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Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
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.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud.
My name is Zach Groschel, and I'm here with my colleague and friend, Gene Tavernetti, for another great sort of just discussion about the things that have been going on in our lives, and online, and in our careers.
Gene, how are you doing today?
You know, I'm doing great.
It's so good to be back with you again.
It seems like it's been so long.
You've been so busy.
I- you got a lot of stories to tell, I'm sure, about what you've been doing this year.
Oh, yeah.
And you too, you know?
things are changing very quickly in education because of AI, but also they're not changing in other ways.
things have stayed the same, and I think we have some great stories to tell today.
Let's start with you.
What have you learned from this year, seeing as this episode as it comes out as sort of an end of year, end of podcast kind of reflection?
Well, t- I'm very excited because this year had another book come out co-authored with a couple of great people, Frank Rodriguez and Donna Smith, called Digital Captives.
It's called Helping Schools Strike a Balance Between Humans and Hardware, and this was really a passion project for Frank Rodriguez.
And I recommend everybody go back on Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works, and listen to the podcast with Frank Rodriguez, because he came to me a couple years ago, and we had worked together a decade or so, and we hadn't worked together for quite a while.
But he came to me with this idea that came to him because he worked with- in after-school programs.
So kids that he wasn't teaching directly, but there was always a teaching component and an activity component in this after-school program.
And he saw that these kids were just different.
They were out of control.
just behaviors that he had never seen before.
So he started doing some research into screen time, and he kinda got the band back together.
He called me to do some work and somebody else, Donna Smith, who we had worked with before, and he wanted to write this book, but he also wanted to go into schools where the kids' attentions had been hijacked by their iPhones.
And so, so, a s- a school district called us up, and they wanted this work done, and we went around.
It's a 7-12 school district in California, and we walked around.
We went through every classroom, and it was curious the amount of time that kids were on screens without instruction And on a program that wasn't good, it wasn't a good program to teach them, it wasn't effective, and
the amount of time that they got you know, that they were distracted by phones because some teachers had a policy, no phones, s- others didn't and just allowed them because they, they said it wasn't worth the trouble.
So we had that data, we had the other research and interviews that Dr. Rodriguez, Frank, had done, and Frank had this idea, no screens.
No screens at all, you know, up till fourth grade.
There should be no screens.
And then when he talked to people who were really knowledgeable in the use of some technology, he said, "No, that, that can't be."
And so we kind of went from that spot of where Jared Corbath is, you know, of like zero screens to no, we need to use them intentionally, and the teacher
needs to be in charge, and we need to let the teachers know that the programs that you're using that you think are teaching students, they're not.
they're not teaching students.
so we're still working in that district, and we're doing the work that we've always done, and I think that's … And that's what the book describes.
It outlines the work that, that we're doing in the, in this district.
there's one other thing that I wanted to share with everybody and it's always talked about, and that is that, you know, the one and done type of professional development, the random professional development.
So we were in this school, and
We were able to work with 50 teachers go through three coaching cycles.
So they did two days of training and then three coaching cycles.
And at the end of the year, we were able to talk to these teachers and and I'm gonna say teacher leaders.
We had department heads, we had you know, folks who were seen as leaders, and we reviewed what we had done and we asked them, "When did you decide that what we were selling you were willing to buy?"
And what we were selling was explicit instruction.
And a couple people raised their hand, one person raised their hand, and he says, "I gotta tell you I really didn't think this was right at first." And I started laughing.
I said, "Really? I couldn't tell based on your comments and your body language," you know?
And he said … And a couple of them said, "By the second day of training, it all started to make sense." After the first coaching cycle.
Other teachers said it wasn't until the third coaching cycle where it all came together for me.
So the point I wanted to make is we always hear about, you know, we can't do just one PD and expect teachers to get it.
Even the teachers who bought in weren't doing it well, so everybody needed that follow-up.
So that was a huge learning for me, and it just made me even more this explicit instruction advocate.
how do you really evaluate whether or not the, you know, things are being adopted and things are happening, right?
is it through, like, an official kind of data collection process based on teacher sort of s- self-report or … I mean, you can't really wait until you see the scores go up often enough to think, is this, is, you know, is this going well?
And then there's all sorts of things that could be, you know, confounding variables, I suppose.
If you do everything at once as you typically do you don't know what caused, right, the learning at the end.
So how do you sense when you are working with a school like this the … W- we can move on to the next topic, or this topic needs a lot more reinforcement.
Like, h- how are you determining that?
Well, I guess if somebody were to ask me, you know, what's my favorite experimental design, I'd say, "Well, I don't know how experimental design, but I guess I'd be more of an ethnographer," and the data would be more f- fluid.
I don't even know how to describe it.
ethnography is a word I learned 25 years ago during my doctorate.
But but I realize that I just pay attention.
