Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.
This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.
Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.
And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.
Only stuff that
works.
My guest today is Rod Jay Knockin.
Rod is a secondary English language arts teacher with deep experience in educational leadership, professional development, and the science of dialogue.
Through his classroom practice and ongoing research, he explores how meaningful conversations can transform teaching, learning, and leadership in education.
A graduate of the University of New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana University where he is currently pursuing his doctorate.
Rod leads the science of dialogue, examining how thoughtful discussion enhances student engagement and educational outcomes.
Through his blog, podcast, and social media presence, he shares classroom insights and explores the power of strategic dialogue in education.
You can connect with Rod at Rod j Nokin across social platform.
Subscribe to a substack or listen to the science of Dialogue wherever you get your podcasts.
I think you're gonna like this one.
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Rod, thank you for being on better teaching only stuff that works.
I'm so happy to be back, gene and talk shop with you once again.
Oh I'm always excited to talk to you, rod.
Although I do have to say.
I've told you this before and it gives me a little PTSD sometimes to read your stuff with all the philosophy.
'cause I was a philosophy major who didn't understand anything at the time.
Huh.
And so sometimes I understand what you're saying, sometimes I don't.
But it's always interesting to read.
And so I appreciate you being back, appreciate you being back.
And I'll tell you, rod, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you back again, is to talk about.
A little bit of your journey, so we, so in the introduction Sure.
Talked about you had done, you had worked in leadership, you're a teacher, worked in leadership, and now you're back in teaching.
So, so if you could kind, let's expand a little bit on, on your background and what you did in that time when you were away from teaching and and then move forward from there.
Yes, sir. So, I first went into a classroom around 2011 in recovery schools in New Orleans.
And I taught for, let's see, about seven, eight years.
And then I had an opportunity to move into a staff development or professional development role at a school site.
So it was 20 17, 20 18.
I started working with the leadership team at a big high school here in Louisiana.
Basically what my role was is kind of liaison between the teachers and the administrative staff.
I chaired the instructional leadership team.
Some folks call those ts.
There's all kind of ABCs with that.
I did that at a big school Southwest of New Orleans for two years.
And then after that I moved into a, within the same district, a system-wide role, where I was doing some instructional coaching for history and English language arts teachers and secondary environments.
That was primarily nine 12.
So I did two years.
Coaching.
I went to two different high schools and worked with history, US history teachers English teachers from a variety of different grade levels.
And then after that, I think in the be spring, late winter of 2022, I went into nonprofit land.
So, I worked for a few different nonprofits that were doing some professional learning or teacher training.
Primarily in context around here in Louisiana.
So, I ran into a lot of those folks because they were doing curricular reform in the state of Louisiana trying to bring different materials to kids and train up the teachers.
With the use and the kind of evidence backing of some of those materials.
So in 2022, I took a full-time role kind of remote doing some of that teacher leadership work traveling to a bunch of different schools.
I went to Arkansas as we were talking about prior to this conversation of four different systems there kind of leading coaching work in those systems.
And I did that for two and a half years while that was happening, I've been working on my dissertation since kind of COVID time.
2020, yeah, about six years ago.
And my dissertation, once I kind of walked into working with leadership teams and then doing coaching at a bunch of different schools and going to like 10 to 12 different teacher team meetings every week I became really fascinated with how.
Adults talk to one another about the work that they do in education.
And that's why my dissertation has become about how educators talk to one another.
It's primarily around leadership talk, but I've studied all around like how kind of, horizontal teacher talk intersects and all that kind of stuff.
And then, you know, ed reform has had some kind of bumps in the road, at least.
In the last maybe 12, 18 months.
And part of that is kind of inspired me to go back to my alma mater.
So I started teaching again in August of 2025.
And I've been blessed to be working with some juniors and seniors in high school with their English language arts work.
So hopefully that gives you a picture of kind of how that trajectory has kind of played out.
So your interest in the dialogue, study of dialogue, the genesis was you're actually doing this work.
Sure.
Observing folks, observing how sometimes they communicate effectively, sometimes not so much.
And so you became interested in that.
And that is that is the your area of study on your dissertation.
Correct.
Of your area of research.
So has that changed?
Can you walk into a conversation now and not.
Dissect it, you know, you know, are, you know, you know, I mean, because when you first start, when you first start studying something, that's all you see.
Yeah.
And where are you in that, in, in that, do you know, it's like a therapist.
It's like a therapist, you know, talking to somebody.
They can't.
Put that aside.
Well, I can't, to be honest.
You know, like, it's become so kind of ingrained and you followed me on social.
So I'm always thinking, I'm always studying, I'm always dealing with some kind of text and trying to kind of refine where I'm at or find new things.
So I mean, I'm that wacky guy that's still thinking about Aristotle's rhetoric while I'm having a lot of different conversations.
I know that seems insane but it's kind of hard to turn off.
And I would say, I would argue that right now we're engaged in a spontaneous dialogue.
And because of like the ubiquity of it it, it would be kind of disingenuous for me to pretend like I'm not kind of, I mean, I'm always involved in it.
We're always involved with dialogue and talk.
So, I try, you know, sometimes to not over philosophize.
I spo, I suppose.
But it's hard for me to kind of, I've just read so much around dialogue that it's always part of my thinking.
I think it was part of, but it was part of it before I kind of Yeah.
Came into that dissertation space.
But now I mean it, for better or worse.
It's always there.
So, so you were doing this work outside at various schools.
You were doing this work.
Yeah.
And again, now you have that perspective that based on your study of dialogue, when you moved back to the classroom, how did you think or how.
Yeah.
How did you think that was going to change how you perceived teaching and your interactions with students?
I had some assumptions and students are a great group of folks to destroy your assumptions and really challenge anything that you may have brought into the room thinking that was kind of airtight and could work.
