Learning Laboratory, which focuses on sense-making of schools, how teachers and students interact. Further, she is the author of Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics and Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In.
In our conversation, Dr. Horn and I discuss how teachers can wrap up the 2020-2021 school year through reflection. How can we build a better system after seeing the inequities, problems, and challenges that this school year has highlighted? And, how do we build a classroom in spite of a system that often demotivates and disenfranchises educators?
GUESTS
Dr. Ilana Horn, professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, director of Teacher Learning Laboratory, and author of Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics and Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In.
RESOURCES
- Teacher Learning Laboratory
- Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics
- Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 89 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:10
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:14
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Jordan Bacca, Margaret Clifton, and Steve Sostak.
00:00:22
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:24
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Guest Introduction and Research Focus
00:00:49
Speaker
In today's conversation, we are joined by Dr. Alana Horn.
00:00:52
Speaker
Dr. Horn is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, who focuses on serving disenfranchised youth through authentic mathematics.
00:01:01
Speaker
She leads the teacher learning laboratory, which focuses on sense making in schools and how teachers and students interact.
00:01:06
Speaker
Further, she is the author of Strength in Numbers, Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics, and Motivated, Designing Math Classrooms where Students Want to Join in.
Impact of Pandemic on Education Inequities
00:01:14
Speaker
In our conversation, Dr. Horn and I discuss how teachers can wrap up the 2020-2021 school year through reflection.
00:01:20
Speaker
How can we build a better system after seeing the inequities, problems, and challenges that this year is highlighting?
00:01:26
Speaker
And how do we build a classroom in spite of a system that often demotivates and disenfranchises educators?
00:01:32
Speaker
The school year has been rough, to say the least.
00:01:35
Speaker
Teachers find themselves at a crossroads on their effectiveness as teachers, their motivation to stay in the profession, and really their relative power within the field.
00:01:43
Speaker
And students have had to experience now virtual, hybrid.
00:01:47
Speaker
Some people have in person, and that's kind of its whole thing by itself.
00:01:52
Speaker
And on top of all of that, we're also living through a pandemic just day to day.
00:01:56
Speaker
So as we're wrapping up this school year and looking towards the 21-22 school year,
00:02:02
Speaker
Where do we even start with all of that knowledge?
00:02:06
Speaker
I think it's going to obviously vary from community to community because we've seen that the way this pandemic has impacted kids and families and communities in the US hasn't been evenly distributed, right?
00:02:22
Speaker
And in fact, it's highlighted some of the inequities that we already knew were there, amplifying them.
00:02:32
Speaker
because I know people in my community who send their children to private schools who have been in school, in person, mostly normal, quote unquote, you know, instruction from the beginning of this academic year.
00:02:49
Speaker
And then I know people who are working in communities where
00:02:55
Speaker
illness and death and parents being frontline workers or, you know, what do they call it, essential workers was the euphemism we came up with through this pandemic, who've been highly impacted and where parents are having to go to work and somehow manage virtual school.
00:03:13
Speaker
So there's not one pandemic
00:03:18
Speaker
experience that our children and communities have had, not one pandemic experience that teachers have had.
Rethinking Educational Approaches Post-Pandemic
00:03:24
Speaker
I think though that I would love to see administrators, both at the school and district levels, taking a stance of really wanting to listen and hear what communities, families, and children say that they need and what they're hoping for to kind of
00:03:44
Speaker
I think there's going to need to be a moment for realignment to make sure we're all on the same page of what this whole project called schooling is about, right?
00:03:52
Speaker
Because the game we've been playing of supposedly delivering curriculum according to predetermined standards that we then measure with large scale assessments and then we rate how well everyone's doing.
00:04:10
Speaker
that makes no sense.
00:04:12
Speaker
It hasn't made sense probably ever, but especially in the wake of what everyone's been going through, it makes no sense.
00:04:21
Speaker
And it's, you know, I was particularly upset when the president came out with a statement saying that he wanted state tests to proceed this year, because that just felt cruel and unusual, given what people are experiencing on the ground, both teachers and kids.
00:04:39
Speaker
Um,
00:04:40
Speaker
And you know the idea that we're collecting, it's so we can collect data.
00:04:43
Speaker
There are lots of ways to collect data.