So, so if we're working with a teacher, and again, I go back to when we were doing the training there were comments that teachers made that were absolutely contrary to what we were talking about.
And it was, "Well, I don't like to do it that way. This is how I do it."
And we don't argue with them at that point, because they don't know what we know, and we haven't seen them in the classroom.
So, so the first thing is just ch- looking at teachers as individuals.
So now when we do the coaching cycles, the first coaching cycle, what we do is we actually design a lesson together, and- As we're bringing them through this design
process, again, you could just tell with body language, the way they respond, you know, if they're just trying to be, "Oh, this is another thing I just have to do."
They're just trying to be compliant.
You can tell that.
And then you could tell when it shifts.
You could tell when it shifts.
And because what we do works- During the coaching cycle, when you are in a classroom observing, you can observe the teacher seeing, "Holy God, look at my students. This stuff works."
And then the next time you talk during the debrief, they begin to sell, th- they begin to develop their understanding.
And we meet again, and the whole thing, the, it changed.
We don't have to go through this 15 minutes of BS about compliance.
Now they wanna know.
And so there's and so there's that for the people who are really embracing what we're doing.
On the other hand, you can tell when you go into a teacher's classroom, even if you designed a lesson together, you can tell their heart's not in to what
they're doing, and they're gonna, they're gonna be compliant, but they're almost wanting to sabotage what we talked about because they don't want it.
So, so do I have a checklist?
No.
It's, in, it's in the beginning, it's like I'm trying to get them, I'm trying to onboard them, and the old cliche about change, you know, like, we need everybody on the bus.
Who's on the bus?
And you could do that just with conversations and talking and respecting what is wrong, you know?
And one, one more thing to follow up on just the observation, you know when a teacher, and every administrator knows this, you know when you go in to observe a teacher and the teacher does something they don't do all the time.
The kids don't know what's happening.
They're st- you know, they're struggling, the teacher's struggling to do something.
It's so obvious.
So, so the people who are on board are obvious.
The others are obvious, but they don't realize how obvious they are.
Yeah.
It's it … I think what I'm hearing from you is often in the initial conversations too, the … it just gonna come, it should come up, and you can guide that question with schools of like, what are we looking to achieve here?
And once you start, once you sort of start thinking about well, I … You know, my expectations for this intervention this consulting, is that teachers will be using a lesson design approach in most, if not all
lessons, that teachers will be talking to each other about that and using a shared language, that classrooms will Be running in much more or in a much more orderly way, whatever it is that you're focused on, right?
And then it's like, and it starts often with the problem that the school thinks that they have, and once we analyze and go into the school and look around you know, you select the problem, and you target it, and you fix it.
And I think that there, the hard data comes into play later.
It's just never … it … There's always more to do before that data comes out, I find.
I don't know.
Did you ever, when, in, like, evaluating the progress of your consulting or the effectiveness of your consulting lean on hard data points?
Or what are your thoughts on that?
M- my thoughts are on that a lot of people when they talk about building habit, it's m- habits, good habits, it's more on process.
Be consistent in the process.
And that's more, you know, that I was looking for.
Many times when we were asked to come in to work with a school, it was because of bad test scores or scores that, that could be better, or they were under some sort of state sanction or something like that.
But you know, we always knew that those take care of themselves.
If you're doing a good job, the scores will take care of themselves.
And because we have done the things that you talked about, we developed a common language, we did the coaching cycles the coaches were with us,
the administrators are with us, everybody knows what we're doing, at the end of the year, is this a, again, a perfect a perfect cause and effect?
Nah, but the ethnographer in me will say, "This is all the things that we did. This is what happened. You decide." And I'm sure somebody else can develop some data, some statistician.
But there's that.
So the answer is no.
And the other thing that I think is always so interesting about what happens in schools and what doesn't happen in schools when we're talking to somebody
Let's say we go into a school district and we've worked with a school.
And other principals will say, "Well, can we go watch this school?
Can we go see this school where everybody does this?" And we said, "No, there is no school we've worked at where everybody does this." You know that doesn't happen.
Not everybody does it.
I can show you some teachers who are doing it.
I can show you some teachers who do parts of it that have improved their practice, but I, I can't show you that.
So I don't have that type of data, and I think, … And I tell them, "If anybody tells you they, their, these scores increased because of what they did, they're lying to you.
You know, they're just not being honest," because we don't know what, where that impact came from.
So two things you worked on this year the Digital Captives book and thinking about technology, which might come up again in this conversation, and then working with schools and realizing that this over time, this repeated exposure
approach where consulting is not one and done truly does work even for early adopter teachers who are really excited at the beginning it but may not have developed the habits, I guess, around these different techniques and strategies.
Anything else you learned about?
Well, just the importance re- reinforced the idea of that shared language and reinforced the notion that in that shared language we have to have the administrators.
We said the teachers had two days of training.
