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Carol Ann Tomlinson is one of the most admired, accomplished, and influential authors and leaders in education. Today, we’re honored to have her on The Authority!
Carol is the William Clay Parrish, Jr. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development; author or co-author of over 300 books, book chapters, articles, and other educational materials for K-12 teachers and school leaders; and has won numerous awards and been named to Education Week’s Edu-Scholar Public Presence rankings many times.
So Each May Soar: The Principles and Practices of Learner-Centered Classrooms is available from ASCD.
Carol and Ross discuss:
- George R.R. Martin’s two types of writers, the architect and the gardener. How the journey of writing this book was something different.
- A “dues-paying member” of innovation in education.
- A learner-centered classroom dignifies students and honors each learner. What else does it look like?
- "Learner-centered classrooms rely on teachers who are willing to change and grow, and on school leaders who are willing to intelligently support them.”
- What does quality mean and what does it ask of teachers?
- How teachers can honor themselves.
- So each may soar beyond K-12. What are our ambitions for students?
- Carol’s book recommendations: An Ethic of Excellence and Leaders of Their Own Learning by Ron Berger
Learn more about the book and get it from ASCD: https://bit.ly/45TeBDM
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About today’s guest
Carol Ann Tomlinson is William Clay Parrish, Jr. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development where she served as Chair of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy, and Co-Director of the University’s Institutes on Academic Diversity. Prior to joining the faculty at UVa, she was a teacher in public schools for 21 years, where she taught students in high school, preschool, and middle school, and administered district programs for struggling and advanced learners. She was Virginia’s Teacher of the Year in 1974.
At the University of Virginia, she taught and advised doctoral, masters, and undergraduate students with a focus on curriculum, instruction, and differentiation. During her time at UVa, she authored or co-authored over 300 books, book chapters, articles, and other educational materials for K-12 teachers and school leaders including: How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms (3rd Ed.), The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners (2nd Ed), So Each May Soar: The Principles & Practices of Learner-Centered Classrooms, and Everybody’s Classroom: Differentiating for the Shared and Unique Needs of Diverse Learners Her books are available in 14 languages.
Carol was named Outstanding Professor at UVa’s School of Education in 2004 and received an All-University Teaching Award in 2008. In 2023, she was ranked #12 in the Education Week Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings of the 200 “University-based academics who are contributing most substantially to public debates about schools and schooling,” and as the #4 voice in Curriculum. She works throughout the United States and internationally with educators who seek to create classrooms that are effective in reaching diverse student populations.
Carol is also serious dog-lover and these days enjoys (most of the time) the antics of Bella, Beau, and Banjo. Follow her on Twitter @cat3y
About the host
Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn
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TAP 42 Carol Ann Tomlinson
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody. You are listening once again to the Authority Podcast on the Be Podcast Network. By the way, if you haven't yet checked it out, check out our website@bpodcast.network or b podcast network.com to see all of our other shows If you're enjoying this one, we have many more shows for K12 leaders.
Also shows for parents higher education, learning and development organization. So you'll find something you enjoy there. But without further ado, let's get into today's show. I am really pleased to be joined by Carol Ann Tomlinson. Among other things, I'll read the short version of the bio year, but she is the William Clay Parish Junior Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development.
She served previously as the [00:01:00] Chair of Educational Leadership Foundations and Policy and the co-director of the University's Institutes of Academic Diversity, and she taught and advised doctoral masters and undergrad students with a focus on. Curriculum instruction and differentiation. She has authored or co-authored over 300 books, book chapters, articles, and other educational materials for K-12 teachers and school leaders.
But the one we're talking about today is called, so Each May Saw the Principals and Practices of Learner-Centered Classrooms. That's available from A S C D. Carol, welcome to the Authority.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk to you and to your listeners.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I, I think, the listeners are really going to enjoy this, and I, we might as well start here. As I just mentioned, you've written quite a few books and many other materials, right? what inspired you to write this particular book that we're discussing here?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: That's actually an interesting story and I'll try not to make it too long cuz it may only be interesting to me. But, I started writing, usually when I [00:02:00] write something, it always takes a while, especially if you're working full-time, but started writing about two years, I guess, before the pandemic. And my motivation at the time was to understand what people were talking about when they were talking about personalization.
And that was a particular interest to me because. A lot of the conversations intertwined with people's perceptions of differentiation. So I would read differentiation is a kind of personalization. Personalization is a kind of differentiation. Differentiation's all wrong and personalization has all the answers.
And then you get, which I'm sure many of your listeners have, here are the principles of differentiation, which people would list compared with the principles of personalization. And my thought was usually, I don't know who wrote that differentiation list, but it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm accustomed to.
So it really was just a, sense of wanting to get clear in my own thinking of what personalization meant. So that I had some way [00:03:00] of pondering it and responding to it. The shorter version is that after about a year and a half, of using almost every weekend, all weekend, and as many days as I could say during the week to write and having written quite a bit, I really came to the conclusion that at least at that point, what I was trying to do just wasn't possible.
There was not enough literature of any kind on personalization. It was hugely confusing. And every time I started to go a different direction to try to do something meaningful with it, I got stuck. So I ditched that one, started writing really, I guess about, the second time through what it seemed to be that we needed to be doing in classrooms to honor the students that we were teaching.
That's sort of where I ended up. Although not in the same way that I started on that second go round. It actually was the fourth go round when I finally figured out what it was I was trying to do. Had wasted a lot of time by then, except I guess it's not waste if you're learning, but it doesn't always seem that way.
So I [00:04:00] began working with a premise, which this is a little embarrassing to say, was an epiphany for me it because it shouldn't have been. But what I realized was that many things that we do in our education world look like the next new toy that came down the pike. And if we just pick up that new thing and use it, everything will be fine.
And so it personalization could be one of those in somebody's mind. Differentiation could be one of those, and it might be inquiry, it might be problem-based learning. I mean, there's so many different things that, are those things that we think if we pick them up will save us.
