Jethro: Welcome to Transformative Principal I am so excited to be here with you today Uh I am stoked to have Gene Kerns on the program You may have heard him as we've been doing some AI minutes uh over the past few weeks He is the Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Renaissance Learning and he has uh Been around for a long time doing a lot of things He's got 20 years of experience leading staff development speaking at national and international conferences And uh he his former clients include administrators associations across the country and the Ministry of Education of Singapore And we know that there's always exciting stuff coming outta Singapore as it relates to education Gene received his bachelor's degrees and master's degrees from Longwood College in Virginia and holds a doctor of education from the University of Delaware with an emphasis in education leadership He's the author author of three books on educational topics and Gene excited to have you here and glad that we get to talk after we just did that recording with the AI tips So this is gonna be a lot of fun I'm excited to chat with you
Gene Kerns: Yeah that's great.
We get to go a little bit more in depth.
Jethro: Yeah Well one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about and I I know other people have been too is we have all these programs and systems in our school and sometimes it feels like things are disjointed and you know we have a some tier one instruction and then we take kids out of the tier one instruction put them in a completely different tier two instruction and then sometimes in a completely different tier three instruction And sometimes those things talk to each other sometimes they don't You taught me this new word called instructional coherence so can you tell us a little bit about that idea first and help us understand what that means
Gene Kerns: Yeah, absolutely.
And it's one of those things that I, you know, part of my job as a chief academic officer is to, to watch the trends, like what's coming outta the educational think tanks, what's coming outta the research And I will tell you my opinion is that the concept of instructional coherence is trending.
And basically what that means is, um, does everything fit together?
I mean, we buy pieces, but do those pieces actually work together to make a system so we don't set out as educators to be incoherent.
But here's what we do.
We buy individual parts.
So for example, we buy a textbook and that covers us for, for tier one, and then we buy like a tier two program or some type of intervention in Richmond.
And then some kids need even more.
And so we buy something else.
Um, and maybe it's not even intervention.
I mean, you have schools, we have to buy assessments because we have to do, uh, screening for the characteristics.
dyslexia or MTSS, uh, and, and they come in with some information or we buy practice programs because very few curricula have enough practice for kids.
Each part we add and, and we use the word, each part we add has the potential to become a silo.
And when we say it's a silo, what we're applying is there's something about it that is disconnected.
Um, and, and I think what we need to do is move from silos.
of a well-stocked, highly indexed warehouse where it's all in one place and we get the parts.
And again, they're not just parts, but those parts fit together.
Jethro: You know and and one of the aspects of that is that if if we stick with one particular vendor then This is great for the vendors right That everything is coherent because it's all their stuff Um but if if something is just not quite working right or we have a new thing that doesn't have all three tiers for example then we're not going to have that And sometimes there's you know the the special ed department is paying for one thing and the stem Uh CTE group is paying for another thing And so there's all these different funding sources and it's hard to have that coherence together So uh I wanna first ask how do you know if there's instructional coherence And then second how do you do it when things aren't from the same vendor So first let's talk about how do you know if there is instructional coherence and and how do you verify that as a just a normal principal who's listening to this
Gene Kerns: All right.
Yeah, let's do that.
But let's definitely come back to that one vendor, multi-vendor thing, literally, because, you know, I said my job's to keep up with it.
An article came out today that speaks to just that.
Um, I think it's easy if we start with an example of, of what would be coherence.
What would be incoherence?
So I'm gonna use some examples that came out recently in A-T-N-T-P report and another one from C-C-S-S-O, the Council of Chief State School Officers.
One example they said is, you got a school, a lot of kids struggling with reading.
Uh, and so the principal buys a reading intervention program, which means now every kid has got a core reading program.
every kid got an extra intervention block of reading, and if you're an English language learner, you get a third block of English language development.
But the problem is if you went in and observe what was going on, those three programs are all working on different unrelated skills, and the kids are reading on three different topics.
So, for example, let's say in the core room they're reading about, uh, the Holocaust in, uh, the extension program.
Uh, they're reading about oceans and in the enrichment program or the language development program for English language learners.
Instead of reading about either of those topics that might help them back in the other rooms, the kids are reading yet about a third topic.
That's an example of incoherence, an example of coherence.
You got a kid, Anna, she's a struggling reader.
Uh, they're about to do a unit on the circulatory system in her classroom.
So that's, that's what we want her to do on grade level.
And so before Annie even shows up in school or in, in the main classroom today in an intervention support room, they have her read an easier text on the same topic, something she can access, and it's on blood and circulation.
So she learned some background knowledge, which we know is a. Powerful leg up for kids who are struggling readers.