Teachers had four half days of training.
I mean, the administrators had four half days of training, and it was kind of fu- you know, and here we are talking about, you know, we need to have the teachers take control and these programs that the kids are on are not effective.
They're not working.
We should get them off the screens somewhat.
This is the whole emphasis with the administrators, right?
We got 50 administrators in a room.
My partner's presenting.
I'm walking around, and there's a principal on his computer at a table, okay, checking email.
He's checking email and I love this guy, okay?
But this is part of why I love this guy.
I'm standing behind him, and he looks at the people sitting at the table, and he looks up from his computer and says, "He's right behind me, isn't he?" Just like a kid would do, right?
And they all laughed, and he said, "Yeah." And I reached down and I closed his screen, you know, on his computer.
But, Administrators have to buy into, you know, administrators have to buy into.
So that was a big learning.
And I'm sorry, I'm gonna e- expand on this just a little bit more.
Just as the teachers needed to realize it wasn't one and done, and they were gonna have to do something now that they're trained, it was the same way with the administrators.
The administrators never had to be a part of it either Sometimes they weren't even one and done.
They were, you know, come to this meeting, then they were done.
So it's just so important that everybody is on board, everybody's speaking the same language, everybody knows what's going on.
So those were my big things.
So but, It's awesome … but Zach, yeah.
It's awesome.
I just it's just great to… it's been a good year.
It's… And are we gonna talk about me sometime?
I'm kind of ex- you know what?
I was just gonna say, but I think, you know, you could say I, you know, "Shut up, Gene," but I get so excited when there's stuff that goes well.
Yeah.
So I know you had, I know you had an exciting year.
What about you, Jack?
Let's let's get to Zach.
I need all the air time I can get, I really do.
The this year's been you know, every year that we've done these podcasts, I feel like this has been the biggest year of my life, and it's certainly s- certainly my career.
And this year feels like that again.
It just seems like things are constantly in motion.
One of the really great opportunities that I had that I think is going to impact me for forever was spending an entire month in Gimli, Manitoba, doing a long-term consulting gig, or what we could call maybe a residency i- in Evergreen School Division.
And there were a few reasons why I decided to do th- that, you know, to pursue that particular project.
You know, it, it is a, you know, it is a bit disruptive, right?
You have to take your fam- I brought my family up there, brought my kids there.
Put my oldest daughter who is six, was six at the time, into their schools, so you have to trust the new teacher's gonna take care of them.
You move to a very cold climate, and you have to buy a bunch of stuff, or thankfully they just kinda donated all their extra s- gear and, you know.
And so you have to deal with sort of being almost feeling like you're in a foreign land and you're, you are in Canada, so you're dealing with different cultural approaches to education than you would get in the United States.
Why did I do all of that?
I really believed- And still do, of course in, in this mantra that you brought up around consulting and school improvement being a long-term commitment that requires a lot, getting
your hands dirty, spending a lot of time in observation, spending a lot of time doing things in the context of real classrooms with specific content and with individuals and people.
And I just felt like the sort of two-day consulting every other month was needed … I needed a learning moment that was more in depth than that.
I needed to kind of feel like an employee at a school.
And so we accomplished a lot of things during that month.
A lot of things.
The first was just verifying that there was excitement around the initiatives we'd put in, which was around explicit instruction, science of learning, reading curricula, right?
Instructional coaching.
But then there was the, you know … So I felt validated in the sense that the teachers had shifted a lot in terms of their enthusiasm.
They were less skept- skeptical and much more, … They all had their own stories of things that worked and things that weren't working, and I didn't feel like they were parroting a certain line that we had sort of told them that they were saying.
These were genuine beliefs that things were going well that matched the data from the year before that showed that the school is in an upward trajectory, right?
The other piece of it was sort of, looking at … Well, l- actually being able to go back to real coaching, like coaching teachers with students you know, actually being the coach again was a great experience because y- I sort of felt out of practice.
I was coaching coaches to coach, but I never really, like, was just 100% responsible for doing several coaching cycles with a sort of a fishbowl design where everyone's kind of watching you do it.
So I got a lot of practice coaching again.
And just being around extremely enthusiastic leaders.
Jess and Scott and Della and these folks who are just, are putting in 100-hour weeks to make this school division the best in the world, and I think, I believe in my view it's probably already the best in North America.
Just to give these kids that happen to be living there a shot at a world-class education, it was just very moving and it gave me a lot of motivation moving into the next part of the year.
So I know, you know, say we've been friends a couple years, and I know people offer you jobs all the time.
You know, "Come to my school district and we'll do this." So, and y- you know you like what you do, you like your lifestyle, but you did this for a month up there.
You were th- you were there for a calendar month.
If you were to try to describe what you did as a job that currently exists in a school district, is there a j- a parallel job?
Or what you did came in and did, should it, do you think it's more designed as a consultant type of thing?