Ross Romano: Right.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: And my epiphany was that, none of those things will save us.
What we need to be focusing our energies on is our best knowledge from our profession about what ought to be going on in classrooms to maximize the capacity of the learners we work with. And so that's what the book really is about. If we just used best [00:05:00] practice, What would we be doing? And with in my interest of course, is how would we do it to deal with the great variety of students that come to us every day?
So that's what the book's about. It's, what we would do if we didn't look for the next new thing. But if we just tried to use those practices that are pretty clear in the literature of education, from educational psychology, from pedagogy and from neuroscience, what would that look like?
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Ross Romano: I found that really interesting because, one of the things that I ask a lot of times on this show to our authors around the. Premise that writing a book is just as much about learning things as you go, as it is about writing what you already know. Right. And, depending on which book you're writing, there's equal parts of one or the other, or it might shift if it's a topic that you, of course have, written a lot about.
But, in the preface to the book, you, wrote about these two types of writers [00:06:00] that, the novelist, George R.R. Martin, who, listeners may be familiar with from the, the Game of Throne series. I think the books might have different names, but, the architect and the gardener,
And. You can describe it better, but the architect being more the, person who would go into it and say, okay, I know exactly everything that's going to happen from beginning to end. I had the blueprint and the gardener going to, plant the seeds and, cultivate them and see what grows.
And it's more exploratory. And, you wrote how you've done both over the course of your career, but then this journey was something different entirely, which you kind of just described, that process of saying, okay, I thought it was going in this direction, and then, eh, that wasn't quite right and then I went in this other direction.
But I thought that was really interesting, not only because it sort of reinforced that point that if we wanna have really meaningful content in our books, we have to be open to new ideas and learnings as we go. But also to say that, Most readers might [00:07:00] not assume that, right? They might say, well, you've written a lot of books.
You've been working on this for a long time, so clearly you knew when you started exactly what you wanted to say, and that's what you said. And, and I think the fact that you went through that process of doing it makes it all the more meaningful because they were ideas that you were really exploring and investigating and interrogating as you went.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: You know, one of the things that was, really fascinating and not always, Lifting during that process was, truly by the time I had finished the book, it was, it had been about four and a half years or five working in every spare minute I had. The thing that saved me was that I was, working on it when the pandemic began, and then suddenly I had a boocoodle of time to be able to use.
But I think for me, what you said there about the writers is true. I've always found that when I can sit down and tell you exactly what's gonna be there, there's not a very good piece of writing because it's bores me. It's just sort of rehashing what I might be saying in classes and keep trying to find new ways to [00:08:00] say, and it, just doesn't seem energizing to me and therefore may not to anybody else either.
This one was more of a gardening thing and not knowing what kind of seed was gonna come up was planting frig vegetables or fruits or maybe a new sheep's, seed or something like that. But once I started and began working and got where I was going, then the process was pretty neat because, I studied all the way through it.
But for me, whether I'm doing a presentation or an article or a book, it's that learning process for me and knowing that when I come out of it, I understand things more deeply than I did when I started.
Ross Romano: And it also, relates to how we may want to define, innovation in education, right? So you referenced earlier kind of the conclusions you came to about it, there's these shiny new things and we don't necessarily need to focus on chasing them. And, there's different models, any of which could work perfectly well, but it's contingent upon these other [00:09:00] foundational factors being, there. So they're not the thing. But you do also, you wrote, I think you called yourself a dues paying member of innovation and education. Right? Or, or a subscriber. So that's something you really believe in, and I would love to hear from you.
When you think about that, when you think about innovation and education, how are you defining that? What are the hallmarks of really innovative thinking in the space?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: I think when I taught classes on creativity, one of the things that I always tried to stress with my students, because I think when you talk about innovation, creativity, that kind of thing, it sounds very ethereal and somebody's expecting me to be Michelangelo. And in the writing on creativity, which you may know as well, people talk about, what they call big C creativity and small c creativity and big C creativity changes the world or a significant part of it.
Little c creativity also changes some part of the world, and it changes us as we go so that we get stronger. And so in any context, there are things we can do to be innovative and make things [00:10:00] better. But what I have become really, Fascinated by committed to in the last 10 or 12 years, partly because of studying when I've been writing, is, what some experts in school change call second order change.
And what they're talking about is the fact that, again, we keep looking for the thing that's gonna fix us. And what's nice about those things, if we think we've found them, is that I can keep doing exactly what I was doing and then I can just kind of hang this ornament on the tree that was already there,
and nothing has to change too much. It's fresh, it's nice, good thing to have, but doesn't require me to change my world. Second order change requires us to change the world to say this thing that we call teaching. Doesn't need a tweak, it doesn't need a new paint job. It needs to be renovated from the ground up and to start over because we are so enmeshed in so many things right now that make it difficult for us to think about the human beings we teach.
We're trying [00:11:00] to defend ourselves from so many things at the same time. And so when I'm thinking about innovation, aware of I guess capital I, innovation and small, I am grateful for both kinds. But I really do believe that our schools, are stuck in a time long ago and that we are not able, for a variety of reasons, certainly very rarely the teacher's fault, but we aren't able to look at who we are, who they are, what resources we have, what are aspirations for them are, and so I'm interested in innovation.
We're. A school leader, and I know a lot of your audience is a school leader group, where the school leader says, I'm not interested in more ornaments to hang on the tree. I want us to really, as a group, work together to figure out how we reinvent ourselves. That, that to me, is the most exciting and important thing in schools right now.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I feel like some of these I words, might've come out of my mouth earlier, but, you know, I'm thinking about innovation [00:12:00] and, it's a good perspective, right? A good reminder of perspective around, innovation doesn't, necessarily mean something that's brand new or to understand that if, there were a lot of ideas that you innovated many years ago, but then if you continue to iterate, investigate. And even interrogate your own work and say, Hmm, you know, what do I know now that I didn't know then? Or what has changed in schools that we need to adapt to? Or that it's, there's ideas. If we talk differentiated instruction, right?