But one of the big things for me, and I still believe this and I can talk to you a little bit more about how I've kind of, finessed it to make it kind of fit with the reality of high school juniors and seniors in 2026.
But I've come to the understanding that.
Dialogue is kind of upstream of monologue.
So when I returned to the classroom, I really was looking for ways to support kids with talk before I asked them to do more monolog.
I know that sounds kind of crazy artifacts.
So in other words, if I was gonna ask them to write a paragraph, I wanted them to talk a lot about it.
Take a lot of turns talking about what they would write about before.
I would ask them to generate an artifact, a text, a free response question, or to respond to anything multiple selected, whatever it is.
Whereas in the past I wasn't doing as much talk.
I wasn't building in as much like, deliberate.
Conversational and discourse kind of moments prior to having them write or complete an assignment.
So one of the big things when I came back to the classroom, and I blogged about this in the fall and I had to do some tinkering to figure this out, was like, I'm gonna have a convers conference table and I'm gonna talk to as many kids as I can.
And I learned a lot about how.
That could work, sort of.
And oftentimes it is very challenging to manage in a classroom, but I've kept the principle of trying to have a lot of turn taking conversations or offer kids opportunities to talk to one another before they had to encode it in writing or respond to a prompt or develop an essay.
Or expand a paragraph.
So I'm still doing a lot of that.
Now it's like, it looks a little different from how I envisioned it.
When I went back in August, I was like, we'll have a conference table.
I'll talk to two, three kids every day.
We'll always be talking about it and yada.
And the management of everybody else was not something that was as prominent in my thinking.
But returning that reality kind of jumped in on me.
But I'm still inviting kids to have rich conversations before I get them to do to generate a text or to write.
So let's talk about the thinking of your timeline here.
Sure.
So you had you were teaching, you started teaching about what year were you doing?
2010. 2011. 20 20 10. Okay.
So you had, from the time you were teaching you started out, you had all the, I wanna bring tech.
See, I wanna talk about tech a little bit.
Sure.
So you had the explosion of the iPhone and all of that happened?
Yes.
And then you left for a period of time, you left the classroom prior to COVID, correct?
Sure, yes.
Okay.
And then you came back?
Yeah.
So here's my question after trying to provide some context is, did you see.
A difference in the ability of the students or the desire of the students to have that dialogue that you were talking about.
Was that a confounding a variable in what you were trying to do?
Do you think?
Or am I making it up?
No big time.
So when I was still in the classroom, my last year in the classroom was 20 17, 20 18.
At that time I was blessed as a English teacher to have a Chromebook cart in my classroom.
And there was a lot of amazing things we could do with that, right?
But it lived in my classroom so kids would come and I could make an instructional decision about when you would gather those materials for part of our lesson.
It wasn't living with a kid post COVID.
At least in the place where I am now, and I recognize this is in a lot of places that kids are distributed one-on-one devices, oftentimes from a school.
So now what happens is, rather than kids coming to my classroom and I decide when you get the Chromebook or when you use a device.
They are arriving with a device that has been assigned to them for the whole school year that they're bringing to every class.
So that changes things pretty dramatically, at least in my conception, right?
So I have to, no longer am I the one who's orbiting, like, Hey, 20 minutes in, we're gonna use the Chromebook for writing test.
They arrive with them and they have expectations about their use, right?
So I'm teaching 11th and 12th grade kids.
That have at least for the last maybe four or five, maybe a little bit more than that, have expecting one-to-one devices.
And that changes their expectations of what kind of activities they get from their teacher, how much they do or don't use them.
And kids, you know, like adults, you know, in many ways really rely on their devices to do certain things or expect to be able to access things through them.
So that's a whole new, that was a whole new thing for me coming in, in the fall.
It was like in the past.
I could decide and I would say, Hey, you go get them 20 minutes into class now.
You all arrive with them and I have to figure out how to manage you at the beginning so that it doesn't become kind of a divergent kind of challenge there.
So it's been, it, that has been one of my bigger challenges returning to a classroom to be frank.
Oh, when you are doing these conversations with the students, do you need to structure the conversation at all?
Do you need to provide any framework for them?
Again, I hear teachers say, you know, that they will have students who are 10 feet away send them a text.
Yeah.
Instead of talking to them.
And so the idea of talking to anybody much less a teacher Sure.
Did.
Did you have to scaffold that?
Well, well, I'll tell you a few things.
Yeah.
Okay.
Go ahead.
I'll tell you a few things that I'm doing and I have some complex feelings about this, right?
So there's a lot of folks who like to talk about the Socratic seminar and all this kind of stuff in their classroom, but I've been blessed enough in the last six, seven years to really look at the Socratic texts, like really read more about Socrates and his like dialogic approaches.
So I'm not a huge fan of a structure like a Socratic circle.
When somebody says we're doing a Socratic today, it kind of grinds my gears to be frank.
Look, if you want to email me, find me online and talk to me about this.
I'm happy you're doing a discussion in your classroom.
But that's not like, to me, that's that's a protocol, you know, and I'm like I'm such a dialogue person that that I believe in, like, levity and spontaneity in dialogue.
So over scaffolding is something that I'm afraid of, but.
You're right, like kids wanna be in advice and they'd rather text you than have a conversation with you.
So I used a few relatively simple structures to try to build a discourse culture in my classroom.
One of 'em was kind of an accident in the fall but I discovered it and I think it's really been helpful and it's a simple, would you rather questions?
You may have heard those.
When I was working in ed reform, we would do like a little icebreaker at the beginning of the meetings.
All of my zooms all day long, right?
The last time I saw you, I was like, I hadn't been on a Zoom in a while.
But what I would do on Zoom a lot is ask folks these, would you rather questions like, would you rather have like spaghetti for hair or pancakes for feet?
Like wacky questions to just like get us into the humane kind of dialogue of that of that moment.