That you could come in, get it going, and then try to develop a system to to keep it going?
It was, it's really a mixture of things that I feel that I'm good at doing, that they recognize that, you know, skills that I might have that other people don't have, and then sort of the needs of the school at the time, right?
The s- the funny thing was that at the beginning of their journey into the science of learning, the science of reading and I think Scott would back me up
on this, he's talked to me, you know, the superintendent there, that they, there was just this belief that things are gonna have to go really slowly, right?
Like, like there's just no, there's no pushing the envelope when you could really get a lot of people upset, right?
And then all of a sudden you sort of blink, and then three months later, everything that you wanted a year later is already in place, and you go, "Wow, like, it went faster than we all thought.
Maybe I could have been a little bit more direct.
Maybe I could have been a little bit maybe I could have had higher expectations, but look at us go," you know?
So a lot of what the role was built around was what I felt like I was good at doing and what the school needed to do at that point in time, which is
really focus more on strengthening their levers of PD and leadership, getting the principals to do a lot more heavy lifting with the coaching, getting
And then we found as w- as we go around the school division, that a lot of the issues were no longer around were not, no longer so instructional it felt like.
It felt like it was a lot more curricular.
At times we went, "Ah, there's just a hole or a gap in this particular department, and that they seem to be the only one without any great materials.
What do we do next?" Right?
So a lot of that, yeah, a mixture of, like, maybe an instructional coach role that many schools have, and sort of a curriculum and instruction consultant coming in is kind of how it probably turned out.
Oh, that's interesting.
And I think one thing I would want to amplify that, that you mentioned is I think one of the things that consultants can really do with schools if they know what they're doing, is to let them know, let the schools know, "No, you can do a lot more.
Y- a, a lot, you can get a lot more done than you think you know, if we do this, if we do this properly." So y- you, you're Canada.
Okay, you're Canada.
I know you just got back from England.
You've been in South America.
What el- what have you learned in your travels around the world here?
Yeah.
I mean, so that Canada experience was probably a once in a lifetime thing.
just a quick note about that, like watching your own child like sort of, you know, navigate the social you know, pressures of moving to a different school for the first time, that was a lot of where my head was at like in the evenings during that Canada trip.
It was like think- You know, my daughter's doing a gr- doing great there, but she'd come home and be like, "Yeah, like, you know, nobody talked to me today." It's sort of like- Yeah … oh, my goodness.
Like, what, you know, th- those sort of things were part of it.
And just getting to know all of these amazing teachers and watching a lot of the fear of external support like coaching sort of fade away by the end of that month, that people felt, you know, that things…
It's just kind of normal to have folks in your classroom and talking to you about teaching because we have your back and we're on your side, you know?
Yeah.
All of that was really great.
One of the things that I did pretty shortly after was I went to ResearchEd Columbia, which is not the New York Columbia.
This is the country.
I also went to the South Carolina Columbia just recently too, so I'm all mixed up.
But going to Columbia for ResearchEd really exposed me to this world of like the World Bank and you know, Defense Department folks
that are working in, folks that are working on trying to improve just the minimum standard of developing countries' education systems.
And realizing that a lot of what we take for granted here is, are the problems that they're trying to solve elsewhere.
I mean, like, many students in part, Latin America and i- across the developing world don't even get the amount of hours that our students get in school, right?
They don't … Often enough they get a teacher who is untrained, or if they are trained, they might be locked into kind of just going through the motions and spending a lot of time, especially this is true in some of the Asian countries
I've worked in, like Vietnam, where a lot of the real learning takes place through after-school tutoring for the kids who can afford it, and schools themselves are just holding grounds for children and they're not very effective.
And many children don't come to school.
And you know, if we think we have an absentee problem in the United States, think about one in which you may never see a kid but once a year so they can check the box and go back to doing what they need to do for their families.
So work, you know, going to Colombia was a big moment.
It also connected me with the folks in El Salvador, which if you've been following El Salvador and its … what, you know, what's been going on, there's a bit of a, sort of a revolution, I guess, in all aspects of their economy and their national growth.
And so have been consulting and on the learning science and instructional design side with the school system in El Salvador so that they can kind of create a s- more scalable solution, probably technology-enabled
solution, that will help kids to learn gi- when they don't have a qualified teacher or when they're in a rural area and they don't have a, perhaps a teacher who knows the subject or who, who can even read.
And so that's been exciting.
So I think both of us have touched on this in the idea of use of technology in schools.
Where are you now in, in that?
I mean, you know, we've got people talking about alpha schools and like I live in California, and I can go up to every teacher friend that I have, and this is what I've done so far, say, "You ever heard of alpha schools?" "No.
No.
No." But on Twitter you think it was the center of the universe what it is.
so where are you on technology and people know that you have a role at alpha schools.
What, what exactly is going on?