We're at this point, people have heard about that term and they might be really familiar with it over the course of time. And yet to understand that if you were to compare the newest, books to a book from 20, 30 years ago, they would say, oh, this doesn't look exactly the same. Right? There's a lot of foundational pieces that are here, but it has evolved because schools have evolved students, educators, we know more now than we knew then, or we know [00:13:00] new things and all the, and that's innovation, right?
That's innovation happening within, maybe concepts that, are established in that stand, the test of time. But yet, if it was just the same old thing over and over again, it would. Fail to keep up with other things that are changing.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: When I'm presenting, I'm interested in how many times people will say to me something like, I saw you seven years ago in Chicago and two years before that in Detroit or something. And every time I hear you, you weren't saying the same thing. It keeps changing. And my sense of that, if it doesn't, I'd be bored to death in a corner.
It is the challenge of growth, of understanding, which is difficult to understand issues of the time and new technologies and our failings and what makes us strong and what threatens us and what teachers feedback to me all the time, which gives me a, sounding board for ideas. So yeah, that I, too is an important point.
I think, Ross, when I [00:14:00] think about innovation in school and second order change, that isn't something that's a once and done I hear so many times, so, so many times. Oh, we did differentiation in our school last year and I'm almost sure that if I went in that school, nothing would be happening because it is a lifelong pursuit of something just like parenting or golfing or a thousand other things.
If you wanna be any good with it, it isn't, oh, we did that last year and it's finished. And so for people who are big C creative and I think many of us who aspire to be small C creative, it's a matter of growing the ideas that we have, not just sort of hatching the egg and walking away and hoping something comes of it that's part of the process.
And second order change in schools as it happens really works because we walk away from.
Ross Romano: Yeah. So another important concept to this book that I think is probably gonna be illustrative of other, innovation and changing thinking and evolution over the years is the learner, [00:15:00] learner-centered classroom, right? So that was indicated in the title, principles and Practice of Learner-Centered Classrooms.
And, I'm sure a lot of the emphasis around creating these classrooms and what they should look like, And the thinking about that is much different now than it would've been 10 20, you know, over the years. And just considering why it's important, why would we wanna aspire to this? What does a learner-centered classroom look like in your estimation?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: It's a classroom in which the teacher is committed to teaching content to human beings rather than covering content for a test. It's a classroom in which the teacher. Realizes, or at least is willing to work toward realizing, that a class can't learn. There's no such thing as the class learned it today.
There are 30 kids in there, they're 30 different brains, 30 different experiences, seven different languages, two kids with trauma, a couple with reading issues, and a class can't learn. So you have 30 brains. And the question is, what do I do to reach those human beings? [00:16:00] We know also that reaching their brains is sort of predicated on reaching their hearts or their trust of you.
And so it is a teacher who's committed to seeing the human beings that he or she teaches, committed to understanding them more deeply and more progressively as the year goes on so that subsequent planning, can be more responsive to who those people are and to what their needs are now and in the future.
Many of our schools right now, and they're reasons for this that are understandable, but we aren't teaching. As though the kids live in the time that they live in. And that for many of them is a dragon. For a lot of them it's, the kids of death really, because school seems so I relevant in the midst of very hard lives.
So that really is the crux of it to me. It's a teacher who is willing to say, I'd like to teach in this place in a way that indicates to the students first and to me that they are my rationale for planning. That when I [00:17:00] plan, I'm doing things based on who they are and who they're becoming and where they're going, and the information that I'm getting about that from assessments.
But from them and from our conversations and from observation, this class is gonna be driven by who these young people are and how they're evolving.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And it, it struck me as, perhaps almost being able to divide out, positive energy and negative energy. You know, you, you had written about an energized and mutually respectful classroom community, right? Students who were going to be able to better understand themselves and others, and understanding that that dynamic around learners can create the kind of positive energy and engagement and motivation you want in the classroom.
Because we're, feeling like we're interacting with new ideas and thoughts, and I'm learning about the people that I'm with and my teacher is, encouraging that. Versus when we think about, okay, what's happening if something's not working in [00:18:00] school, it's either a lack of energy or those negative energies that come in when we don't turn these
objectives into aspirations, and we instead are using them in other ways. And then it's, that divisive type of energy. But, I really like the visual create around that positive energy, that engagement around when students are emphasized and placed in the center of that learning environment.
And all of the students are honoring each learner. Right. That, that's the dynamic that you would want if you were just a fly on the wall and you would say, Hmm, something's happening here.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: I worked with a high school teacher when I was teaching in K-12, which I did for 20 years. So I've been in the same trenches that other guys are for a fairly good length of time. And by the way, loved it. I loved every day of it. Or at least I remember that I loved every day of it. I'm sure there were a few that I didn't, but I don't remember those.
I worked with the principal who was a high school principal at the time, and he said to me one day, I think I must have the worst luck in the world. And I [00:19:00] said, what do you mean? And he said, well, not just in life in general, it's observations. When I go in for an observation, my luck is really bad. So I said, well, tell me about it.
And he said, I always get there about five minutes after the invasion of the body snatchers. And I thought that was such an interesting way to say it. What he's saying is what you said. When I go in, something has sucked life out of this place, and I'm looking at these corpses sitting here in front of me waiting for the time to pass.
And that's a terrible, terrible way for young people to envision school and the message that we give them that that's what learning about? And why would you want to try? If you A, don't believe you can do something, but B, you just can't see the point of it in the world at all, has nothing to do with you.
Ross Romano: What does the creation of these learner center classrooms, require of teachers and then backing up, from that, what does that require of, the administration, [00:20:00] right? The type of support to provide to teachers so that they can bring what's required to really create these classrooms.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Well, glad you've said that because of course it's not, if we don't have teams and partnerships going there, we've lost the battle already.