So when I went back into a classroom, I was like, Hey I was struggling to find ways to get kids engaged.
I was like, Hey, this worked.
I mean, it was fun, dude.
Would you rather, let's try it out.
So now in this spring what it does is it makes it forces a binary and I'm not always a binary person, but it forces a binary.
So would you rather is structured like.
Hey, are you gonna pick this side or are you gonna pick this side?
And when and I set it up to where I ask them to stand up and go on the other side of the room that you would rather, right?
And then I ask them, I know this is not a groundbreaking process.
I know that folks have described this before.
And then I ask them to turn to the person next to you and tell them why you're standing there.
They're justifying their claim.
They're justifying why they decided on that position.
So I do that every Friday.
And sometimes it's, I try to make 'em approachable or accessible questions.
So, and not every kid's gonna wanna talk, but I'm asking.
I'm like, leave everything.
Don't pick nothing up.
You don't need to bring anything with you.
All you need to bring is your wonderful self.
Stand up.
Pick a side to my question.
And we do that so much that some kids, they would love to talk all day like me.
You know, I love to talk.
It doesn't matter.
I love hearing my own voice, da.
But many kids that's not something that they're really.
Prepared or desiring to do, especially when it's might be broadcast more broadly.
So when I do that, I'm.
Providing a, the scaffold for me is you have a smaller group.
I'm just asking you to talk to the person next to you about why you're there, and then I might draw you into the further conversation.
And then we do that all the time.
We do four or five of those every week.
And then I build them into and try to make them more coherent.
What we're studying, the text that we're reading to invite kids into conversation.
I'm not gonna lie to you, gene.
Not every kid wants to say stuff, you know.
It's a tough to get kids to start to speak.
But I use a lot of different structures like small group, partner all the time, talk I, I intentionally say get rid of everything else.
Close everything, put everything away.
I don't need you to have anything except your mind, you spirit and talking to the person next to you.
So that's really what I lean into as far as like, quote unquote structure.
Scaffold it's more kind of like a repetition of a few easily accessible dialogue structures is what I'm really kind of, living with right now.
In the second semester, I'm hearing you talk about be you want the kids to be able to talk about what they're gonna write before.
Yes.
And I'm trying to tie a couple things together.
Help me out here.
Sure.
So, in your writing.
I've read some of your blogs where you have talked about providing scaffolds for the writing so that it's more focused.
And so that's really structured and so I'm thinking about do we have to match the dialogue in that structured way as well prior to the writing?
Well, what I'll push on there is I'm less of a fan of the writing structure.
I like CER, for example, claim evidence, reasoning or like race or restate, assert.
Around here I've heard folks say like, Acer assertions, site evidence or re reasoning, all this kinda stuff.
What I'm not a huge fan of those things, to be honest.
I, for example I don't think, like, if you look at CER claim, evidence, reasoning.
In the wild writing, in the wild your evidence and your reasoning are oftentimes integrated.
In fact, if you go ask a bunch of teachers, and I know you work with a lot of teachers a problem quote unquote, that a lot of writing teachers encounter is that kids drop a quote in and they don't explain it.
I, I think part of the cause there is because we're telling them that evidence and reasoning are different things when they aren't.
And in a fluid writing you will find reasoning that integrates evidence inside of it.
They're integrated.
So that's part of the justification or the rationale that I have for why I'm not a huge of like, form formulaic writing kind of, ingredients.
But what I do is like I'll tell you about what I was doing today.
So I want kids to write about Greg Gatsby in 11th grade class, right?
So, rather than telling them, I need you to write a paragraph, here's your question.
Do a claim, do evidence, and do reasoning.
What I do is say, Hey here's the question or here's a claim.
GA Gatsby's ambition changes how Daisy sees him, right?
So I give you a claim, and then here's a dialogue structure.
I'll count you off.
I'll put you with three or four other people.
Here's 10 different pieces of evidence.
Some of them are good and some of them aren't.
Talk to the people that you're with right now and try to figure out which of these is good evidence to support this claim and which isn't.
That's an activity that we did today, right?
So I've provided the claim there.
I've also provided us an assortment of different kind of evidence and reasoning statements where they're integrating the evidence in there so kids are seeing.
Some examples of quality evidence and reasoning and some poor examples, and they have to talk to one another about which ones match the claim.
So what I'm doing there is trying, so when they go to write, it's no longer obscure.
No longer do I need a name.
Hey, you gotta generate evidence.
You gotta generate reasoning, and you gotta generate a claim.
You've seen them working together in a similar context.
So oftentimes kids can grab that, like maybe a claim that they found compelling or they'll take an example and make their own claim to demonstrate to me 'cause they want to, that they can take it in a different direction.
But they've seen concrete examples that are really closely.
Related to the text that we're reckoning with in that moment.
So what I've basically done is taken the scaffold from the writing piece and put it into a pre upstream dialogue conversation where I really am scaffolding their understanding of claim, evidence, and reasoning.
I'm just doing it in a different way, and rather than saying, you have to have this many sentences, and this is how the parts fit together.
I've, you've seen examples and now I just want you to answer the question.
So answer the question for me.
If it's, if it demands a claim in a certain way.
So that's kind of how I, my thinking around writing and speak speaking, and those relationships has developed.
I, you had I read a blog recently of yours that you described part of that process, you described the fact that you were gonna give the claim.
You didn't go into further how you just described, you know Yeah.
Give, having them evaluate evidence.
Yeah.
And I had talked to you earlier and I was so excited to see that because developing a claim is difficult and it could stop the whole process.
Yeah because you start with the claim.
So, so I was excited when you talked about that.
And it's hard for me.
I work with a lot of language arts teachers and do having them do that.
It almost hurts their heart.
They're thinking like, oh, I'm giving them too much.
I'm giving them too much.