How would you describe what's going on?
Well, yeah I think my view of technology has never changed.
It's never been, it's never been universally accepted by anyone, but, and it's pretty
It sounds pretty trivial and mundane when you put it out there.
But simply that I don't think that devices and technology are doing the teaching.
if you found an equivalent thing that a human can do in terms of its delivery, I think that it, you could find the exact same thing in technology.
And there's no, there's nothing better that you can find necessarily in, in a technology platform, and there's nothing better necessarily that you can do as a human.
And I'm speaking strictly about the mechanics of instruction, and not motivation or, you know, relationships.
Just simply if you know, if you tell me that, "Yeah, I have my kids do a brain dump every morning," I could say, "Yeah, you can create a text box in a, in an iPad, and the kids can do the brain dump there."
And perhaps there are certain affordances in the technology that allow the AI to review it, and so the teacher saves some time.
But really, the me- the mechanism of doing a brain dump is exactly the same on a piece of paper or inside of a screen.
I've always believed that.
During COVID, I worked as the director of educational technology for a private school near here who didn't even have devices because they were like a dance school, an art school.
And so they brought me in to set up their whole infrastructure so that they could have some sort of online learning.
And at the time, everybody was asking me that.
"What is … Are they gonna learn more from this technology-enabled instruction, or are they gonna learn radically less?" And all of this, and the answer was always, "Well, depends on
if they're paying attention, if the practice tasks are good, if there's assessment throughout, if the models are really concrete and respect the limits of cognitive load, and so on."
You know, to, to Alpha to Alpha which you're right, it's sort of, it's unknown to most people and a- and it's extremely, it's a hot topic online.
They came to me several years ago.
It's almost, it feels, it's almost three years ago they came to me, but I think I've only been working them for more than two.
They came to me saying, we need help and eyes on the design of our apps.
Our, the apps that we use currently are third-party apps and these sp- like, you know, like Khan Academy or so on.
They're third-party apps that we didn't design and develop.
We know that they're not sufficient.
We believe in a lot of, in all the things that you believe when it comes to instruction.
Kids need to take tests, right?
Kids need to learn within a systematic approach, and they may not exactly enjoy it the whole time, and it may not be very motivating to practice something, but success breeds success.
And so we want really slick apps that do the curricular work of folks like, you know, Zig Engelmann and the developers of direct instruction."
And so I've been consulting with them for some time before the media you know, about the school and what the model was itself kind of grew up around it.
And yeah, it's been it's been interesting.
It's been interesting to kind of, see that, like, you know, folk- folks may, in m- in my view, may be attracted or be disgusted by a very superficial element of all of this, which is that the kids do some of their
learning on a screen during the day and not be really focused on the underlying design and the aspects that really can promote learning, like examples and non-examples and space practice and all this other stuff
I knew several years ago, you were working for some company, and they would send you lessons and you'd evaluate them and you'd send them to me once in a while and say, "Al,
what do you think of this?" And, you know, we'd critique it and that really was the only time I was envious of you, Zach, where I'd think about, "You're getting paid to do this?
I would love to do this." Because it's the exact same thing that we spend hours on the phone talking about.
Not necessarily how to put it in the app, because that's beyond me, but just, you know, what are these elements, you know, of good instruction?
And when you say slick You're talking about slick in a different way than look at the aesthetics and look at the things blow up and how cute it is on the screen.
You're talking about slick with regards to using the science of learning, using all the things that we know about good instruction to accelerate instruction.
Oh, I'm talking about making some boring apps, right?
I'm ta- I'm talking about an app that just makes it all but guaranteed that you will succeed, that when you are given a model and you listen to the model, that the practice problems
that you get afterwards are fully guaranteed you'll get 80 to 90% of your answers correct, and that they're so atomized, the information, and so in such small steps, making sure that
And I'll bring up Teach Fast for a moment.
Making sure that you sort of, you certainly separate out a lot of the concepts that you need to do, and then you embed them in, like, a cognitive routine.
So you sort of have, like Chris Bolton calls this conceptual atomization.
But it's assem- it's essentially there are procedures and things to do, and these are quite easy to learn, by the way.
They just need a lot of repetition.
And then you have things, like, that are conceptual or they're sort of what questions.
They are questions that can be answered by yes, no, and why, right?
And when.
And so you separate those out into very careful little tasks, and then you do this weaving and combining that at the moment, we pretty much have to rely on humans to really think about the taste and the craft of that.
It's it's interesting how AI is not very good at doing that.
And then you just kinda put it together, and the kid takes a mastery test, and they get it 100% of the time, right?
You're looking to inspire kids through high levels of success and motivation to crush their learning, just like you would in a classroom, except there's just a few things different, and that's that the learning that they're gonna
get is gonna be field-tested rather than made up and improvised on the spot, and that it's individualized in the sense that they had to take placement tests to ascertain that there were no gaps before they got to this material.
