On the road training schools in Trust-Based Observations trainings, we periodically see absolute teaching brilliance during our 20-minute observations. It dawned on us that we have an obligation to share this brilliance with all teachers so they can learn and grow from one another. Each episode is an interview with one of these teachers where we explore their strengths as they share their tips and tricks. Tips and tricks that definitely lead to improved teaching and learning.
Jill Stedman
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[00:00:02] Intro: Welcome to 20 minutes of teaching brilliance on the road with Trust Based Observations. Every week while training school leaders, Craig Randall, the developer of Trust Based Observations, witnesses brilliant teaching during their 20 minute observations. Wanting to share that teaching brilliance with others, we talk shop with those teachers, learning what they do that is so impactful. We hope you enjoy.
[00:00:25] Craig Randall: Hi, and welcome to another edition of 20 minutes of teaching brilliance on the road with trust based observations. Today I have with me Jill Stedman. Recently, I was at the Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia, a ridiculously swanky looking school. I felt like I was on a college campus. It was so fancy.
[00:00:44] Craig Randall: Seventh grade global issues class. And I saw what I thought was just brilliant with the way the kids were learning, the way they were thinking critically. And then when we had our reflective conversation afterwards and Jill came armed with, I think, more information on the lesson.
[00:01:01] Craig Randall: I've never had anybody else bring to her, reflect a conversation to show me all her work. I was blown away even more and so, I wanted her to come on the podcast and talk to us because I think there's a lot of really cool things that she's going to be able to share that all of you can learn from, I hope.
[00:01:17] Craig Randall: So, Jill, would you introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to where you're at, what you do, what you're doing now?
[00:01:25] Jill Stedman: Sure. I'm Jill Stedman. I teach seventh grade at the Lovett school. I have been a social studies teacher for about 27 years. I have taught grade seven all the way up through 12th, just depending on the year. And it's my favorite thing I do.
[00:01:45] Craig Randall: Isn't that great when you get to do what you love for a living? listen, I think when we were talking in the reflective conversation that day, and you brought your plans, not just your plan for that day, you brought your whole unit's plan, which I absolutely loved. And so, Anyway, the very first thing that stood out to me was was that you, kind of as a base, correct me if my language is wrong, is use Madeline Hunter's work to kind of guide your unit planning to some degree, and I know it's more than that, and you can jump in on that too, whatever you want along the way.
[00:02:20] Craig Randall: But And because I, when I was writing Trust Based Observations, I wrote her book, which I just told you about before we went on the air, about teacher observations and how cool that was and so anyway let's start about talking about planning and just what you do with it, because I think it's a really key part of how you're building success in.
[00:02:40] Craig Randall: So I'm just going to let you riff, as they say, on planning.
[00:02:44] Jill Stedman: Sure. Well, this the lesson that you observed was one piece of about a five day process, a project on fast fashion. We have been studying East Asia, and I wanted something that would really engage the kids in trying to understand the Chinese economy. And so I started by just collecting a lot of research based articles a lot of news stories, just trying to get myself educated and figure out what I could use for the kids.
[00:03:18] Jill Stedman: But from there, as the ideas began to flow into some sort of structured plan, I always turn to Madeline Hunter to kind of plan things out day by day. One of the things that I really instructional methodology is that, and the day that you saw, I started with a graph on fast fashion. I had the kids analyze that graph and I always, interpret her use of the anticipatory set as a way to help kids connect to prior knowledge.
[00:03:57] Jill Stedman: So it gives them something to look at, to analyze, to go back to their notes, to try to make some connections, but also then to connect in hopefully an interesting way to what we're going to be learning in class that day. I don't necessarily follow The traditional order. Sometimes there's directed instruction that follows.
[00:04:23] Jill Stedman: Sometimes we jump in as we did that day to a group learning activity, and then it might follow that the direct instruction comes after that, or perhaps some independent learning. But I like the idea of. Using her strategies as a method of helping to remember that with my seventh graders, they've got about 15 to 20 minutes of attention span before I need to transition into something else.
[00:04:54] Jill Stedman: And so using
[00:04:56] Craig Randall: on a good day.