A number of the things that need to happen in classrooms in some places cannot happen now because teachers don't have that permission and that support that you're talking about. So even a teacher who's willing to do and understands how they might start, finds it almost impossible to go there, but, In terms of the teacher, I think we need a teacher who is David Sousa says, is willing to see the world through the eyes of each student they have to really try to get into the students eyeballs and skin and shoes and go in that direction. And is a teacher who has cultivated a desire to be with kids of that age. I think there are a lot of teachers who, end up [00:21:00] being mechanically pretty good. But our mighty happened. Happy to see those kids go away every day.
It isn't about the kids, it's about covering the content and, saying, I've prepared 'em for a test and there's just not much, as you say, electricity going back and forth between them. So I think a teacher who says, I want to know these kids, I'm richer for knowing them. It doesn't mean we're trying to get intimate details of their lives.
And you couldn't do that anyhow with, 30 kids in an elementary classroom or 150 in the upper grades. But you can get to know them as individuals if you're trying and to see the humans that you're teaching. And so I think that teacher is trying to better and better every day and knowing it'll never be perfect.
Say, why am I doing what I'm doing? What evidence do I have that this is or isn't? Moving things forward for individual kids, not the class, but the human beings in it. And what are other things I can learn about? What are other ways I could do this? It's an evolutionary thing, [00:22:00] and so you need a teacher with some patience.
When I'm presenting to teachers or teaching, I'm always feeling a need, of course, to show people some examples and I've learned over the years to try to balance two things. One is examples that somebody probably could say, yeah, with a little thought, I might be able to, to do that. And then another thing which says, holy cow, if you expect me to do that, I'm dead in the water, because we have to have that aspirational thing.
We can start here and we can go here, but first it is a teacher who is empathetic, appreciative of the young lives that are in front of them, grateful to be working with them, and fascinated by the opportunity to get to know them in order to teach them better. From that, I think, arises a sense, and this is nothing of this is automatic.
This says the most basic thing I can do is to create an atmosphere in this room, an environment that's welcoming to [00:23:00] every person in it. John Hattie calls that an invitational learning environment. And what he means by that is a place that kids get up wanting to come in the morning, even if they won't admit that to anybody when it, they're at the super cool age.
But it's a good place for me. That doesn't mean easy. It means challenging, really challenging. And I don't think I can do this stuff all the time, but there are always people there to support me. And generally I find out eventually I can do it. And I feel somehow stretched and fulfilled and part of a group, a contributor to a receiver.
And that's true for the. Low income kid who is hungry when she comes to school. It's true that needs to feel it's invitational. The kid who's suffered trauma and we may not even know about it, needs to feel that this is a safe place to come. The kid whose light years in, his thinking ahead of his peers needs to know that this is a place where what he's thinking in his mind is, welcome there.
And creating that invitational learning environment, I think is something we don't talk about [00:24:00] too much, which has a principal role in it as well. School leaders need to have those conversations with us all the time and help us think through those things because we know that that is the springboard for everything else that happens when a teacher listens to me, accepts me as I am, pays me a compliment of believing I can do something I don't think I can do.
Sets up a support system so that that's likely to happen, teaches me how to do it better and I succeed at something I didn't think I could. It's all different. Second issue that we have to work with is that right now in many places, you can't generalize the schools and teachers anymore than you can to kids, but in many places we have curriculum that is just, sorry.
It is just awful. We've taken standards as the curriculum and we teach them almost in isolation and too many of them, and it has no significance. And especially kids who are struggling with school, it's like asking 'em to speak in a [00:25:00] foreign language they don't know for years and years and never get any better at it.
Curriculum ought to be a way to show kids that they live in a magnificent world and that they have endless possibilities to act on that world in a way that improves it and that the world will continually teach and they ought to go away from us. Knowing that learning is the biggest probably, but if not pretty close to the biggest, gift of humans is learning.
And many kids aren't getting that from the materials we try to teach. And then we need to be learning a little more about how you get to know those kids in terms of how we can use assessment in a way that mentors kids rather than judging them and sorting them and that kind of thing. And how we teach in a way that's collaborative and shared space and helping kids learn to do that cause they don't know how to do it anymore than we do a bunch of teachers in a room and tell them to collaborate is usually pretty deadly too, cuz we haven't figured that out.
And then learning how to work in a classroom where children won't be doing exactly the [00:26:00] same thing all the time for a variety of reasons. And all of those are hurdles. The biggest one for school leaders I think is having that vision and thinking about if you think about different kids you see in the hall or that get sent to the office, or the ones that aspire to great things and get there.
What's really going really wonderfully well for them and what's not, and what could we do to change that? I think one of the things I've learned over time is that a school leader who has a vision for change is in a much different place than one who says, we're gonna do differentiation this year and next year will do, it's a mission and we tend to follow leaders with a mission, but at the very least, the school leader needs to be able to say, you know what? This teacher's doing something really interesting, and I'm gonna encourage that. I'm not gonna tell 'em they all have to do the same thing. And if this one is willing to go [00:27:00] down that route and invest in that and talk with me and other people about it, we'll learn and that person will learn.
And so let's use this as a laboratory that's in the midst of us, rather than the, everybody has to be on the same page within three paragraphs at the end of the Friday of every week kind of thing.
Ross Romano: Right. A couple of weeks ago, I moderated this conversation about, why community is the foundation of learning. And this thing that kept coming into my head during that was, Conditions for learning, right? And of course that can mean a lot of different things.
But at a baseline level, I think of it as if I walked into the environment and I saw what was happening in there, what I say can kids learn here? Is this a place where every student is able to learn? Or are there things happening that are going to make it impossible for them to really focus and engage and feel like supported?
And, perhaps not the best example, but in some ways I think relevant is, if you think [00:28:00] about going to a jewelry store, for example, and, let's say you want to go in there, Buy something nice for your significant other or something like that. And there's certain places where it's like, as soon as I walk in the door, somebody's kind of in my face and they're saying, what do you want?