And they're doing it by themselves.
This isn't a group activity.
Their role is not to teach it, but to make sure that if they're stuck or if they're demotivated, that they have some strategies to get themselves unstuck.
Well, it seems like you brought up at least three separate things.
I was gonna say four, but I had already forgot one.
One of them was the design, you know, and again, since we met several years ago, we've been talking, that's all we ever talk about is instructional design.
Then you talked about that it's individualized, and you talked about the teacher, and those seem to be separate issues.
And I think that's where a lot of the conversation is about Alpha schools that, you know, you will see things, promotional things that they do, say, "Oh, yeah, they're done.
You know, we're done quickly.
You know, we're done.
Now we can go, you know, work with, you know, and meet other kids and do that stuff."
And so it seems that those are the things that when I think of the descriptions that I've seen, those are the things that I c- am concerned about because getting back to digital captives
and what, you know, a lot of folks are concerned about with regards to technology these days is the social aspect, social development, being able to look somebody in the eye and have a chat.
And so I think those are separate than everything that you just talked about that was important to you in designing these apps Yeah, and my colleague and co-author of the
of an upcoming math resource, Marcy Stein, often she says that when you think about issues in education, four really rise up when it comes to instruction in particular.
She says there's delivery.
That's what the system or the teacher does to efficiently convey the material.
There's design, and that's the underpinning theory and organization and you know, and weaving of all of the, you know, the content together into a package that makes it so kids learn.
Then there's also two other things, and that's, one of those is politics, and that's the politics of a certain approach being, you know, associated with a certain line of thinking or way of thought or sort of epistemology.
And then there's also the organization of instruction, and that includes things like, do we group kids a certain way?
Do we have them all at the same age?
Do we put them in the same room, right?
Just the more of the ski resort or MTSS type of view, where it's like, where do we put everyone in this darn place, and where, who's getting what, right?
I think people could use a framework j- like that to, to think about w- what specifically they believe when it comes to a juicy question like Alpha, right?
Do you believe that a teacher should deliver all of the instruction, and why?
Because if you go to a, any school, there it doesn't matter which one it is.
They, unless there's a full abstinence ban on, on technology, most schools are using technology for probably around two hours, which is that max they put in on Alpha.
It's just they don't, you know, we all know at some, in some classrooms it's done like it's sort of a pacifier or a babysitter, and other classrooms
the teacher cannot monitor their activities, so the kids are on YouTube and they flick back to the lesson, and then they flick back to YouTube.
And, you know, and in other cases, the apps themselves are full of discovery, inquiry-based mumbo jumbo that it's like, ah, might as well just Might as well just have a teacher teach
them directly rather than them trying to do these extended inquiry tasks that are so disconnected from the, what, you know, what, you know, from what they need to do next in the app.
You know, but if your belief is that t- only teachers can deliver instruction effectively, right?
You know, that's a point of view.
But then there's all these other aspects.
Like, m- I'm sure that people find a lot of disagreement in homogeneous grouping or individualized support, right?
And that's one of the big critiques of Engelmann's capital DI direct instruction, is that you end up grouping kids and you know, you can disagree with that, but what about the kids that can go three times faster?
What about the kids that are drowning and just coloring in the corner?
And no matter what everybody says about, "Yeah, I include them, yeah, I include them," they're not being included in the mainstream classroom,
and they need to be taught to read, and it's just it's something we need to take responsibility over and not just excuse it away, right?
So maybe those four things, Jean, to wrap up my rant there uh, would be helpful.
Is this a political issue that you have?
Is this an organization issue?
Is this a delivery issue, or is this a design issue?
And and each of these things can take quite a different form given that we have a school system that serves a pluralistic society, a society of folks that don't
necessarily all want the same thing And I think, and I say this over and over again, is that I don't think we have a school system, we have systems of schools.
I am neutral on Alpha, just as I'm neutral on other schools that have a theme or an emphasis.
Every kid is They're not different in how they learn, but they have unique personalities.
They have unique interests.
And I think, you know, in this society, you know, we've got micro schools.
We've got schools with five kids in a grade.
We can find a place, I think for everybody.
And if Alpha's for you alphas for you.
It doesn't mean that's the model that everybody should do.
But I think that's kind of the the evangelist in all of us is … You know, I worked at a visual and performing arts school.
I went to the next school and I wanted to bring a visual and performing arts program.
People were excited about it, but I'm gonna tell you, the minute I was gone, it was gone.
Because, you know, that wasn't what they had come together for.
I think those four things that, that Marcy Stein has talked about that's for every school, you know?
that'd be a nice thing for somebody to come in and lead, facilitate, have a discussion with parents, like, "Who are we?"
And I think it'd be a good, you know, for school districts to be able to identify how each school is different.