But but in, in the, in your blog you had an example about a claim about Macbeth and what was happening in Denmark, and I'm thinking, oh, kids, that is pretty sophisticated stuff.
But once you know that, now you can evaluate evidence.
Yeah, so I'm really inspired.
There's this woman Sarah Tio, who has written a book.
It's called The Literacy Cookbook.
I'm looking at it right now.
But in the fall, I was trying so walking into a teaching role, right?
So there's, curricular materials around you, expectations, policy and I'm happy to be a part of a system where I'm trying to apply those materials in a certain way.
Right.
As I mentioned earlier, I've worked with some ed reform around quality materials in this state before.
So I'm a fan of materials.
I'm happy to look at materials.
However, when I arrived, I'm kind of a philosophical guy.
I don't know if you mentioned that at all, gene, but when I arrived in the classroom in again, in August of September I started to question.
The questions.
I know that sounds pretty Socratic maybe, right?
But like, thinking about what a claim really is and a claim needs to be defensible, right?
So there's some questions that aren't claim worthy.
So I started I started questioning, being skeptical Socratic in some ways, right?
About the questions that our materials were asking of kids.
And I really, it was really a difficult time for me trying to figure out, like if I'm at, like oftentimes I'll ask kids to write to a question and then they're just like, where do I start?
What do I say?
Yeah.
And I wanted to afford them better opportunities to express whatever their thinking was.
So I had to kind of figure out.
What is a claim?
Or like what is some questions are not worthy of making a claim, right?
It's not defensible or not whether or not we can argue that the earth is a sphere.
That's not a defensible claim.
There's like a preponderance of evidence that makes that no longer a debatable proposition.
I recognize the conspiracy theories that abound but I think that's there's a preponderance of evidence that makes it more of a convergent question.
There's not a divergence of answers there Claim questions.
Offer the opportunity for a divergence of answers, right?
That's why they demand evidence and reasoning.
So the questions themselves need to be ripe enough that they di that they can offer differences in the claims.
Maybe there's not a wide variety of claims, you know, but there's, at least you can make a couple different claims in that context.
That's why they need to be substantiated with evidence and reasoning.
So I reckoned a lot with what a claim was and what a claim wasn't.
Trying to think through in our curricular materials, what questions we were asking kids.
And then that helped me kind of come to this place where, like you're saying oftentimes you give kids a question and you're like, where do I start?
Like, what's the ingredient?
What ingredients do you like me to use?
What's your acronym?
Tell me, you know?
So rather than doing that.
Once I kind of figured out, okay, here's claim worthy questions, how can I go?
That's when I found Sara Tino's blog and what she talks about is how to help kids write better paragraphs.
Here's a process, and I've shared with you the steps that she has and one of her techniques is.
Give the kids a topic sentence, and then they have to build the paragraph from there.
So I've been really inspired by quite a few of her pieces.
I haven't even dug all the way into a lot of her work.
But that really has shifted the game for me and how I think about stepwise claim, evidence, reasoning, writing, instruct argument instruction, is really what she calls it.
Uh, Argumentation.
So taking that and then going back to what you said about, I'm gonna give the kids nine pieces of evidence and they're gonna, they're gonna tell me if that's good evidence or not.
Yeah.
And do you have any instruction prior to that?
And the reason that I say that is because if they're gonna write a paper.
If they're gonna write a paper, just do some writing.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you're gonna get it, you're gonna do some evaluation.
So obviously in your head, whether it is you have written it out or shared it with the kids, you have some sort of rubric in your head Yeah.
Of what's good evidence or not.
Now, do you share that with the kids ahead of time as they're doing this process?
Can I ask you a follow up?
Like, the, what do you mean by good evidence?
I don't know you, you're the one who gave that to the kids.
Okay.
You gave them, here's the claim and here's nine pieces of evidence.
Yeah.
So sure you, I want you to tell me which is good or not.
So I'll go back to Sara Ten's framework.
Right.
So in her framework, the first step is given claims and evidence that kids can distinguish which ones are claims and which ones are evidence.
A little bit further down.
Maybe the second step, I don't have it in front of me right now, but it's like, can you match evidence with their claims?
So, given a set of claims and evidence, can you figure out which claims go with which evidence?
So, so, so, so, excuse me.
So even at this point, we're not even talking about quality, we're just talking about identifying.
Nope.
Yep.
We're just talking about the coordination of them, so to speak, if that makes sense.
Right.
Got yes.
Yes.
So I'll bring it back to would you rather, right.
So if you are choosing, would you rather live in a giant mansion with a bunch of strangers, or would you rather live in a tall small little house where you know all your neighbors?
That's the question I asked my kids in that context.
When kids pick a side, they're making a claim.
They're saying, I would rather live in a mansion.
So that's my claim.
It's a divergent question.
You can answer something different.
You can justify a different claim.
And then when I ask them, why are you standing on that side of the room?
Why are you standing there?
That's their reasoning.
That's their so they naturally already, I mean, if you've been around kids, they argue a lot.
I don't know.
Mine argue all the time, they're seven.
So they have facility would argumentation.
It's just like turning that into like a literary argument in an English classroom or a, a more kind of cons coordinated argument is where we go.
So I like to, I do provide some instruction in a sense of like, I'm asking you to make a claim and I'm asking you to justify it.
Now, the reason why I was asking you about like what good evidence is, it really depends on the claim.
It really does.
So wherever you're trying to go 'cause they have to work in concert they're working together.
Right.
So, sometimes I knew, like if I give them a list, obviously if I've given 'em a claim and I give 'em some pieces of evidence, I've done some vetting there to determine what I think are the pieces of evidence that are strong, most strongly supportive of that particular claim.
But I suppose the instruction is more around.
Trying to coordinate those two pieces together rather than within the I guess I'm supporting like kids with their finding of good evidence by bringing them through the process for particular claims.
But it's hard to kind of separate the pieces and parts.