00:04:45
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Why are those the data we need to collect?
00:04:47
Speaker
So I would like to see us back off on some of these more technocratic approaches to education and kind of take a breath, talk, listen, and maybe use a little more of our imagination about how we can meaningfully move forward off of this terrible, I think it's been pretty terrible time.
00:05:10
Speaker
The fear that I have is that we're going to really buy into that learning loss narrative because that has been co-opted no matter really what political party or what education reformer is working on it.
00:05:22
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The reason why they want to measure that data is to determine how much learning was lost, which doesn't make any sense.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:27
Speaker
I mean, just the ignorance about measurement and that, you know, there's one of the very first things you learn in educational measurement is about issues of validity and reliability.
00:05:39
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How is data collected right now valid or reliable?
00:05:44
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Like, what are we actually capturing?
00:05:46
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And PS, there is no reason why we need to test every single child and every single subject if really what we're trying to do
00:05:57
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is get a sense of where people are at.
00:06:00
Speaker
For years before No Child Left Behind, we had the National Assessment of Educational Progress, right?
00:06:06
Speaker
That's been called the nation's report card.
00:06:08
Speaker
And that's used as a strategy called matrix sampling, where we sort of purposely sample a subset of kids
00:06:17
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to get a read on how things are going.
00:06:20
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You don't need to test every kid in every year, in every content area.
00:06:26
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And the cost associated with it means we usually go for cheaper data instead of better data.
00:06:32
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And there's so many trade-offs that we do in that model that actually works against the idea of validity and reliability that would produce things that might be useful to help guide our action.
00:06:44
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So we've bought into this weird
00:06:48
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idea about what it means to measure that's actually paradoxically working against the stated goals, like you said, across the aisle of both political parties of wanting to get a handle on what's been lost and who's been hurt and who might need more help, which are all reasonable things to do, but can we use better systems and strategies for doing that?
00:07:13
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Yeah, I mean, it warps the narrative, right?
00:07:16
Speaker
If you're really bought into the system, it makes you think, one, I was reading an article recently where one of the proposed solutions to quote unquote learning loss is putting students who don't achieve on standardized tests in mandatory summer school, which I couldn't imagine.
00:07:34
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I couldn't imagine.
00:07:35
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I just wouldn't go to school.
00:07:36
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I would become Truett.
00:07:37
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And the second thing is, it also assumes that the students who have gone through the experience of learning in COVID
00:07:42
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Haven't learned a lot of stuff along the way which isn't traditionally academically measured and there's a lot of knowledge there it really has a very particular lens about it on assuming that if you don't learn these specific things you are therefore not as intelligent and
00:07:58
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It's very school centric, like the only valuable knowledge that is in this world is school knowledge.
00:08:05
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I mean, over the last summer in the middle of the pandemic, there was a group of young people here in Nashville called Teens for Equality.
00:08:14
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a group of high school.
00:08:16
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I think they were all young women who organized for Black Lives Matter here in Nashville.
00:08:23
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And I was looking at them going, my God, I'm so proud of them.
00:08:26
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Look at what they're figuring out how to do.
00:08:29
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They're being civically engaged.
00:08:31
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They're figuring out how to organize.
00:08:32
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And it was very important to them that they had nonviolent protests.
00:08:36
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So they figured out messaging strategies and they figured out ways to mobilize people to get the kind of equipment they needed to keep it
00:08:43
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pandemic safe.
00:08:45
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And I was looking at those young women going, there is no learning loss happening there.
00:08:50
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Those, those young women are
00:08:52
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are blowing up what they might learn in a government class in high school.
00:08:59
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So absolutely, it's a very school-centric framing.
00:09:04
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And every now and then on Twitter, I'll say, OK, so tell me what your kids have learned.
00:09:09
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What have you seen?
00:09:10
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And I hear all kinds of things about learning to help around the house, learning new games.
00:09:18
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you know, going out in nature and exploring and finding the names of plants or birds or whatever, kids are having more interest-driven or community-driven learning opportunities.
00:09:30
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But isn't it interesting
00:09:33
Speaker
that we don't have a way of valuing that in school.
00:09:36
Speaker
That it's, here are the standards, here's the curriculum.
00:09:39
Speaker
Okay, that's wonderful that you learned how to be a dungeon master at D&D.