You know, maybe you wanna go down the street and it might … And no hard feelings because we know we can't be all things to all people.
You said, like, the evangelist, and I just thought, I think it's natural to fight for the default school.
That's what I've always called it.
It's the school that children will get by default regardless of how good their parents are at navigating the system, how much money the child has.
And sort of gets rid of all the edge cases.
We have very accelerated high learners, and we have students who h- need a lot of instructional support.
But l- what about just the default school, right?
And maybe that's just not a debate worth pursuing.
Like,
Maybe that in itself is not the best use of anyone's time and energy.
And I've seen people getting even emotional about this, like expending emotional resources on the idea that a school that has a certain model and a certain approach can't just be inspiration to others, or can't
actually create its own experimental data to help everybody else in this sort of this more diversified system of education that it has to be a debate around the, this normal school or average run-of-the-mill school.
Maybe that school isn't serving nearly as many kids as people want it to in the first place, or maybe most of the schools that are s- in the default space aren't even transparent about their
approaches, don't really know what they are, and we're actually talking about a very- just a very wooly topic of what do most kids need to get, and maybe we should f- focus more on models.
But i- you know, if that's not your view and whatever, if you're just, if you're just really worried about, you know, the technology and the impact on kids, just take a breath and just think that there are
many folks in the space of reforming and creating school models who have perspectives, and these need to be tested in the crucible of real children in undergoing real lessons for us to learn anything from it.
You know, you mentioned something about just a moment ago, about schools what did you call them?
You didn't call them mainstream schools.
What'd you call them, Just default schools or whatever they, default schools.
And that was part of the the reason that we wanted to write Digital Captives, because we know those default schools, that's where the improvement needs to be.
You got 100 grand, you got 80 grand to spend on your third grader, you're gonna be going to, you know, some schools to get whatever you want.
On the other hand, the mass of kids are gonna be going to these brick-and-mortar schools, these default schools, and that's exactly one of the
issues that we try to address in Digital Captives, is that every school district needs to be able to declare, "This is our instructional vision.
This is what we do here." Not that vision, not our, you know, our mission st- you know, that you know, that ephemeral, "Oh, all kids are gonna be learner, lifelong learners." No, "This is what we do at our school," and we have to have this discussion.
And we have to have this discussion at the district level, we have to have it at the site level, and we need to
This was one of the discussions that we had when we had all the administrators together as we were training them, as I'm referring to something we talked about an hour ago.
As we have all these administrators in the room, saying, "You, administrators, site administrators, you need to come together and say, who are we?" Because you can't leave that to everybody.
And take that further, you can't leave that to individual teachers.
Because if I'm a school and I say, "I'm a school district and I'm hiring people," and I can articulate, "This is how we do things here.
This is what we do.
This is what we believe.
Mr.
Groeschel we like you, but if you don't believe that, then this is just not gonna be the place for you." And that's okay because there's gonna be a place for you in the United States of America.
There's somebody else that's gonna want a school with a district with a different vision, a different instructional vision.
You're speaking my language.
I think that this is really the point.
We used to have these things in Tacoma, Washington, by the way which is where I live now, but I'm gonna be moving to Austin pretty soon.
To be closer to the app design for Alpha and to put my kids in these these horrible Alpha schools.
But there used to be these things called magnet schools, and The one that I chose, because there was, like, a fair of magnet schools when I was going into middle school was around science and engineering.
And the whole idea was you go there and you're gonna learn about space.
There's a space program and all this other stuff.
And this was not controversial around here.
This was exciting because it meant that there would be a bit more of a marketplace when it came to parent choice, I suppose, within the public system.
this is ethical for me, give a sense of transparency about what the school is about.
Because withholding that information from folks because the leadership or the school district themselves doesn't even know what education consists of, right?
Or what their schools should… You know, the limits of what the school should do is for me, is immoral and unethical because there are people that don't have another choice other than to go to
that school and just trust you without any without any documentation or without any evidence of what you're doing that what you're doing works or has a s- a particular perspective or philosophy.
Now, what happened to pup- to magnet schools in this area many of them didn't really do anything differently.
They just had the name, right?
We're a science and engineering school, and then I went to that school and I went, once in a while a sort of forced nod by the teachers that we do work at a magnet school that's, you know, focuses on that.
And then I noticed that was the same with other ones.
Yeah, we have one period more of music per day, and we're the music school.
You're like, "That's what the music school does? I thought the music schools, you know, were training the next Mozarts." Instead you get an extracurricular activity during the day around music?
That doesn't sound right.
So schools themselves in the general public, I think are attracted to being able to have some you know, in a pluralistic society, some level of A agency when
it comes to where does my kid go and what are they gonna learn and what are they like, and we've not done a good job of actually providing those choices.
And I think, you know, a- and I don't think that this is a Republican or a Democratic point of view or it necessarily needs to happen in charter and private schools.