So she comes in the courtroom already primed to do a little bit more, and then since she struggles with monosyllabic words, uh, her teacher does a small group lesson on the prefix CIRC.
that that's preparing her not only to understand circulatory, but circumference and circle and circumnavigate and circumspect, you know, so those parts are far more coherent.
So it, there's that coordination.
Um, it does require, if, you know, if you're my interventionist and I'm the classroom teacher or vice versa, um, y. interventionist has to know what's going on in the, in the tier one core classroom so that he or she can align what's going on in the extra time supports to that rather than it being just some random topic.
Jethro: Well as a uh elementary assistant principal This was my biggest frustration is that I knew what we were studying in the tier one classroom and then I'd go check on the tier two students and in their uh intervention groups and I'd see that they were just like not even talking about anything in the same ballpark
Gene Kerns: Mm-hmm.
Jethro: know that like well I knew that there was something wrong with that but I didn't know how to fix that at that time But I knew that it was something that I would need to fix because that's a problem and the kids should be reading about something similar or working on something similar And I tried to make that coherence happen in uh different subjects in the middle school where the students would be learning about one thing in science and the English course would be reading a book that related to that science topic somehow And and that kind of thing that made a huge difference for our kids because they'd be like oh this connects to what I'm learning in that other class and I understand now why this piece matters So you know that that becomes a really thing Uh just as a brief example Um at at my school the science class was reading about or was learning about uh photosynthesis and growing plants and were growing plants in their classroom while the English class was reading uh what's it called The book by Andy
Gene Kerns: flower.
Jethro: No Andy Weir The Martian The Martian that's what it's called The guy who's stuck on on Mars and he's gotta like grow his own food And and that was like the kids were loving it because they could see those connections and and it made sense And it might not have been about photosynthesis but it was about something I remember
Gene Kerns: It's related.
It's related though, because you, you put your finger on, on the main thing.
I read one author who said, when we are not coherent, when we don't do stuff like you just talked about, actually happens is our students who are struggling the most.
End up carrying the most like cognitive load.
Like, wait a minute, I have to shift from this topic to that topic, to that topic.
That's not really easy to do versus what you talked about was look at the connections.
Wow.
You know, to walk into one teacher's classroom and say, we were just talking about something that related to that.
a far more brain friendly way to, to get learning done than for everything to be a random crapshoot about topics and skills.
Jethro: For sure Alright let's talk about this one Vendor versus multi-vendor versus how do we manage this because we can't the the other vendors may just not have content for what we need
Gene Kerns: Yeah.
Um, and you know, it is interesting 'cause I mean, we, we can, we can align in kind of really two ways we could align to the skills.
In other words, I could say, you know, like, here are resources that support the teaching of this given skill.
But you also gave an example there of aligning to topic.
Like, oh, topically I could get a book.
Now.
The reason I was so excited when you, you mentioned that was literally an article came through today that was talking about a very common trend occurring in the ed tech industry is the pairing of assessment and instruction kind of put together, like, I'll give you a whole package and what it said is that some school leaders and some, some folks like that 'cause to them, like the fewer vendors, the better.
Other people are a little bit nervous about that.
'cause they say, well, wait a minute.
It's your curriculum and your assessment.
Am I really getting a truthful read on what's going on?
So, um, others have done pairings again where it's like their assessment and their curriculum, we're doing something slightly different.
Uh, Renaissance, what we're doing is we're doing alignments to the textbooks, uh, so that the information our assessment produces, uh, can be given to you through that lens.
In other words, I could say, for example.
I using this given textbook, I'm teaching unit number one.
And then what our system would do is serve up all of our information that we could tell you that relates to the topics of unit one.
Again, it's not our assessment tied to just your textbook, because that's not the nature of really good screening tools.
They, they should be broad, they should screen topics, they should be reliable and valid and produce all those normative type of data.
But it does allow us, uh, to make things far more coherent.
'cause, 'cause here's the deal.
Every, you know, we all have standards, right?
We all gotta have educational standards, but then we go buy a textbook.
Now, which one does the teacher look at more?
When I was a teacher, I didn't look at the state standards every day or every week or every month, but darn it, I looked at my textbook and my pacing guides virtually every day.
Textbooks are so powerful that they in some ways become proxy for the standards.
And I say textbooks, it could be the curriculum that you have.
So if that's the nucleus of power, like if that's deciding what's going on in the classroom, we as supplemental providers.
Have a responsibility to be able to sort of re-index our information and present it through that lens, because that's going to promote coherence.
You can, you can be part of the problem or you can be part of the solution.
And that's the approach that we are taking to be part of the solution educational coherence.