00:09:43
Speaker
That's wonderful that you've learned all the choreography in
00:09:49
Speaker
80s music videos, whatever it is that you've done because it's what your passion was, it doesn't count and all we're going to see is what you lost by not staying on this arbitrary thing we call grade level in school.
00:10:04
Speaker
I think that builds well into just thinking about that meaning-making process from the last year and how we can take what isn't working and transition that to something that maybe is working.
00:10:15
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We can see what's been exacerbated by the pandemic, and we can see the problems that we find ourselves in, especially inequity.
00:10:23
Speaker
The thing that we're really seeing is that particularly white affluent students are the ones that aren't experiencing learning loss, but everyone else is.
00:10:33
Speaker
That has so many implications for how our society just views young people in general.
00:10:40
Speaker
And then as they become young adults, what they can make out of their lives and what culturally is being reflected.
Teachers' Roles During and After the Pandemic
00:10:47
Speaker
And specifically, I want to talk about your work with teacher learning laboratory, how you work with educators, and just what tasks you would give to educators to think about the last year and how they can improve their practice.
00:10:58
Speaker
First of all, a word of compassion to all educators this past year.
00:11:03
Speaker
I think it's been an emotionally difficult year to be a teacher.
00:11:08
Speaker
You know, there was about a hot second there where teachers were heroes and, you know, during the initial pivot to virtual teaching and they were being put on this very high pedestal.
00:11:20
Speaker
And I'm someone who has like fear of heights when people are being put on a pedestal.
00:11:25
Speaker
I know it's not going to end well when someone's being exalted like that.
00:11:29
Speaker
And sure enough, by the time we got to, I don't know, the end of last end of 2020, the
00:11:35
Speaker
people's patience was gone and all of a sudden these stonewalling teachers who don't want to do their jobs and schools can't be closed and teachers aren't working and teachers getting thrown under the bus every which way.
00:11:50
Speaker
And some of the teachers that we've been following in my lab are in communities that have been devastated by COVID and a lot of illness, a lot of death.
00:12:04
Speaker
How do you just move forward from that right, you know we've had some pretty heart wrenching interviews with teachers who are trying to figure out how to how do you keep going forward as if anything is normal in the midst of so much loss and grief.
00:12:20
Speaker
So I think there's an education reporter on Twitter, Jennifer Berkshire, you might know her.
00:12:28
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Yeah, and she did a listening session with students in Massachusetts.
00:12:31
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And she said that one of the things that she heard repeatedly almost from all of them was, we need help healing from this time.
00:12:41
Speaker
Because kids have lost not only
00:12:45
Speaker
people in their lives.
00:12:48
Speaker
They've lost milestones.
00:12:50
Speaker
You know, I have two kids in high school and a child in college and there were things that that they had expected out of this year that were just supposed to be a part of their growing up that are gone, you know, no prom, no
00:13:02
Speaker
freshman year, first time in high school, making new friends, all these things that are considered rites of passage.
00:13:10
Speaker
And in the scheme of things, maybe not the biggest deal, but they're a big deal to kids.
00:13:17
Speaker
And kids are in grief over those things as well, over the experience of being isolated and not having the same connections with their friends.
00:13:29
Speaker
So I think it's important for teachers to listen to kids.
00:13:33
Speaker
I think that it's important for teachers to help kids value what they may have learned in this time.
00:13:41
Speaker
You know, maybe someone was just a super nerd about COVID tracking and they learned a lot of things about epidemiology or viral spread that they didn't know.
00:13:51
Speaker
Everyone's been learning something.
00:13:54
Speaker
That's just what we do as human beings.
00:13:58
Speaker
I would love to see teachers helping kids recognize the value of what they did learn in this time, as well as paying attention to all the social emotional fallout and grief that they may be experiencing.
00:14:17
Speaker
like the worst thing that could possibly happen is we return in the fall and it's school, like just normal old school.
00:14:24
Speaker
I think there's a little bit of calmness around the idea of business as usual.
00:14:28
Speaker
Like that's the experience that I expect.
00:14:30
Speaker
But at the exact same time, I don't know if I want to go back to...
00:14:34
Speaker
maybe a more boring traditional classroom if I just got done doing virtual hybrid learning.