I think it can happen in public schools, and it can be supported by anyone with just a level of empathy for a child who might wanna dance a lot more
than they wanna do somewhere else, you know?
I don't know.
Well, for those of you who listen to Better Teaching but you happened to miss my podcast with Jane Wagner, we spend an hour talking about magnet schools and her magnet school in particular, and the issue of what you just talked about.
You can say you are something, but what makes you that and what continues to make that school strong in whatever it says it is.
Oh, Zak you know, it's usually it's about an hour is all I can take talking to you 'cause we get so excited you know, both sides.
You know, we're very passionate about the fact that we can do a better job, you know?
We can do a better job, and it's not that much more work.
And most times it's less work that we found out just by providing some structures that are replicable, that you can do over and over again.
And that's what you talk about in your book, Just Tell Them.
That's what I talk about in Teach Fast.
And, yeah, tell me about that before we close out.
I know this is getting, you know, getting long, but it's actually about the, you know, s- still two hours less than a Craig Barton episode.
So I think we've still got people's attention.
by the way, listeners should go check out his podcast.
I listen to it all the time . I'm just teasing.
you have now put out sort of a re-edited version, not necessarily a new edition, but you've shifted the, you know, the publishing load elsewhere, and now There's sort of a second birth of your two books.
And maybe you could tell us a little bit more about why you chose to do that and what's the, what the future's gonna bring with with these new updates.
Well, I'm very excited that you know, we're getting- we're republishing with with a new publisher,
Cognoscente Books, and In fact, both of us are very familiar working with Mark Combs again.
Mark Combs, who has worked with, like I said, he worked with you, he's worked with Doug Lemov, he's worked with I mean, he's worked with a lot of folks.
He knows what he's been doing.
He knows what he's doing.
And so I wanted to to have an opportunity to kind of relaunch these books, reintroduce them.
And as you said, there, there's, there are some minor changes, but I think, you know, I don't wanna say by law, but I think by custom you have to have, like, 30% new content to call it a new edition.
This is just a a ni- a nice new edition for Teach Fast that tells a little bit more about the how closely, How closely the story is told to the science of learning.
So if people understand if they've been going to all the trainings, they've been attending research ed, they do all the webinars, they do all the stuff online, this is how to put it all together to have a coherent lesson.
And so that's what Teach Fast is about and it's pretty much I made a joke earlier about, you know, an ethnography, and this really
is a book that's based on 20 years of studying instruction, and working with teachers to design instruction and deliver instruction.
Now, when I say 20 years of experience, it's just doing that.
I have another 20 years before that of experience but it's just doing that.
And so very excited to have these reissued.
In fact, people may have noticed that trying to buy Teach Fast when they go online, it's not available, but it will be in just a couple weeks.
so that was again changing publishers, and the same thing with Maximizing Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.
But one of the things I … God, one thing that I forgot to tell you that I learned, Zach, and thank you for talking about the books, is that I
have worked, done some online coaching in lesson design and delivery, and that's because of the, you know, people are able to, to video lessons.
But I always thought, I was just very wrong.
I thought teachers couldn't do this until they sat through a training.
And now I'm working with some teachers who've just read the book.
Not just, but they've read the book, not had any training, but I can't believe how well-designed the lessons come for that first time that we meet, just taking the elements from the book.
So it's really made a difference to some folks.
and I think I'll probably be doing more of that.
I'm not gonna be traveling to Colombia or El Salvador.
I'll j- just sit in my office and do some coaching.
That's nice.
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah it's hard because y- being in person just does feel, just feels so so much more natural, and it feels like you get so much done.
But then, you know, I've also had to balance those things as well.
Maybe I'm in the mode of, like, doing these intensive one-month things and then hiding out in my computer for the month after that to recover.
I'm not really sure.
Z- Zach I have a feeling that people are gonna hear that you did this month-long thing, and they're gonna reach out to you to wanna do it.
So you may wanna have some particular parameters to let them know.
Oh, yeah.
how about I take care of the stuff that I'm already working on first is probably the main parameter.
But Gene, always great to talk to you.
I feel like, listeners, if, you know, you come on here and you just wanna hear something, and it's all different.
We'd love to hear from you as we go into the next season.
What are some of your questions that you want answered on future episodes of of Thinking Out Loud?
What are some of the topics that you want covered?
And what are some of the things you might agree with and disagree with?
All of these things, please contact us through the various channels, and and keep in touch.
I- if for when you're listening to this is the beginning or middle of your summer, have a great vacation.
Like, retool and refuel, and get ready for a new school year because kids learning doesn't stop, as cliche as that might sound.
It keeps on going, and we've gotta hit the ground running when it comes to this next school year.
Gene, man, thanks so much for chatting with me.
Oh, great seeing you again, Zach.
Hope to talk soon.
All right.
Bye.
Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.
Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky.
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.