What do you wanna see? Do you wanna see this? That? And I, I don't know yet. I, don't
even know what's going on yet, versus a place where I can go in, I can kind of look around, explore, figure out what I'm interested in. Then I know what questions to ask. Okay, can you tell me more about this or that?
And I'm comfortable and I am, saying, okay, now I can absorb the information. Cuz now I sort of know what's, happening here. and it made me, as you were talking, think of, this is probably a paradoxical phrase, but if it requires a teacher in particular, and then also their administrators, they're looking to be proactively receptive.
Meaning I need to put myself in [00:29:00] position to absorb and to listen and to hear what's going on. I can't force the issue. and there's also only so much we can do, right? Because that's what some people, if they're either being critical or defensive against what they perceive this to be, would say, well, it's impractical.
I can't really get to know each single person is individual. And, but it's maybe a question of, well, are we misunderstanding what is really being asked? Because it's not that you have to know every detail of everything that everybody's doing, but you have to be observant and be in the right place at the right time to say, okay.
I picked up on something here and something there, and it helped me to tilt my support just a little bit this way that this child needed and do this and, be looking for opportunities to receive inputs versus, being able to, to drill into the ground for oil. Right.[00:30:00]
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Carol Ann Tomlinson: There's a video that I really like. I think from the, pretty sure it's teaching channel, where a elementary teacher is being filmed working with his students in reading. He's an interesting fellow anyhow because he does not look exactly in terms of his clothing and hairstyle and big earring that he wears and stuff.
Exactly like we might envision the teacher.
But he's totally tuned in to his students. And in this course of this couple of videos that have been done on him, he'll work with the kids, on a mini lesson, maybe read them a book. And when he's reading the book, he'll stop and ask 'em questions really often and get 'em to do a thumbs up, thumbs down, raise their hands, talk to each other.
And he's watching all the time, but he has very clear sense of why he's reading what he's reading and why he's focusing on that right then. And that proceeds through. [00:31:00] And it's always exciting and it's fun to see to me what he's chosen to do and how he's chosen it. Because he's thinking of things that the kids have responded to in the past.
And that lesson, I think you can, watch the kids on the floor watching him. There's nobody watching the camera. Their eyes are. Sparkling, with interest and thought and that kind of thing. But then he, asked them to go get lost in a book and every kid finds the book that they want to get lost in and starts reading.
And he spends the rest of that time walking from student to student and kneeling on the floor and asking the student to explain something in his, in their book to him, and then saying to them, I believe yesterday or last time we talked, you were working on X. So let me ask you this in this book to see where you are with this right now.
All of those, any, they're stretching questions. It's not what's the right answer here? And you can see the kids, think and respond. They're responding to [00:32:00] him really well, but with some struggle a lot of the time. And in the end, what he's doing is step by step remembering something that they need.
Working with them on something that's exciting as the container for that, the wrapper, but then making sure that that thing they need continues to grow as well. And it's, that video to me is just a wonderful example of exactly what you just said. A teacher who's finally tuned in to each student and not trying to cover everything on the planet, but find a next step that student needs to take.
And figuring out how to help that student take a next step with something that we're doing in common. All of us that's exciting. But the things he's asking, those kids are very, very different in complexity and in focus. And I, having taught for 21 years in public school, I'm very clear that there's no way you can go every kid deeply.
And sometimes there's some really bad. Gaps in what your knowledge is. And if you had that [00:33:00] knowledge, you would be on much sounder footing to help them and you won't always have it. But to, stop ourselves by saying, I can't know them, so I'm not gonna try, and I have no mechanism for it. The purpose of formative assessment as we understand it, is to get a persistent snapshot of kids throughout whatever it is you're trying to teach.
And just being able to say, ah, he's made progress in this. It's walking around a classroom with a checklist and just watching kids and making a check with things they have. It's using a homework assignment that would usually just be busy work to say, I wanna see who's using this thing. Right? And if you're doing that, if you're engaged in that hunting and watching and listening thing that you're referring to, it's amazing how good your little brain can become at doing those things.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and I think all of that is a, great explanation of exactly why that support from the administrator is so important, right?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Romano: of that requires [00:34:00] confidence. It requires, Confidence, in that teacher and the teacher to have in themselves to say, I know I have the tools. I have the knowledge, I have the strategies, I need to be in the moment and see what's happening.
See what this student is doing, what they're struggling with, what they're saying, what they're, and then I'll know the right thing to say or do at the right time, but I have to wait for that to reveal itself. Right. And that might, wait, might mean a matter of seconds, right? Or it might mean that student that I'm having a hard time knowing.
But eventually it'll, it will reveal itself and I'll know what to do. But you have to be in the moment to be able to do that. And being in the moment requires. Not being stressed about something else, right? Like my mind is taken up by I'm trying to force something or do too much, because I feel like I have to, right?
Like, if I'm not doing [00:35:00] something, then nothing's happening. Versus to say, look, it's an exploration process. And if I'm observing that teacher, and the way to give them that confidence is to encourage that. and also to not assume as the administrator that I know, everything, right?
Because I only see a certain, just as they only have a certain slice of each learner, I only know a certain amount of what's going on in each classroom. And so I have to offer my insights when I have it, but also not jump to a conclusion to say, the one who said, I, I come in right after the invasion of the body snatchers.
Like, I don't know what was happening before that. So
Carol Ann Tomlinson: But it wasn't good.
Ross Romano: and I know of something, but I don't know. Okay. So I gotta put the picture together. Another thing that I, thought was interesting and important and relates directly to this is the concept of, what it means for teachers to honor themselves.[00:36:00]
Can you talk about that a little bit and how that relates to everything we've been discussing?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: I think it relates pretty closely to what you were just talking about as well. If we go into a classroom which asks us to contribute huge energy every second of a day and we just start, we are responding more from instinct or habit than we are from our own aspirations. In my experience, the parents who were ones that I always wanted to watch when I was teaching children, Were the ones who knew what they wanted to be as a parent.