It's you know, it really is because we.
Even though there can be a divergent opinion regarding a claim once the claim is made, there is better evidence than others.
That's it.
Yes.
And you know, you know, and so you know that, and you again, as an educated person, as the teacher that's in your head.
Are we cheating if we tell the kids, Hey, you know what, here was the claim, here's the evidence.
Can you point to where in that claim this evidence actually applies?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, do you develop criteria like that for them?
I guess what I what I'm really going for here is to get your opinion about.
What you had talked about in one of your blogs about breaking things down.
Yeah.
Being more direct.
It was a lot of Rose, I think it was all about Rosen.
Schein.
Yeah.
And I think as I see this writing and what you've described, whether it is guys.
Here's a three point rubric on how to determine whether this is good or not.
Or it's just guys, does the evidence make sense?
Does it connect?
Yeah.
Is it convincing?
So would you change your mind about it?
So, I'm res, I'm resistant.
Like I do use a rubric for paragraph construction, which I've taken from Sarah T's work, right?
So her rubric talks about like, topic sentence like pieces of evidence, integration, commentary, a lot of things that are not a field of what we do, but.
The thing that something that's really kind of prominent for me is in the.
Like you said a little while ago.
Right.
So if we give kids like CER and ask them to answer a question, if a kid throws out a claim that is difficult to defend, then you end up with a paper that is kind of like going in every single direction.
Yeah.
And it's hard to provide intentional feedback there.
So I don't necessarily give them criteria for how to find the like this is the hard and fast generalizable criteria of good evidence.
It really is dependent.
And one thing that Sarah 10 talks about, she uses this mean mom skit.
So she says, Hey, imagine if you're a kid and you're trying to go to the movies, so you're trying to convince your caregiver, your parent, whomever it is, that you can go to the movies.
So you say to your mom, Hey, I did all my chores.
Can I go to the movies?
And your mom says you're supposed to do your chores.
No.
Right?
So that's one way to make an argument that's not producing a lot of reasoning, right?
So again, this is to my case that evidence and reasoning are interrelated.
And then she says, well, imagine if you said this, Hey.
So, hey mom, I did all my chores to go to the movies this weekend also, so and so who invited me said said that her mom can bring me there.
And that demonstrates that I'm like keeping up with everything and can I go to the movies?
And then mom says, yeah, what's their number?
I'm gonna call 'em right now so I'm not reproducing her anecdote as well as she does.
And we can find the blog where she reproduces this.
But her point is that just finding the right evidence.
Is not gonna substantiate your claim that evidence and reasoning are interrelated and we need to do the work of making the point.
Like another thing she says is that if you have good reasoning, you can turn okay evidence into really just like, a really compelling case for your claim or vice versa.
If you have good evidence and your reasoning is not very good, then it can kind of disintegrate.
So, that's why I find it difficult to name without the claim there.
A hard and fast kind of set of criteria.
It really depends.
They're all interrelated.
The argument that I'm making, the thing the reasons, the evidence that I'm citing and the rationale that I'm giving about why they're connected.
So, okay, so when you're teaching this, would you might, is, was that an example that you might use the mom conversation?
Yeah, so I'm starting to try to inter integrate and that's what some of the folks I've been following really kind of, emphasize is trying to get kids to think about argumentation in a way that's successful.
'cause like I said, a little while ago.
Kids love to argue.
They're arguing with all each other all the time.
If you put a, would you rather question like, would you rather wear sweatpants or whether you rather wear jeans?
Somebody's gonna pick a side.
Guess what?
You just made a claim.
I'm asking you now, Jean, why'd you go to the jeans side?
Because it rhymes with your name.
I don't know.
Can you gimme a justification?
And what I'm, what I make vi, what I'm trying to make ta more apparent to the kids in the room is that those things are interrelated.
Like you pick the side because you feel like you have evidence 'cause you're, feel like you have a rationale.
And when we go into a text, we're doing the same thing.
Of course you're gonna.
Pick kind of where you're going with a claim but then I can help you kind of marshal your evidence and your reasoning in a way that can convince someone or defend that, that claim in the ways that that I recognize or that literary argumentation may recognize, or us as an 11th grade faculty may recognize as substantive.
You know, I, I kinda laugh going back to when you talked about Socratic seminars.
Yeah.
You know, I've observed, you know, a few classrooms, you know, that trying to do the Socratic seminar in the, you know, with those protocols that you suggested.
And I've never seen it go very well, you know, you know, because part of the protocol is for the teacher to stay out as much as possible.
Yeah.
And it's just deadly.
And I always remind teachers who wanna do this, I said, you have to remember, I. They killed Socrates.
So, you know, don't get wedded, don't get wedded to this.
Fair enough.
So, okay, so, so that was an example.
We, it was an, what we just talked about.
It was a lengthy discussion about writing, but it was really an example of.
What you realized when you came back.
Yeah.
That, wow.
I need to break things down a little bit further.
Yeah.
So, so one of the things that you talked about was more dialogue prior to writing.
Yeah.
More choices, not making them actually come up with the evidence or the reasoning first.
Yeah.
It's evaluating it, seeing it, and then deciding and then making the writing.
Almost a different it's a part of the, it's the end part of the process.
Sure.
But it's the end of the process, which.
Which I'm gonna tell you is what you described doesn't always get taught.
Yeah.
Is that what you found when you were working with teachers, you know, during the time when you were outta the classroom?
Well, it was revelatory in many ways.
Right?
So you gotta remember too, that 17, 18, when I left the classroom is also the year that my children were born.
So going back into a teaching responsibility, I had never been a teacher of record with as a parent.
And I'm not saying that I mean, we're blessed to have kids.
I understand everybody has their own trajectory.
But going back to a classroom with my thinking about my own kids in school buildings it just wasn't enough to not teach 'em things.
Right.