[00:04:58] Jill Stedman: that is my kids. They do pretty well, but it just helps to keep me structured and make sure that I'm meeting all of my kids needs.
[00:05:10] Craig Randall: So really, I, there's so many things that I want to unpack out of that. So one, it's like a baseline tool. Just these are key elements that I want to make sure that I'm doing to help my students best learn. And I think if Madeline Hunter was still around and you said you weren't following the order, I think she would go, yeah, exactly.
[00:05:27] Craig Randall: You do what works for you. This is just a guide to help you. So, so I love that. And then I think also even when you're talking about the anticipatory set, I think, you know, call it the hook or whatever other terms you want to use to it. And you're talking about accessing prior knowledge, but I think something else that you do that's really important is you're very purposefully Tapping into the interest of seventh grade boys and girls and their interest in fashion, both boys and girls, because we know exists on that, too.
[00:05:57] Craig Randall: So, and you can call it differentiation. You can call it whatever you want to call it. There's probably all kinds of different things at once, but will you talk a little bit about that?
[00:06:06] Jill Stedman: Sure. So, I mean, you hear about the kids shopping habits. All the time. And I think what you had did not have the opportunity to observe as we started to do a little set up the day prior and did some surveying of the kids just to get them talking and interested. And I had no idea. As we were doing the surveying of the kids.
[00:06:29] Jill Stedman: The girls all buy from Sheehan, the boys buy from Timu, and I wasn't expecting that at all. So that then got into a rich conversation. Okay, well, why do ladies, why do you buy from one boys? Why do you buy from the other? I learned that electronics come from Timu. I had no idea. But we also asked about Adidas and Nike.
[00:06:51] Jill Stedman: And how often do you buy new clothing items? How often do you just. Scarred them. Are you taking them to Goodwill? Are you donating them to siblings? So just to get the conversation going was interesting. And we had done a cartoon analysis activity. Very stylish cartoon lady with her H and M bags and all these other.
[00:07:17] Jill Stedman: name brands, but then there's this sort of landfill scene behind her with the big trucks, like shoveling things around. And I use a lot of Project Zero routines. So we were doing claim support question. What do you think the argument is that this cartoonist is making? What do you see in the cartoon that would serve as support.
[00:07:43] Jill Stedman: What questions do you have? And that was really sort of the setup that then brought us into the next day where we were looking at the graph comparing European clothing online sales, U. S. clothing, online sales to China's. Clothing, online sales, trying to connect back to that textbook information where we have been learning about special economic zones in China versus the parts of China that are still under communist economic philosophy.
[00:08:13] Jill Stedman: So you've got all this heavy stuff that has virtually no interest to kids, but now interject fashion. Now we're interested.
[00:08:22] Craig Randall: It's too bad you don't have any passion for your work, Joe. So let me, so are you purposefully though thinking about what's tapping into their interest, like when you're planning it? You know what I mean?
[00:08:33] Jill Stedman: So actually, the genesis of all of this, we use junior scholastic magazines, and I use them very intentionally. We don't just take out an issue and read it. I comb through them looking for articles that are related to the topics that we are studying. And last year they had this It may be if it was two paragraphs at most blurb on the dumping of Chinese fast fashion in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and we're constantly looking for ways to bridge the different regions of the world, and it was mind blowing to me, but I knew just that what the kids are interested in is Fashion and shoes.
[00:09:20] Jill Stedman: And I it's very natural. So when I saw that to me, it was like an automatic. We had been in the couple of years prior looking at Taiwan and its independence. And there are kids that get into that, but some of them it's not as interesting. And I thought I wanted to try this as a means of really pulling the kids in.
[00:09:43] Jill Stedman: So, you know, It was intentional. But playing junior scholastic, it's at the root of everything.
[00:09:50] Craig Randall: Hey, and it's a tool that fits for the kids in their developmental stages too, right? So that's really cool. So as you're doing all this, I mean, I think there might be teachers out there that are going, holy hell, that's a lot of planning that's going on because there's time, effort, research, all these things that you're putting into this ahead of time.
[00:10:10] Craig Randall: And so do you want to just. going to that a little bit because I don't want to, I don't want to scare people off yet. I want to The kids were learning so much on such a deep level and we'll get, hopefully we'll get that little aha moment we saw with that group of girls in the front later on but that doesn't happen without all of this time and effort and thinking about them and blending it all together.