That didn't mean they had a single day where they accomplished all those things, but they had those visions of who they wanted to be, and they held tight to them as much as they could, and they reflected on those. And when things went well, they reflected on that and looked at what the next step might be.
When it didn't go well, [00:37:00] they asked themselves, how could I have done this better? It's that mindful sense that I have huge responsibility here in front of me. Haim G said it had occurred to him that the teachers are the weather maker in the classroom, that every day they decide whether a student will be uplifted or humiliated.
Every day they decide whether a stool will go away, dignified, or feeling foolish and hopeless. And it's that sense that I can be something more powerful with these kids than I have imagined I can be. And I wanna help myself get there. I wanna listen to how I talk, how I speak to them. If I want to dignify students, then I need to be asking myself, what have I done that did dignify some people today, but did I ever say anything or have a facial expression or respond to a student's weird behavior in a way that actually took away some of the student's dignity?
So [00:38:00] I, what I'm really talking about there is, I guess the thing that serves us all well at some point, and that is, who do I want to be and what can I do to make sure that I get myself there? Not totally on my behalf, although I think it benefits the person who has that aspiration for sure. But these kids are in my care, and I don't think we think about that as often as we might.
Many of the students we teach are with us during a day for more waking hours than they are with their parents. That's pretty consistent, K through 12. And for some of those kids, the time with their parents is very difficult. For many of them. It bandages some rough spots and, keeps encouraging kids.
But that's what I really mean by that is dignifying teaching, dignifying this adult opportunity. And trying to figure out what that would mean and where I am with the characteristics, the attributes of that kind of thinking, and how I can move myself forward with it. It's hard [00:39:00] because we are human beings.
Everybody is, they're no real hero teachers. There's some that are more focused and some that have a talent for X or Y, but we're all vulnerable and we're all weak in places that we wish we weren't. And what do I do as a teacher when a kid says something in class, either to me or to a peer. That's really hurtful.
How do I respond? Do I respond in a way that brings more hurt to the situation? Or is there a way that I can deal with that in a way that's redemptive? And so to me, that's what I mean by that thing. And again, I don't remember in my teaching career at the university or in K-12 with anybody talking with us about that sort of thing, who I am.
I'm the weather maker. Who are these kids? What do they need from me? What does it mean to be an empathetic teacher? What does it mean to be a warm demander? The teacher who truly cares for the kid and the kid sees it, but also just doesn't put up with any mess. That's a, formula for success for a lot of kids [00:40:00] that are floating a little too free in the world.
So honoring the teacher to me means honoring the potential in yourself and honoring the profession by trying to understand what makes it positively powerful rather than sometimes negatively powerful.
Ross Romano: Yeah, that really, that reminds me of. Something that I had, mentioned in that conversation I was referring to earlier, which I was calling the upside of accountability in this case, that a teacher who is properly holding students accountable for their learning, properly, challenging them, showing them that there's a pathway to success, but really being present is showing them that they care about their, them and their progress and their learning.
Versus students don't want to be challenged or they, don't want somebody to set parameters and objectives and go, they. But it needs to be done [00:41:00] correctly. It needs to be done, focused on growth, focused on support, focused on. And then the same thing for the educator as an individual, defining that for themselves.
Defining who am I, who I wanna be, how do I wanna be, would allow you more often than not, to make decisions based on your values rather than your circumstances, right? Because like you mentioned with parents, same with teach, there's certain days where, the kids are making that easier or harder, right?
If they're all having a great day and they're well behaved and getting along, and it's very easy to be exactly who you want to be. But you know, on the days when they're not, you have to know who you wanna be or else you're just going to react to whatever's happening in front of you. And that can go awry.
It might go awry anyway, but.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Let me share with you one of my favorite stories from a teacher in that regard. This, I've come back to this so often, probably 10 years ago or so. Now we're doing institutes on differentiation at U V A a couple [00:42:00] of times a year. And there was, I don't remember what we were talking about, but something like what you and I were talking have been talking about in the last few minutes, in this young woman who, had been sitting sort of near the back, came up during a break and she said, really appreciate what you were talking about.
And it had to do with what you're saying, empathy for kids and accepting them as they are and aspiring to do something positive for 'em, even if their behavior is wretched. And she's teaching high school kids. And this boy who was irregular in school attendance and clearly did not want to be there and was accomplishing nothing unless he was making chaos for somebody.
Walked in this door one day and she was, waiting for the bell to ring. And she said to him, I'm so glad you're here today. I know this sounds strange, but when you're not here, there really is something missing. And I've been thinking about that. I think it really is the sort of all center sense of humor you have that always challenges me to think, and I'm glad you're here.
And he looked at her [00:43:00] dead in the eye and said, that's great cuz I hate your guts. And he wasn't joking, he was dead serious. And I thought, ugh, what would I have done if somebody, she was the second year teacher, what would I have done in my second year if a kid had said that to me? And so I said, what, what did you do?
What did you say back to him? And she said, Oh, it wasn't a problem. I knew it wasn't about me. I knew it was about things going on in his life that were hard. So I just looked at him and I said, that's okay. You're entitled to that opinion, and I've found over time that it takes a little while for me to grow on people, but I think you'll get there and turned around and walked away.
And that's the perfect response. And accepted him who he was. He, she's not saying You have to be somebody else to get my attention and for me to feel positively about you, so you can go ahead and try, but it's not gonna work. That's somebody who's working from an intention, not from circumstances.
Ross Romano: Right. And and the perspective is so good because it is one of those things that, we were talking earlier about this [00:44:00] positive and negative energies around education right now, and that's one of the. things that's, that's happening currently is this debate around almost like, uh, who's entitled to care about kids?
And I think it's a, probably a very small but vocal minority, that would present this opinion that, how could educators possibly care about kids and only parents do? And I don't know of any student, whoever, opposed their teachers caring about them, right?