Jethro: Exactly right And that's something that is that is for sure needed that it can't be this this idea of we're just gonna do only our own stuff as the vendor because that's what we produce and we don't care about anything else It really we we talk a lot about like why are we doing this and it's for the kids and all that kind of stuff that needs to be true for vendors also It's interesting I was talking to a to a woman who's working on some sort of uh uh intervention for schools and she she was asking me she she wasn't she's not doing anything in K 12 yet She's only worked in higher ed And so she's like well what does it look like in K 12 and like is if we if we provide an intervention that gets uh schools more funding would that be valuable And I was like well we would we don't really think about it that way she said well what metrics do we need to improve to make things happen And I said something that uh that made sense when I said it and kind of surprised me when I did say it which was
teachers believe that if kids are in school then they're going to learn That seems really basic right we would think that that's the case And that probably is the case So getting kids to come to school is going to be a valuable intervention that's going to help And so if kids are missing a lot of school them coming is gonna be really valuable
Gene Kerns: They're, they're highly correlated.
Jethro: Yeah exactly But then I I thought about if they come to school but what they're doing isn't meaningful and the curriculum's not meaningful or they can't connect to it or they don't get it then that's going to be much more difficult For them to find the success that they're looking for And that's where this idea of coherence comes into play is that if you have to uh code switch every single uh 20 minutes as a as a student That's gonna be really difficult for you to get everything that you need to And if you're not having the type of support that you need to grow and learn then it's gonna be nearly impossible for you to to learn what you need to learn So it's not just about being in school obviously but about the tools that are being used at school to work well together and be to help you be successful Does that make sense
Gene Kerns: No, I, I think You you framed it perfectly because I was, I was just reading another report that that kind of juxtaposed two approaches.
approach was exactly what we've been talking about.
When the core and the extensions and the tier two and the tier three are, are not coherent.
It it both, it and only frustrates the kids.
We've talked about that, but think about how hard it is for the teachers.
They're switching too, so everybody's frustrated.
What one report actually said was, there's a body of research that suggests.
kids that get extra time do not get any extra growth.
Some of them don't grow anymore even though they've gotten twice as much because what we're doing is confusing to them.
So we're giving them two, sometimes three times the dosage, and they're not growing anymore than if they got one term of dosage.
Now that stands in contrast.
another body of research, primarily talking about accelerated learning, which says let's make our services far more coherent.
That gets much more positive.
And it, it's exactly what you said before, topically, it would be, let's have a theme.
It all bills, it all relates.
That's a language arts example.
Uh, in math, you know the example and the phrase that TNTP uses is accelerate.
Don't remediate.
Now be honest.
No marketing person was involved in naming accelerated learning.
'cause it doesn't mean go faster.
What it means is we have to move ground more quickly, and the way that we do that is to make sure that everything is coherent.
So what I tell people is the emphasis is on grade level content.
I want kids to do and access as much grade level content as possible.
That emphasis on grade level content doesn't mean you can't review off grade level content, but there are two rules to review.
Number one, only review what is absolutely necessary, which makes sense when you're trying to catch a kids up.
No extras.
But here's the other one that really gets the power.
Only review what is immediately relevant to the grade level lesson that you are doing right now.
So if I'm teaching seventh grade geometry, I can review anything from any previous grade level that kid needs.
But what I review must be related to the current unit, and that's me in the classroom.
Or again, you as my interventionist.
You need to know what unit I'm teaching so that a kid can work with you and then come down the hall to my classroom and go, we were just talking about it.
those are the moments we want and, and, and, and again, that not only doesn't, you know, cause the kid to carry an extra burden, but my gosh, look at the opportunity it does to build up their confidence and to say it's finally starting to fall into place to me instead of, I go from room to room to room, and I never really know which way's up in any of them.
Jethro: you
know one of my schools we had two uh we had 45 minute periods and we had two blocks of English that were scheduled back to back So kids had 90 minutes in English and that was for everybody regardless of of their need which that's cool But at the same time what we also realized was that the time was not well spent for For the kids who were doing well and on grade level and it wasn't well spent for the English language learners it wasn't well spent for the kids who were below that And so we re we adjusted it so that we could then provide that second block of intervention to students who needed help in English or in math And kids who didn't need help in either of those had an opportunity to have an additional elective And that that Way of doing it helped our students succeed so much more because they had this place where they could get everything that they needed all at once which was it turned out to be really cool and and was exactly exactly what they needed which was targeted time That was helping them learn what they need to learn to be successful in their grade level classes And all of our kids uh increased their Their performance in those content areas very quickly It was really cool to see Now back then we didn't have the tools that we have today where you could essentially use ai for example to write the uh previous level story for someone so that so they get at a lower level What are the ways that you guys are at Renaissance are using AI to help with this idea of coherence
Gene Kerns: I mean, definitely part of it is, uh, a variety of AI tools that we've developed that help you kind of level things, you know, so I need to, uh, make this more complex or less complex.