[00:10:34] Craig Randall: Yet, I don't want to scare people off that are listening from, so I'm just going to let you go.
[00:10:40] Jill Stedman: I'm probably the wrong person to speak to about that. I, my husband would tell you that I get an incredible amount of joy from my lesson planning. So I would say first and foremost, to create a lesson like this, it does take time. The benefit, because I,
[00:10:58] Craig Randall: even. Yeah.
[00:11:00] Jill Stedman: I approach all of my lessons in this way.
[00:11:03] Jill Stedman: But the thing is that you're creating a foundation where every year then you can look back at individual lessons and say, Okay, do we want to tweak this? Do we want to update it? Do we want to scrap it for something entirely new? But you're basic foundation is there. So to me it's worth the time and the effort.
[00:11:29] Jill Stedman: And as crazy as this sounds, this, we had snow here in Atlanta, and this is how I spent Martin Luther King jr. Day. I sat down and in eight hours I created this lesson. It's kind of one of the, it's just my craziness, but. It's worth it. The time in the effort because one, the kids are engaged. They're interested.
[00:11:51] Jill Stedman: They can tell you precisely what they learned from it. It was meaningful to them. And it set sort of a template for how I can aid. The two teachers I work with, so I plan for a team of teachers that they can then execute this for their kids as well, so it's worthwhile. Anything that's worth doing well is going to take time, but you get the benefit in subsequent years.
[00:12:22] Craig Randall: So I'm hearing you say that one, there's tweaking that goes on every year and you might be like, well, perhaps whatever the topical thing is how we're going to make that work for this year or whatever. And. Really, it's that early on when I'm first creating that unit is that's when the efforts going to have to happen the majority of it.
[00:12:41] Craig Randall: And yeah, it does take time, but it also pays off because the kids are, they're more engaged. They're learning on that deeper level that we want to have them learn. And you've got that interest pulled into it too. And I know I talked about this a fair amount on the podcast, but sometimes people don't understand that even if I want to work life balance, putting in this time is actually going to create better wellness in my life, even if it's taking up some of my personal time and
[00:13:11] Jill Stedman: There's a joy that comes from executing a lesson that engages your students that is irreplaceable.
[00:13:21] Craig Randall: That is what I've been looking for all this time, is hearing somebody say that. On the back end, when I see that, yes, happened, right? And so, let's get to that yes. So, there was a group of girls, a chatty group of girls, that I know you strategically placed them together because they would work well and could counterbalance each other.
[00:13:43] Craig Randall: And, because I think we talked about that a little bit. And so there was that aha moment with those girls. So let's talk about that. Oney, I'm just gonna let you go with that because that's the joy. That's the moment. I'm digging now. I'm going to preface it with one more thing before we do that though, because when I was in there and watching every single thing you're doing, it's not about facts.
[00:14:03] Craig Randall: I mean, there's some base knowledge, of course, but it's about that critical thinking, it's about that problem solving, it's about awareness of things outside of their schema on a level that they hadn't, and when it all came together really for that group of girls, and I'm not just saying them, I think everyone in the class too, but will you go ahead and talk about that?
[00:14:22] Craig Randall: And
[00:14:24] Jill Stedman: So what I had the kids do was actually a pre reading activity. I had a set ultimately of Six news articles that the students were going to read about fast fashion. Some of them were, if you looked at them in their original form, the imagery was incredibly rich in terms of looking at working conditions in some of the factories in China where The conditions under which the Uyghurs are working pictures of the Atacama desert, but the articles themselves were written at too high a level for the kids to read.
[00:15:00] Jill Stedman: And so I did have to adapt them down so that when it came time for the students to read them, they would be readable. But I didn't want the students to miss out on the imagery because it's. And so really as a setup to get them interested in the factual content we would be learning in groups, each of the kids took one of the articles and looked over the images.
[00:15:29] Jill Stedman: We were using essentially a see, think, wonder activity where they looked at an image, write down what do you see in some level of detail, and what do you think? about what you see. So, some of the girls were commenting on, they saw barbed wire around the factories. They saw the mounds of clothing in the desert.