You could have circumstances where their actions might show otherwise, like in that story because of something else that was going on, because of somebody that was just having a hard time knowing how to react and respond, to, a caring, adult or peer, That wasn't really about that. But, other than that of course that's what students want.
That's what adults want. If you work someplace, you want to know that your [00:45:00] colleagues and your supervisor and your organization cares about you to a certain extent. And when they don't, when it's just, cutthroat capitalism, right? You harden and you change and, and you start to look out for yourself in different ways.
If we think about how that would manifest in a classroom with a student, you can en envision it. That child that has that opinion or has had that experience, that nobody's really particularly interested in what they're doing or their progress or their wellbeing, they're no longer able to engage in that way because they're on the defensive.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: I'm sure there are things that, teachers can do that are unhelpful in. all of us can in trying to serve kids well. But I can't imagine having a child of mine that was gonna be in the care of other adults for 12 years [00:46:00] when I wasn't holding my breath, hoping that that person would care for my kid, care about my kid.
And for some of the kids, Geneva Gray has a line that, grabbed me really hard the first time I read it in one of her books, she said that talking about teachers who, care about kids. And she said what that means is, they like spending time with them. They enjoy their sense of humor. They have good stories to tell the kids, have stories to tell them.
Just sort of good company. And when I read that, I thought, yeah, I think that's right. I think most of the teachers I ever worked with in all the grades and places cared about kids in that way. But then she said, there's another level of that, that we need to be considering. We need to understand those kids who need to be cared for, not just cared about.
What she said caring for them means is you do whatever's necessary to help them move forward in a positive way. And I I, I don't think in the now 50 plus years I've been working in education, I have seen kids [00:47:00] worse for teachers who care about them and care for them in professional ways.
Ross Romano: Right. Totally. So, circling back, as we're kind of coming close to the conclusion here, to the title, so each may soar. Certainly the objective of that is beyond K-12, right? We want each child to achieve their full potential within, inside the classrooms in the micro. But also it's about their long-term trajectory.
How, what can they achieve in their life? How high, how are we setting them up for that? What are we doing there? What are some when you think about that through the lens of educators who are operating in the K-12 space, and of course have all these immediate realities and, things they need to achieve in that time, but are also.
Trying to keep in perspective to say, well, what we're doing here is really the foundation for what happens after that. How should we be thinking about that, [00:48:00] talking about that, and establishing that so we don't lose that perspective on it. Cuz it can happen there,
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Yeah,
Ross Romano: there's just days and weeks and sometimes years I'm sure.
where, , it's just easy to lose that perspective of okay, but what we're doing right now is not about right now, it's about the future.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Everything is about right now and the future because what happens right now from day one starts impacting the future. If we have a kid that's digging a hole in the ground, that hole's just gonna get deeper and deeper and deeper. And if their confidence is sliding, unless there's a somewhere down the line, a teacher who says, wait a minute, I'm sorry.
You can do better than this. Let's do it. At the same time saying, I'm so glad you're here like you are. I'm appreciative of the human being you have become in this lifetime and the things you are thinking and doing and accomplishing, but by George, we're not finished yet. I think that's a really critical, aspect for teachers.
I'd go back again though, Ross, to the, notion of the school leader[00:49:00] who can't keep saying to us, you have to cover everything. You have to do it really fast. You have to make sure they've all memorized it. You have to make sure they eat a breakfast before they come on. The day that they take the test.
The test is everything. And by the way, we need to be preparing them for the future because that's not preparing them. And when that eats up our lives in a classroom, then the other stuff doesn't happen. But if the principal says, let's figure out how to do a better job of understanding these human beings and addressing things, and we'll share ideas and we'll talk about these things.
Figure out how you can do the most important things for you to do in terms of baseline learning, and then how you can integrate kids' interest into that. How you can give them choices that help them show you and themselves that they can use that stuff in service of something that matters. What about making sure that at least a couple of times a year, the students are working together on something that can make a difference for a lower grade or for [00:50:00] the school, or for their community or for the space program or something so that they see themselves reaching out and accomplishing things they didn't believe they could.
We can't, if we are required to do the undoable, which is what we've been asking for teachers for about 35 years now, if we require them all day, every day, and their measure of success and their measure of their student's success is a false measure. And there's no time, no opportunity, no permission to be innovative, to try something different, then we're, we're not gonna do any better than we're doing now.
We're just gonna have more tired and frustrated teachers and students. So I think, again, what you're getting at, which I appreciate you read that, you read the book quite carefully enough to really understand some of the depth that's there. Is that sense of working as a team with.
Quality school leaders and teachers where we say, here's our mission. How do we envision that? How do we make it live for us and for other people? What can we do to be responsible for [00:51:00] the core learning of students and at the same time help them understand that the curriculum is much, much wider than that one of, when I was working on my dissertation, one of the teachers I observed for a semester interviewing her kids early on in.
Every one of them said to me at some point, in our class, we hate our textbook. And the first time I thought, really? And I said, tell me what you mean by that. Well, we don't like it because it doesn't really teach history. It's just a bunch of facts and names and dates and that kind of thing. And that isn't what history's really about.
History's about the lives of people and their accomplishments and what worked and what didn't, and blah blah said it in different ways. But every time I would say to 'em, so what do you do about the fact that you don't like your history book? And I thought they were gonna say, we don't use them. But every one of them said, oh no, we start by reading what's in that textbook because it gives us a common understanding.
And then we go do the real history. Those kids will learn what they need to learn in terms of history [00:52:00] and will remember it as a positive thing for their whole lives. Compared to, I had to memorize all the names, dates, and places in the history book, which by the way, we haven't asked people to do, cuz it's not tested.
And I think we're maybe paying some prices for that in our society as well. But, it's a sense that my job is to help students learn some basic skills, but also to see those things live in the world and to help kids learn how to do things that make them better than they are now. Do you know how to read for meaning?