00:14:40
Speaker
Instead, I could make learning and I use this word very carefully.
00:14:43
Speaker
I think that we should use that time to make learning more fun, not fun in the sense of like we'll over gamify it or do some wacky activities, but realistically creating
00:14:53
Speaker
grandiose experiential learning that pulls upon those lived experiences and opens up the classroom so kids can actually talk to each other and socialize and get out into the community, like actually get to leave their seats.
00:15:06
Speaker
I mean, the worst part of the year by far has just been
00:15:10
Speaker
There's no group work.
00:15:12
Speaker
It's not online.
00:15:12
Speaker
It's not the same.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I can't take field trips.
00:15:15
Speaker
Just that kind of stuff is so simple, but it's the most powerful experience.
00:15:18
Speaker
The only thing I remember from high school are taking field trips.
00:15:21
Speaker
So I think that any chance that we can get to connect with the community and do those hands-on, people-driven projects, the better.
00:15:27
Speaker
Right.
00:15:28
Speaker
I mean, I do think that a lot of educators had...
00:15:34
Speaker
out of necessity, a crash course in technology use in education.
00:15:39
Speaker
And so I do hope that maybe there will be the potential to find some creative uses of technology in real-time physical world spaces that might allow for more interesting activities and more creative kinds of assignments.
00:15:57
Speaker
Oh, what's something else you said?
00:16:01
Speaker
Oh, another thing that I've heard a lot
00:16:05
Speaker
from the teachers that we've been following and I follow mostly math teachers, actually for this I'm only following math teachers at this time, is I think that something about virtual teaching and pandemic teaching has really surfaced some pretty profound issues around student assessment.
00:16:28
Speaker
You know, math teachers love giving tests and, you know, we say what you know and you don't know based on how you produce answers for a test.
00:16:39
Speaker
And especially online, there are so many portals into other sources of knowledge besides the kid.
00:16:48
Speaker
So what does it mean to give a good math test or a math assessment in that kind of an environment?
00:16:55
Speaker
And so it's really kind of uncovered
00:16:57
Speaker
a lot of questions about how do you know what somebody knows?
00:17:00
Speaker
How do you decide?
00:17:02
Speaker
Is it really important that somebody knows something all by themselves without any additional resources?
00:17:07
Speaker
What's the value of that kind of knowing versus a more resourceful view of knowledge which we as adults definitely use to function like I don't have to know everything all the time at my fingertips.
00:17:18
Speaker
I can look something up and no one says I'm cheating, right?
00:17:25
Speaker
I kind of wonder if those are two things that we'll see maybe people questioning more as we go forward, like integrating technology to make more dynamic, interesting, maybe even kid-centered lessons and really digging deeper about what the point of assessment is and what we're hoping to do.
00:17:47
Speaker
It's flipping that narrative, right?
00:17:48
Speaker
It's moving away from like the student's going to cheat because they have access to resources or that whole ideology toward, I still remember one of the most profound experiences I've had teaching was probably a third or fourth year teaching.
00:18:02
Speaker
And I've always given open note tests for the most part.
00:18:04
Speaker
And we did open note tests over history, but I still had students that didn't do very well because they struggled just to answer the question.
00:18:11
Speaker
So we shifted just saying, just talk to me about this question.
00:18:16
Speaker
What did you think about it?
00:18:17
Speaker
What do you think about this?
00:18:18
Speaker
And they would have like the smallest little thing like we would have like a question over like let's say civil rights, you know, like Martin Luther King.
00:18:24
Speaker
They like oh Martin Luther King and then they start talking about it and there was just a disconnect there between not really understanding exactly what's being
00:18:31
Speaker
asked or really what context we're talking about here, even with the notes at their disposal.
00:18:37
Speaker
So shifting from a more traditional sit and get fill out the answers, even with resources to more of a conversational ongoing piece has been huge because you see students succeed that otherwise wouldn't, at least not in that traditional lens.
00:18:52
Speaker
I hope that once we move into a new year, we can start to rethink things like how we view students and how they're using things and how they think about things always at a detriment.
00:19:04
Speaker
It's always this view of they're cheating, they're plagiarizing, they don't know anything, they're apathetic.