It wasn't an, which just felt kind of insane to give kids, to ask kids to make a claim, to a question that didn't even deserve a claim.
Like, what is the narrative structure of Great Gaby?
Like, that's not an argument.
That's not an argument.
That's like Nick narrates it.
Like what do you mean to argue about that?
Like, I can't say that.
Gatsby narrates it.
That's just an objective reality of who the narrator is of that.
So to clarify that terminology, at least in my own mind was a big part of it.
And it was because I didn't want to throw stuff at kids that was just indecipherable and incoherent.
Whereas before, when I was out there and I wasn't thinking about like maybe it was my kids in a room or I didn't have a deeper awareness of every kid who's arriving 16 years old has caregivers and folks around them that have helped them get to this point in their lives, you know?
So I take that seriously.
When I went back in the fall, it was just not good enough to not teach them how a sentence works or to not support them with kind of zooming in on parts of Fitzgerald's prose, which are really confounding and confusing.
So I really walked in knowing that I wanted to be thinking about Rosenstein.
And that is difficult to apply in an English language arts classroom.
But like trying to find, and like, it was not good enough to just ask kids to follow along with me and a graphic organizer and pretend like you understand in the text.
I get that may be a little bit of a straw man on some ELA instruction, but that's not where I wanted to go.
So I've been trying to find a place to feel like not just feel like, but.
And I'm collecting more evidence now with their writing and exit tickets and stuff.
And like, I feel justified in saying that I'm teaching them much more than I ever had in my career.
And I see the evidence of that.
So for me it was really more about like, I need to break this into steps because I'm not just gonna throw kids a CER and ask 'em to fill out a thing and then go run around and do postmortem, try to fix some wacky claims that didn't make sense about who narrated this.
So I was really trying to be much more intentional about breaking that process down.
when you came back and started doing the work, you started blogging right away.
You, I mean, somebody like you, I always ask them, when do you have time to watch tv?
But I mean, you're constantly working, thinking, writing, and as I was reading your blogs, coming back and tell me if I'm interpreting them wrong, but I was interpreting them.
In a way that, you know, I came in here guns blazing, man, I'm gonna really kick butt.
And then there was a little bit of a reality check.
Oh yeah, well, not a little, no.
It was like somebody walked by me in a lounge earlier today at the copy machine and I was like, Hey, how's it going?
He had started this year at that school as well.
It had come from another school, not a new teacher.
And he was like, pretty good.
And he asked me, how's it going?
And I said you know, pretty good.
Like much better than the fall, you know?
So, I've been drawn to Mary Kennedy, who was a education writer for a long period of time, education researcher.
And she wrote a book called Inside Teaching.
And it's about how the chaotic reality of schooling is a difficult thing for education reform to kind of butt up against at least difficult, right?
So, her writing and thinking has had become prominent, but when I went back into classroom, I was not prepared.
I was not prepared.
I had seven and a half years lap.
In aggressive research of teenagers on how they're gonna check you for your expectation, how they're gonna use the materials that they're afforded with that the device that they're issued the ways that they would ask you a million questions and try to test what you would or wouldn't allow them to do.
Ways to motivate them.
I've written a blog in the fall about like thinking like, yo, I like these trees.
I don't know if you can see on the podcast, there's some cypress trees behind me in my virtual background.
And I was like, yeah, I'll get to go on August and hang out with these kids and talk about how much I love cypress trees in Louisiana.
And thinking that kids would be reasonable, but they aren't, and I'm not throwing shade.
I'm just saying like, you're a kid.
You're 16 years old.
Yeah.
You're not an adult.
Yeah.
So I had that weird, that expectation kind of trafficking more among adults for a long period of time.
I had lost touch with the developing minds of high school kids and what that means.
So it was a, it was rough, you know, a lot of the things that I had you know, happily walked into other folks schools and said like, Hey, this is a great idea.
I try to be cognizant of the challenges and remember some of the things from my time in the classroom.
But you lose touch of that stuff very easily and the wins and the pressures and the pieces and parts of teaching do change so dynamically, moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, obviously that if you're outta step.
It takes a period of time.
So yeah, I was kind of, shocked in many ways about the the reality the pressure of classroom teaching and the myriad kind of, contingencies variables, things hitting you from every direction that are a part of that.
So I'd lost touch with that.
So, yeah, it was kind of, it was kind of difficult.
Yeah.
You wouldn't be wrong saying that.
You get that vibe from how I wrote about it.
So, so when so you walk in and you're experiencing all of these things.
Did your experiences in the time out of the classroom, science of learning all the things that you were doing, did that provide some sort of backstop for you?
Again, I'm thinking of what you brought, facing those same challenges that you just experiences and your background versus somebody who didn't have that knowledge.
What do you mean by backstop, if you don't mind me asking?
I mean that if you see something if you see a kid acting a certain way or asking certain questions, like just like you said, oh, they're asking me these questions to see how far they could go.
A new teacher might be asked the same questions and think, oh, these kids really like me.
They we're engaging.
Yeah, we're engaging.
They're not in dialogue, but in a conversation.
Yeah.
So, so you brought a lot of, you know, a lot more experience.
Like, for example, doing the writing, you know, the conversation that we just had you know, I realized I had to break these things down.
Yeah.
And you talked about Rosenstein.
You didn't learn about Rosenstein this fall, right.
Right.
You brought that with you.
So that's kind of the context for my question.
Gotcha.
No, I understand what you're saying now.
Thank you for that.
Jean, so I guess what I would say is, I had to, I blogged about this too.
My wife really helped me when I went back to teaching.
She still helps me all the time.
She's always helping me.
Like she's the best.
I try to help her.
I don't know.
She's incredible.
But she works in a garden a lot.
And I don't know if you ever reckon with perennials in your garden.