[00:15:52] Jill Stedman: The group you were talking about, I think it was Wells who had the aha moment. She saw the menu that is written in Arabic and she couldn't figure out why there was an Arabic menu in China. It made no sense to her, but we've studied Southwest Asia and so they know a little bit about Islam.
[00:16:14] Jill Stedman: And so you could kind of see, right, things are starting to click. This doesn't make sense, but it was intriguing. And so, The goal was really a set up to get them interested so that they would then want to go back and read the adapted versions of the articles from which they would draw a lot of the data and the factual information.
[00:16:37] Craig Randall: taking that just a little bit further, that was really, it was about the Uyghurs, right? And basically their slave labor. And so I thought the aha, if I remember, was even like that realization of what, wait, what? And that just it opened up that whole group's eyes to this, like to an injustice that they were unaware of before.
[00:16:56] Craig Randall: And they were saying, I'm not buying, you know,
[00:17:00] Jill Stedman: Wells was quite adamant. She's not buying from Sheehan ever again. Yes.
[00:17:05] Craig Randall: Exactly.
[00:17:06] Jill Stedman: Objective achieved and we hadn't even read yet. Just
[00:17:09] Craig Randall: No but, right, but look, but when we're talking about that, going back to the planning piece, right, you put in all that effort and she wasn't the only one. We're just,
[00:17:18] Jill Stedman: not at all.
[00:17:19] Craig Randall: she was maybe the loudest one. And so, not in a bad way. And so, but that effort there then comes back on the back end.
[00:17:27] Craig Randall: Because now, what do we, that's, now it's a critical thinker in a way that she wasn't before. I mean, I'm not being, saying she wasn't, but you're following my train of thought. So, let's dig a little bit more than maybe into when the kids were working in their teams on this work. You were obviously circulating around and checking for understanding, formative assessment, whatever you want to call it, as they're going on.
[00:17:49] Craig Randall: But I think one of the other things that really stood out to me was like, because they were fascinated and you could see the wheels are spinning and there were disconnects and they were trying to make sense of it all, which is a tribute to your planning too, because that got them thinking about it and the visual nature, all of that together.
[00:18:04] Craig Randall: But then. Every time a kid came to you with something, or you went to them with something, you immediately use, and with descriptive progress feedback, I'm big on, you know, we can give them the answers, and we can give them information, little tips, hints, instructions again, and those have value. But whenever we can use coaching questions to get it back to them, and they figure it out on their own, it's just so much more powerful, and Every single question you asked was like that what do you see?
[00:18:33] Craig Randall: What do you think? What do you and do you want to just talk about that? Because I think it's important.
[00:18:38] Jill Stedman: So I think a lot of that comes from having done the course out of Harvard on project zero, where so many of the routines are grounded in what do you see, what evidence can you find either in the imagery or in the text, if we're looking at text, it might be find the sentence that you think best articulates the main idea.
[00:19:07] Jill Stedman: If you could just find one sentence or what is the one detail that stands out to you the most that is the most engaging or the most provocative. So it's really trying to turn kids Into finding the evidence themselves and helping them to realize. I mean, certainly if we're talking like definitions right there, right or wrong answers, but largely, especially in a history classroom, there are not necessarily right or wrong answers.
[00:19:38] Jill Stedman: It's perspective. And can you figure out what your perspective is and then defend it in a way of Okay. I can provide you with evidence to back up why I believe what I believe. And that's our starting point.
[00:19:57] Craig Randall: yes, but it's more than that because You're pushing them, look,
[00:20:02] Jill Stedman: them to think. I
[00:20:03] Craig Randall: you are, but look, I'm on the road and I see more teachers through the lens of observation than any human being, I'm pretty confident of that, and I mean that, and because that's my work, right? And so, look I'll see coaching, and I'll see good use of coaching, but, your purposeful use of questions to get it back to them.
[00:20:20] Craig Randall: You're not just explaining it to them. You're actually purposely not explaining it to them for the most part, unless just you can tell it has to be there. Your It feels to me like you're using questions to no, you think about it. What? Like it's, there's a relentlessness to what you're doing.
[00:20:37] Craig Randall: And I mean that in the highest praise way through the use of questions to get it back to them.