00:19:11
Speaker
Like cell phones are like ruining their education because they can't do anything outside of play games on their cell phone.
00:19:16
Speaker
All these different ideas that I hear every single day.
00:19:19
Speaker
I don't think are realistic because anyone that's ever done a cool thing in their class knows that kids aren't like that.
00:19:24
Speaker
They actually are hyper engaged.
00:19:26
Speaker
They're just waiting for the moment to shine.
00:19:29
Speaker
You know, through your work, through what you're seeing with teachers, what changes beyond assessment do you think might be a systemic change towards that social justice driven humane education piece?
00:19:42
Speaker
I can speak to the humane part first.
00:19:45
Speaker
One of the things we've been hearing from a lot of teachers is that they've learned at this time to ask first, how's everything going?
00:19:55
Speaker
How are you doing?
00:19:57
Speaker
before they launch into here are the things you're missing or why haven't you been in class or whatever.
00:20:03
Speaker
You know, we always have to have those check-in conversations with kids when they're not meeting expectations.
00:20:09
Speaker
But it's almost become more glaringly obvious to the teachers we talk to,
00:20:18
Speaker
that they need to check in and see what's going on first because there's a pandemic and people are getting sick and people are dying and people are losing jobs.
00:20:26
Speaker
So you don't just go for like school teacher voice and they have told us some of the teachers have told us that something they plan to carry forward is to start with concern and to start with checking in and honestly
00:20:44
Speaker
A lot of the time when kids aren't doing what we expect of them,
00:20:49
Speaker
it's the right thing, even if there's not a pandemic going on, to see what's going on in your life.
00:20:54
Speaker
Maybe you just had a breakup.
00:20:55
Speaker
Maybe your parents are getting divorced.
00:20:57
Speaker
Maybe your dog died.
00:20:58
Speaker
Maybe you're just having a bad day.
Prioritizing Student Well-Being Over Academics
00:21:00
Speaker
But having that little human moment of what's going on, how are you doing?
00:21:06
Speaker
I'm concerned, as opposed to a finger-wagging kind of reprimand conversation.
00:21:12
Speaker
So I think that's something that I hope is more deeply instilled
00:21:17
Speaker
in educators moving forward.
00:21:19
Speaker
Social justice, I really am thinking a lot about the structural issues and we have such a segregated school system like we were talking about, right?
00:21:28
Speaker
Like we have some schools where you'd hardly know there was a pandemic going on and others where, you know,
00:21:35
Speaker
you get the district's plan for how they're going to go back to in-person teaching and it involves like keeping a window cracked open and you're like, has anyone been in the building?
00:21:44
Speaker
First of all, some of the rooms don't even have windows and the other ones that do, the windows won't open and like just the disconnect between
00:21:57
Speaker
what somebody in the public imagination is determining policy is assuming school buildings look like and what they actually are, I hope...
00:22:10
Speaker
that you know today we're recording this on March 11th and the big pandemic relief bill just got signed and it includes some provisions for education I haven't looked into the details of it but my goodness can we please please invest in just the buildings and the teachers and the people who are making them go because
00:22:35
Speaker
I think that's a real source of discontentment.
00:22:39
Speaker
It's definitely a place where kids will say to me when I'm talking to them in interviews, they'll say, look at this building.
00:22:47
Speaker
Nobody cares about us.
00:22:50
Speaker
Why do they care?
00:22:52
Speaker
No one cares that only one of the four toilets in the girls' bathroom down the hall works.
00:22:57
Speaker
No one cares.
00:22:59
Speaker
And it's a place when we neglect the buildings that we ask children to spend their days in,
00:23:05
Speaker
we're telling them that we don't care about them as a society.
00:23:09
Speaker
So I hope that if we mean it, if we really have all come to realize just how crucial schools are to so much of society's functioning, I hope that we are mobilized to invest in all schools for all children and all teachers who serve all children.
00:23:31
Speaker
That would be, I think,
00:23:34
Speaker
a move forward towards social justice is like the very, very beginning.
00:23:38
Speaker
It's a pretty honestly low bar, but I hope that all the
00:23:44
Speaker
difficulties of returning to school buildings maybe will press us in that direction.
00:23:50
Speaker
I think about that picture of, I don't know if you've seen the picture of like the music room where the kids are practicing and they bought those like things you get from Target that you store your coats in.