The advice that folks give to folks who are trying to plant some perennials is that the first year you plant 'em, that they sleep and then they creep and then they leap.
So she told me a lot about that.
So the reason why I say that is it took me.
I had to live through a semester.
To see how all the parts were fitting together.
Of course, I had some backstop pieces.
I knew that threshold in the first five minutes was the thing I needed to figure out.
I knew that 'cause of my experience.
I had worked with new teachers and I advised them around that, but then when I went back into classroom, I was like, you know, like maybe, you know, like she just send me an email da.
I was like wacky ignorant in that moment.
Moment.
But I, I knew it what I needed to accomplish, so, I knew I needed to tidy it.
It became way, even more viscerally true to me.
Why the fir, the threshold?
And the first five minutes are so critical in your classroom.
And I knew that to your point.
I was just like, I had to figure out how to do it with these kids at this building in this year with these devices, et cetera.
So I pushed on everybody, all around me all the time.
Who can I go see?
I went into a math classroom down the hall with some of the same kids I taught.
How do you do the beginning of your class?
So that, and I told her the other day how helpful that was, that to visit her for 20 minutes.
So I did have a little bit of a backstop, like I knew, and I also knew that like trying to do everything at one time was gonna be impossible, that I needed to try to mitigate for some challenges one at a time.
So I, how about halfway through the semester, it was like, I really need to figure out how to contain behavior.
And a big ingredient there is the first five minutes.
So what is happening when they come in the door?
Where do they sit?
What are they doing?
What are their materials became?
But that was all 'cause of a backstop.
That wasn't me like trying to like make it up.
It's because I knew, I had seen folks talk about the threshold.
I'd seen folks talk about a do now on a bell ringer.
And I knew that was what I needed to figure out.
I just needed to tinker with it and sleep a bit, put my roots down.
Figure out what was gonna work with this particular soil, these particular kids, so to speak.
And then when I came back in January, it was like, I knew what I'm doing now.
But I kinda had to live through it.
'cause there's some things you, this is a way I describe it.
I mean, Superman, that's great.
He can fly and make the earth spin backwards, but I can't do that.
So I could not roll back some of the things that had happened in August and September.
So it became more of a forward thinking like.
What will happen in the next semester.
And I knew that the entry and the first activity were really the most critical pieces.
So that was part of the backstop there.
Well, you know, I, as you talk about, you know, what's gonna happen in the next semester, I think this is what somebody with your experience has over a newer teacher Yeah.
Is that they can see the arc. Yeah.
You know, like, it's not perfect now, but I noticed, you know, these couple little changes are going to bring those flowers up next spring.
Yeah.
And so, and so I think that's important to and that's one of the things when I work with instructional coaches and they're frustrated of how a teacher's progressing and I said, they're right where they should.
Huh?
That's exactly, this is so predictable.
Yeah.
When you have more experience, you'll see they're right where they should be.
And I think that's what, yeah.
You were able to bring and and to have hope.
Well, you know, like, I'm glad you said that 'cause I think you're revealing something that I hadn't quite realized The extent of.
And another thing I talk about with gardening with my wife is that like, if you really would, if you really wanna have a garden, you need to accept that you're gonna kill things, that things are gonna die.
And I know that can be kind of macab and I'm only talking about plants right now.
I'm only talking about your tomatoes or whatever.
Your carrots, whatever.
It's, I already killed Socrates, so it's okay, right?
Bring up a few plants.
So stuff is gonna die.
Your orchid is gonna die, but you have a choice at that moment, right?
That you're like, I don't have a green thumb, or that you're gonna end up cultivating.
Something that flowers, as you mentioned a moment ago, so I say that to people frequently, especially if they're talking to me about a real literal garden.
But it's not altogether dissimilar in teaching.
And I appreciate you giving me a little bit of that perspective.
Is that the reason why I say that in the garden is 'cause you gotta accept that some stuff's not gonna work, but there's gonna be another season, and another season is gonna arrive.
And and what might not be visible now may become visible.
In that season and just you trust the perennial, the, an annular kind of prospect of it.
And like you're saying, like I had enough experience to know that.
When I come back in the spring, da.
I had told people when I worked with new teachers in the coaching capacity that at the end of your term, put a notebook on your desk.
Say, Hey, this is stuff that won't happen.
Stuff that will not happen again.
And write it down while it's top of mind for you right now.
Yeah.
And when you come again, then go take your break and what you're entitled to.
Take your summertime, go to the beach, go wherever you're gonna go.
And when you come back, look at that list 'cause you're doing yourself a favor.
But that.
Tell, tells us, I mean, we have a blessing where we get to kind of reboot and start with a new group and kind of you, there's an opportunity.
It's different from a lot of other vocations where you kind of can start anew with the new cohort.
And that's not how it always plays out.
And like you're saying, you've given me some perspective on how my experience helped me do that.
And for a new teacher it may be like, Hey, I don't have a green thumb, so maybe I should do something else.
And we should be thinking about that if we're trying to better support teachers.
Yeah.
No, rod got, I could talk to you all day.
I talk to you all day.
Well, lemme ask you this.
Do you have any questions for me?
Well, Jean, I think one thing that I'm thinking about for you is like, when how about this, the, do you find.
The like, do you find a difference between like if you're walking alongside a teacher in the hallway or sitting in a meeting at a table?
It, do you find a difference in the ways that you're able to support teachers whether it's in like a informal context or a formal context?
Do you find that there's any distinction or difference there?
My work is.
When I'm working with teachers, I am an outside consultant.
Mm-hmm.
That has been brought in and I have been brought in to work with a teacher, and usually at the same time I'm training a coach.
Okay.
So most of my interactions with teachers are more in a formal setting.
Sure.
So for example we're gonna do a coaching cycle.
We're come in and we're gonna talk about the lesson you're gonna teach, and we go do the observation, and then we, you know, we have a conversation after.