Let's do that.
Uh, we're also using, which I think is a really important use.
Uh, we're using AI to plot the learning paths.
In other words, we, we've been studying learning progressions for years.
Like we understand where a kid is, what grade level is in that same grade level, and if there's a gap between the two, we can outline what this pathway is between those two, uh, and present that to a teacher.
So it, I mean, it's, I mean, like, teachers know what kids are behind and what kids are ahead.
They know that.
So when we say the data, you know, here's your five kids that are behind, they go, Yeah I, I knew that was probably them.
What they really need to then understand is, okay, if this is the grade level unit you're about to be do, and this is where these kids are, let me help you with what the prerequisites are between those two.
Instead of you trying to figure out what prerequisite skills you need to work back through with them, let us both suggest those to you.
And provide you resources, uh, you know, to, to teach those.
The other kind of thing too that I love is, uh, we, we've done a, a lesson creator with ai.
And, you know, I don't, I don't envision using it as a teacher to, you know, there's a million lessons in certain topics out there.
Like, you know what I mean?
There's, there's, there's topics we all teach and there's gonna be dozens of lessons online.
I don't need it for that, but you know what I need it for?
I need it for the teachable moment.
I need it when the topic comes up in the C or when something's going on in the news that's related to the concept that I'm teaching right now, that I can tell that tool.
Use this as an example, and then all of a sudden now we're bringing the relevance into the classroom.
The kids go, I see how what we're doing in the classroom actually relates to the world.
Cool
Jethro: Yeah that that Cool And I I did that back in 2006 2007 something like that Maybe 2008 Steve Jobs wrote this letter about how there shouldn't be DRM on music and this was like a big deal because iTunes music store was there and people could buy stuff and my students were all like They're poor seventh grade students and they're like well yeah we're gonna download it for free because why wouldn't we And then Steve Jobs wrote this letter and I use that as a way to teach them how to write a persuasive paragraph And man the kids like I've never Taught a lesson before or since about writing persuasive essays that was as compelling as that one was because this was something that everybody was talking about Kids love music so they were into it Apple was a huge deal and still is a huge deal and it was so perfect because it was exactly what needed what the kids needed to help them understand why they would write a persuasive essay because most of the time they're like I don't care when am I gonna ever like try to convince someone of something And it's like you're gonna do it your whole life but you just don't see it yet And
Gene Kerns: That, that contrived writing pump write, write a letter to your town council about a topic that we've determined
Jethro: yeah
Gene Kerns: excited about versus the moment that you tapped into.
And, and, and also too, it's this moment as a teacher where kids go, oh my gosh, what he's teaching us is actually related to the world.
Wow.
Jethro: Yes
Gene Kerns: blown.
Jethro: Yeah And related to the world today not just like
Gene Kerns: Yeah.
Jethro: related Yeah Not to the world 50 years ago That I don't understand at all Anyway not related to five years ago That was still before my time but like this came out today and and that's powerful That yeah That that to me is like A great use for using an AI lesson plan writer That makes total sense
Gene Kerns: Mm-hmm.
Jethro: most of the time though they're dumb and they they're not useful But what you're talking about is a is a great way to do that Um so tell us about in closing how people can learn about what you've got to offer at Renaissance and what kinds of tools you have available even if they're not a subscriber and what that looks like how they can get more information
Gene Kerns: It's kind of that obligatory, you know, visit our website renaissance.com.
But, but I think it's even more than that.
Uh, we're doing a lot of videos right
now, uh, and a lot of webinars about coherence.
'cause this is such an important topic.
I mean, we've identified.
helps kids.
It helps teachers.
AI can help us do this on a level we've never done it before.
So, you know, check some of those latest webinars, you know, renaissance.com/webinars.
We'll get you there.
Uh, and I'm doing a lot of writing about it too, so we're gonna have some white papers coming out.
We've got a blog hitting.
Uh, later this month.
And it's one of those moments where we've been really blessed that we were kind of working in this space.
And then bam, here comes this big report from C-C-S-S-O, and then here's another article.
So, you know, this is a trending topic, uh, and it's all wrapped up in our new product, Renaissance Intelligence, where we're really saying, you know.
Let's obliterate the silos by not even selling our product as individual silos.
Let's sell that well stocked, highly organized warehouse, supercharge it with AI and give it to teachers where everything that they might need to do in terms of assessment, practice, and instruction is all at one single login, and that it's intelligent enough to be able to ingest the particular curriculum that you're using in the unit you're teaching and making that completely relevant and coherent.
Jethro: I love it I think that's a great way to do it Uh so renaissance.com Jean thank you so much for being part of Transformative Principal today It was great to chat with you again
Gene Kerns: Thank you.