00:24:00
Speaker
They're like super tall.
00:24:01
Speaker
They're like freestanding and they're stepped inside of it.
00:24:04
Speaker
So like they don't spread the germs.
00:24:07
Speaker
It just, it looks absurd.
00:24:08
Speaker
This is where we're at.
00:24:09
Speaker
This is what reopening meant.
Challenges and Considerations for Reopening Schools
00:24:11
Speaker
And it just doesn't make any sense.
00:24:12
Speaker
In order to meet usually government mandates, some kind of bureaucratic mandate, that's what it's come to.
00:24:18
Speaker
And it's weird.
00:24:20
Speaker
I mean, I've had plenty of students tell me our school is back in person that it actually was easier to learn when it was hybrid or online.
00:24:28
Speaker
Given all of the struggles that teachers are facing to attempt to plan online or in hybrid, just the ability to have to sit in rows to learn in that fashion, to not really be able to move around easily, those things are counterproductive.
00:24:43
Speaker
So even though they might get to kind of see their friends, it's just not the same.
00:24:47
Speaker
The last question I have for you is just kind of like in spite of all of these systemic problems and a lot of things that feel like they're outside of teachers control, like standardized testing, funding, things that teachers can rally for and organize against.
00:25:04
Speaker
But day to day, it's still what it is.
00:25:07
Speaker
Is there a way that we can rethink those structures within our classroom and kind of push off and do things on our own that we can build a better system?
00:25:16
Speaker
I think starting with how kids are doing and showing them the concern and attention to their full selves is a really good baseline to build off of.
00:25:29
Speaker
Some of the things that we were talking about, about being a little broader in how we think about issues of assessment, because I'm in Tennessee and there's been a proposal to just hold back all third graders.
00:25:46
Speaker
this this year.
00:25:48
Speaker
Right, so we're going to be sending kids a lot of messages in the fall about their worthiness, about their competence, about their potential, and I think
00:26:08
Speaker
Teachers are the people who build relationships.
00:26:11
Speaker
Standardized tests don't build relationships with kids.
00:26:14
Speaker
Governors don't build relationships with kids.
00:26:17
Speaker
Teachers do.
00:26:18
Speaker
And I think teachers are in a position to maybe mediate some of the messaging that might be coming from these things that are outside of teachers' control.
00:26:32
Speaker
So, you know, a standardized test comes up and a teacher can say, yeah, this is going to tell you how well you take standardized tests.
00:26:42
Speaker
I'm going to be able to tell what you've really learned and we can talk about that.
00:26:48
Speaker
So to sort of take away some of the power of these external narratives and instead highlight
00:27:01
Speaker
what you see from interacting with these children day in, day out.
00:27:06
Speaker
And of course that requires teachers to develop what has been called an asset orientation toward their kids and their students, right?
00:27:14
Speaker
To be able to see
00:27:16
Speaker
wow, look at all this great stuff you've learned over the last year, even though maybe you don't know your math facts as well as the standards say you should.
00:27:26
Speaker
I can see, wow, you really stepped up in your family and learned to cook dinner three nights a week.
00:27:31
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:27:34
Speaker
Actually, when you're an adult, that's gonna be a better life skill for you.
00:27:38
Speaker
To just have those conversations that really validate what kids have gone through.
00:27:44
Speaker
And then kids will be more receptive to whatever we need to do to bring them along.
00:27:50
Speaker
You know, so that it's not that schooling doesn't matter.
00:27:54
Speaker
We know it's a gatekeeper to a lot of opportunities.
00:27:58
Speaker
And so we can't just be like, oh, what the heck, whatever.
00:28:01
Speaker
We're just going to have, you know, fun school where we just hang out and watch movies.
00:28:06
Speaker
That's not serving children either.
00:28:09
Speaker
We need to keep moving them toward education.
00:28:12
Speaker
this goal that's going to kind of open doors for them.
00:28:17
Speaker
But we need to do so in a way that shows care, appreciation, concern, that really sees them for who they are and what they've gone through and what they've, their resilience, hopefully, that they've been able to bring to these experiences.
00:28:34
Speaker
So it's going to be tough.