Do you have a sense of clarity about the goals that you're aiming for? Do you understand why something goes belly up in a group sometime when it's uncomfortable and what you might be able to do to make that happen? Do you have any real good sense how to study? And for me, the answer to all those things when I was a kid was, heck no.
And, the fact that nobody helped me understand any of those things was a significant impediment, and I was way better off than a [00:53:00] lot of kids. So I think it's the, again, it's that principle with a vision. The desire to collaborate with teachers, to model for the teachers what he want, he or she wants the teachers to model for kids, and to keep our eye on who that kid is now and who they might be and try to work with both of those things.
Ross Romano: Yeah, thinking about that, recently I've become interested in the question of what would a longitudinal study look like of, we define, school success and when schools, the grades of schools by, things that are happening now, their standardized test scores, their graduation rates, their et cetera, and, those things, while some of them may not be the, we could, we get a debate about whether or not testing is done the way it should be and things like that.
Some of those things are of course, important and they're part of the job of the school is to get student to the next step. A high school that has a 98% graduation rate and one that has a 58% gradu- yeah. Clearly there's. [00:54:00] Going to be difference in long-term outcomes there overall.
But if we normalized and controlled for those things and said, okay, among schools that have a graduation rate of 85 to 90%, and they have a college enrollment rate of X percent, da, da, da, da, da. And then if we followed those kids 40 years down the road and saw what they were doing, were they successful, were they happy?
What would be the differences? And then what would we trace back to what was happening all the way back here? Right. And to say that there's again, those things, we have to do these, but also there's other stuff and you mentioned the principles. Having that vision, right? And being able to say, okay, there's just a whole spectrum of things out there and there's learning the facts and there's learning the context, and there's learning.
How to create something new with those facts and that information. There's all those different, and, and you can't do one [00:55:00] without the other. If you're trying to create something new with historical knowledge and you don't actually know the facts, then you're just making something up. Right? But if you do each step of it, then you're, really able to leverage what you know.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Yeah, that, John Hattie in his new book talks about, learning how and learning with, and what he is really talking about, there is the learning that those are the facts. I have to learn that this is the progression in, this algebra, operation, the learning how.
Is, what are the skills, what can I do with this? And learning with is using the knowledge and skills to create something new and to transfer and extend things. And he talks all the way through that about the importance of the balance between those three things. And I think maybe that's sort of what you're getting at there, that they're, multiple realities.
And if we only, and he's pretty clear on this, in this new version of his work, that if we're only working with the knowledge that we're on a flat [00:56:00] dead end street, can't get rid of it. But neither can we expect that they will learn the whole universe of it and then go make a universe with it when that's all they've done.
Ross Romano: Right. Um, so Carol, something I often like to ask at the, toward the end of these interviews is, are there a couple of other, you've referenced quite a few often. Are there a couple of other books that, you would recommend to listeners that are good compliments to your book? Or good, ways of extending or supplementing the thinking and ideas?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: I got a lot of folks who work. I really, you know, like in, in different areas. One person that I think is really inspirational to read, and maybe this is because somehow he and I speak the same language, but as a guy, named Ron Berger, b e r g e r, he has been, involved in recent years with Expeditionary Learning Schools, which now kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken is just K F C, they're EL schools.
But he has written a number of things that have been really instructive to me over the years. One of the first books [00:57:00] he wrote that I read, which I really love, is, an Ethic of Excellence. And what he is talking about there really is making this a school, have the focus of, from the very earliest grades, teaching kids what excellence looks like and how you achieve it and how much sweat and turmoil you have to go through to get it.
But a real sense of pride. And when they do things that are these big things they didn't think they could do, they changed forever. They really are not the same people. And he talks about the implications of this town where he was working. Little town in Vermont, I think very small place, but when all the kids get that ethic of excellence so that that's who they become K through 12.
It changes everything. It changes the police department and the emergency room and the grocery store, checker, he's written recently an article called The Power of Beautiful Work. And he's a person who's a great believer in having kids do amazing things that they think they [00:58:00] don't have the capacity to do, and then mentoring them so that they understand the realities of excellence, but they also understand the reality that they can achieve it.
And presenting that to people who are, meaningful audiences to them, not just giving everything to the teacher all the time. And among other things he's written in recent years, with some colleagues, a book called Leaders of Their Own Learning. And it, to me is the best handbook I've read of teachers who say, I believe kids can do amazing things, and I'm gonna learn to teach them how to do it and what that process looks like.
For me, that's a set of things that I go to really often, and find it really useful.
Ross Romano: Perfect. Well, we will put, information about those books down. In the show notes, we also of course will have the link to find, so each may saw from A S C D. And, is there anything else before we wrap up? Anything else you're working on? Any, anything our, listeners should check out?
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Well for A S C D I have just sent back [00:59:00] to the editor. So we're now in the layout stage. QRG, I don't know if, folks are familiar with those, but A S C D does a little publication that they call a QR G or a quick reference guide, which is, little folder looking kind of thing that's laminated and has, I don't know, maybe six or nine pages that fold in.
And it's a survey of a topic. It's laid out really graphically, attractively, and I'm hopefully near the end of doing one on a thing called Teaching Up. Which means teaching kids with the aspiration and the mindset that they can do much more than they think they can and making a reality of that. And I'm sort of on the front porch of, writing a book for Harvard University Press, looking at evolution of differentiation and its potential, to be a game changer, but also the barriers that we face in making that kind of thing happen.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Well listeners, keep an eye out for those. And also, when you check [01:00:00] out the website here to look at this book, you'll see many others. So find whatever suits you. And, please do check those out though. Please also subscribe to the authority right here. For more in-depth author interviews like this one or visit our website, be podcast.network, or be podcast network.com to learn about all of our other shows.
Um, Caroline Tomlinson, thanks so much for being here.
Carol Ann Tomlinson: Thanks for the opportunity to talk to your folks.