And so, there's a lot of, there's a lot of structure there.
So, when I see a teacher in the hall.
Yeah.
What my hope is, what my hope is that they have realized that I'm an ally now.
Yeah.
And not an enemy.
And that when I say good morning I mean it as much as anybody else, you know, good morning or whatever the conversation is.
But it's like anything they need to feel comfortable.
They need to feel comfortable with that.
And so, that, that degree of being comfortable should translate to the next time we meet in a formal setting.
This is my follow up.
So when, you know you're meeting with a teacher or teacher team or whatever it is, say y'all starting at 10 30.
Do you arrive a little early in small talk?
Do you like are, or is it only when the agenda begins?
I know that's kind of a straw man way to ask it.
No.
I always am there early.
I'm always there early.
I What do you ask 'em about?
What do you tell 'em?
What do you ask 'em about when you get there early?
You know, now let me think because I just met with some folks.
Okay.
Here's one of the things that I asked them, because they're always.
It's always subsequent to a training.
Okay.
So one of my first questions is from the training, is there anything that you just didn't agree with that you just think, you know what, gene was nuts.
Gene was crazy.
Yeah.
I just don't agree with it.
Is there anything like that?
Did they tell you, did they tell you?
Did they say it?
You know, you know, you know, rod, you know this, you know when they have something.
And they're holding back Uhhuh.
Okay.
And I, you know, I said, yeah, don't hold back.
I said, we need to get this out.
Sure.
I need to know what you're thinking because otherwise I'm not gonna have a conversation with a real person.
I'm gonna have a conversation with somebody who you think is supposed to be sitting in that chair and we're then, we're wasting our time.
Yeah, so, so I want them to be as honest as possible.
In fact, there was a teacher recently who said he looked at me and he kind of smiled.
And again, I'm training somebody at the same time.
I'm training a district person.
Yeah.
And he looks at me and he looks at the district person and he says.
I'd just rather not say, huh?
Yeah.
I said, no, that's so good.
No, this is the time.
This is the time.
Yeah.
Don't hold it back.
And I think in that it's not a personal connection, it's a professional connection.
Is that I'm, hey.
I am valuing what you have to say.
Yeah.
And what of two things is gonna happen.
Either I can go forward knowing that you have that in mind, or I'm gonna try to talk to you right now about the fact that I wasn't clear.
If that's what you thought I said.
Yeah.
And most of the time it's the latter.
It's like they're just, I wasn't clear because, I have enough experience to know what I'm saying is true because I've seen it over and over again.
Yeah.
But there are many times I don't express it well because I've said it so many times, you know?
Yeah.
So, well, I would say and I appreciate what you're saying, the, a moment ago you were like, Hey, so I hope when I find 'em in a hall that they know that I'm on their side.
Right.
So, one thing that has really kind of touched me from the.
Socratic and dialogic literature, so to speak.
Bine is a huge one.
It talks about like, all we know is dialogue.
There's no humanity without another person that I'm in dialogue with.
It's, I'm always thinking about who the potential addressee is and that it's un final, that my personhood is never captured in a name or a framework that there's an open-endedness to it.
So I'm inspired a lot by that by.
By pushing somewhat, and I recognize your role.
I've been in a professional capacity where I'm the third party that arrives at your school and I have an imperative to professionally deliver render service, X, Y, z. But the reason why I'm asking about the distinction between a formal and informal is I believe so much in a dialogic project that the, I find the informal margins and I look for the moments to walk with the teacher and ask them about the kid and ask them about the sweatshirt that they have on right now, and ask them about things that may be ancillary, at least, or tertiary to their professional practice, but are not ancillary or tertiary to their personhood.
So that I can nurture a relationship, that I can let well, I don't wanna use that word, that it can be part of a project that we enco en endeavor to accomplish together.
And that is an avenue that among others that I use to support teachers and help them know that I'm on their side.
So I think a lot about the distinction between.
When I'm here on my agenda, of course I have my responsibilities, but like, what am I doing before I get there?
There's a interrelatedness between my person my personal aspects and what I'm doing vocationally, especially in an educational context.
So I think a lot about, you know, like the margins, like the five minutes that I got there, and making sure that folks know that I'm a person and that they're a person.
I recognize the I imperatives to keep our professional boundaries appropriate.
But I believe so much in dialogue that levity is part of it.
And sometimes that's a little bit out of a particular protocol or bounds, but it can go a long way to to build a humane relationship with somebody you're trying to support.
And I absolutely agree with everything that you said.
Yeah.
And I just don't think that's my first meeting.
Yeah.
I feel you.
Okay.
Because I don't want that first meeting to think.
That I'm just sucking up to them.
Yeah.
I want first meeting.
I want my first meeting to be, this guy's not gonna waste my time.
This guy's a professional later.
I, and when they walk out.
Right.
Are those your same running shoes that you wear?
You know, but not initially.
Not initially, yeah.
Because No, you're, I agree with that.
You're right.
And I'm glad you pushed on that.
Right.
That's how I approach it with my classroom.
Like the first day you come, we doing everything that you're gonna see.
I'm not your friend right now, but when I asked you to leave, I'm like, those are some cool Jordans.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
What's going on with this track team?
That kind of thing.
So thank you for putting, add some nuance to that.
I really appreciate your time, gene.
Hey.
Rod, it was it was always a pleasure talking to you.
And again, when you brought up, who's the guy with the B name?
The team B Bine.
Yeah.
Box.
Team Box.
Okay.
There's my PTSD.
But you bte?
I, I. Okay.
Yeah.
This is the kind of stuff I have at the desk, you know, on dialogue, you know, like this philosopher's book about dialogue.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So, you know, you're reading that I gotta go watch tv.
Rod we'll talk soon.
Thank you so much for being up.
God bless you, sir. Have a good one.
You too.
Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.
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Tesscg.
com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.