00:28:36
Speaker
I think it's going to be tough for everybody, but hopefully there'll be some healing that happens.
00:28:40
Speaker
Right.
00:28:41
Speaker
I hope that we learn from the idea of taking it slow and checking it with kids, as you just stated, as well as recognizing that when we change our classrooms to be more community focused and to be more hands on and to have students achieve on real world problems or problems that matter to them.
00:29:00
Speaker
the experience is more challenging.
00:29:03
Speaker
There is a false narrative that progressive education, human-centered education, whatever you want to call it, is somehow not taxing, like it's the hippie-style class where kids just do whatever and there's no learning going on.
00:29:17
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is that there is research study after research study after research study that kids learn way more in terms of standardized testing, for that matter, and they are motivated and they're engaged, so therefore they learn more in the future.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I think that these motivational issues are going to be really, really critical in the fall.
00:29:36
Speaker
I told you I have three children and one of my children in particular has just become super unmotivated in this particular mode of learning.
00:29:48
Speaker
it's gonna be a challenge getting them plugged in again and feeling like this whole school business is worthwhile.
00:29:55
Speaker
And I imagine teachers have over 100 kids.
00:30:01
Speaker
I just have my three right now.
00:30:04
Speaker
And trying to plug in with all the different kids.
00:30:08
Speaker
I'd love to see smaller class size.
00:30:11
Speaker
To help facilitate those relationships.
00:30:14
Speaker
I'd love to see some more creative use of student teachers or paraprofessionals or just to sort of get that adult student ratio down in classrooms and to help kids be seen and supported.
Engaging Students Creatively Over Summer
00:30:27
Speaker
I, you know, one of the things I keep proposing is a lot of college and high school students are not going to have jobs this summer because the economy is tanked.
00:30:37
Speaker
I'd love to see some kind of like Job Corps, Peace Corps kind of thing for teens and young adults to be able to just to play based stuff with kids, get them outside, get them
00:30:54
Speaker
moving around, get them out of their houses, give parents a little bit of a break, because I know parents have really been struggling too in doing that work-life balance thing when you're working and living and everything in the same place is decidedly a strain.
00:31:13
Speaker
I just think that we could bring a little more creativity if we think outside of the box of standardized tests, grade levels, and so on and so forth that could help recover some of the mental health, help restore some of the social needs of kids, help solve some of the problems of our older children, our teenagers who've lost jobs and lost income sources.
00:31:39
Speaker
I think I'd love to see more leadership around those kinds of things.
00:31:44
Speaker
That motivation piece is absolutely huge.
00:31:47
Speaker
I mean, this is anyone who is a teacher, really any adult, any person right now, I'm sure has gotten to the mode of like, you get home, it's like, today's a McDonald's day.
00:31:56
Speaker
Because there's like there's no way I have any effort to do anything else right now.
00:32:00
Speaker
And if kids have homework or extracurriculars or some still sports, like there's all these different things going on.
00:32:05
Speaker
There's a lot of burnout.
00:32:07
Speaker
There's countless numbers of students I know that have dropped all extracurriculars.
00:32:11
Speaker
They've dropped everything else.
00:32:12
Speaker
They just don't want to do anything.
00:32:14
Speaker
It's not that they're over schedule.
00:32:15
Speaker
It's just that it's been so draining.
00:32:18
Speaker
They go through that process.
00:32:19
Speaker
It's also just so much of our lives.
00:32:22
Speaker
Well, you said you're in person, but for those of us who are still like living online in front of the computer, I know I'm not biologically designed to be sitting here in front of the screen all day.
00:32:33
Speaker
I feel it in my body.
00:32:34
Speaker
I feel antsy.
00:32:35
Speaker
My mind wanders.
00:32:38
Speaker
It's very difficult to ask that of children day after day after day.
00:32:42
Speaker
And even some of those extracurriculars and activities are in that modality.
00:32:46
Speaker
And they just want to like,
00:32:48
Speaker
run around and hang out and talk and socialize and not have to worry about washing their hands every five minutes.
00:32:55
Speaker
And the anxiety of this time too has, you know, it's been a thing.
00:33:00
Speaker
And I think that that, that takes a toll on people's concentration.
00:33:09
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to human restoration projects podcast.
00:33:12
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:33:16
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.