[00:20:43] Jill Stedman: wanted them to draw as many conclusions as they could. Based upon what they saw, one, because I wanted them to think about it. I think that the images are just so powerful in many ways they speak for themselves. But beyond that, I knew that the readings that they were going to do would have some rather shocking, but also very data driven facts, and you're not ready to receive that level of detailed information.
[00:21:22] Jill Stedman: If You don't have meaning made in your head, a curiosity, if you will, that opens you to receiving that information. And so I needed for them to generate their own questions and to be invested in what we were doing so that they could then be receptive to the hard facts that I needed to give to them.
[00:21:52] Craig Randall: So if I'm hearing you, right, what I think I'm hearing you say is that I know the only way they're really going to get all the way there on that discovery. And then the ability to back it up is if every time they come at me, It's coming at you, but you understand my, my, my intent here. I hope is that, you know, the only way that's going to happen is if they figure it out on their own and the only way they figure it out as their own is when you put it right back on them with a question and you're, and you're really specific in terms of the way what do you see?
[00:22:24] Craig Randall: What do you notice? What do you like?
[00:22:27] Jill Stedman: You're building their investment. You know, they had the kids do a survey not too long ago about their levels of investment in their learning. And they were talking about how for many kids, they often feel like they're just doing school. They show up, they do the right thing because they know it's what is expected of them, but they don't necessarily feel ownership or engagement.
[00:22:52] Jill Stedman: I really wanted the kids to take ownership of the topic and to have a desire to dig deeper and to be motivated to draw conclusions and do something with that information. And so if I simply tell them Then they're just these receptacles for information, but it just kind of bounces off the wall. It doesn't get deep into their minds and,
[00:23:24] Craig Randall: It's not ownership. It's not ownership. Like you said, it's telling and so you're saying
[00:23:30] Jill Stedman: I was intentionally not telling.
[00:23:32] Craig Randall: right you're intense You're intentionally because you're saying it's telling versus ownership because you're talking about building investment If I tell I'm not building investment if I can question Then there's ownership on their end because they're making the discovery.
[00:23:47] Jill Stedman: And so then you To coin that phrase that you just said, you're building invest, they're building investment because you've made them do it and only, that's only going to happen through coaching, through questions. So, We talked about project zero. We talked a little bit about, scaffolding. anything that you want to dig into at any of that stuff, anything that you want to share additionally, because I'm just learning, loving hearing you go.Well, I think the really fun part of this, actually, you did not have the opportunity of, to observe, was the next. stage. So we used a project zero routine called generate, sort, connect, and elaborate. Essentially just a super fancy concept chart. But once the kids had read through the adapted versions of their articles, they took very specific pulled extracted specific details out of their articles again on post it notes.
[00:24:41] Jill Stedman: And then they had to sort them and categorize them on their big concept chart. And then as they read over each other's post it notes to start drawing connections. How do I see this connected to that? It makes me think of when we saw this graph, it supports that. Or we watched this video and I see this connection.
[00:25:04] Jill Stedman: So that's when you really start to see All the different little elements that we had been pulling together over three days come together and then they made videos explaining what they had learned and how they wanted it, how they thought it would influence their learning, would influence their future behavior, how they hoped it would. influence others. And so I think when you see kids really be able to take information from so many different sources and synthesize them into so that they've created their own learning their own understanding and now they can teach somebody else. That's fabulous.
[00:25:49] Craig Randall: And which are, and we were talking before about how the latest Blooms doesn't have synthesized anymore, but are, we keep the one that does for our form. But, so what did you just say, the last two things? You said they synthesize and then they create their own work, right? Those are the two highest levels on that, and you build and build to that.
[00:26:06] Craig Randall: And so everything you've done along the way is then creating the energy, so then that real Deep learning happens. And look, we like more and more. I'm just saying, we're not preparing kids for the real world enough, you know, with too much facts based stuff, but like what you're doing right there. And I know there's seventh graders, but I don't care.
[00:26:25] Craig Randall: They're there. You're teaching them and they're learning all the things that are going to make them successful out in the work world, right? That are going to be successful human beings. And that's purposeful.
[00:26:39] Jill Stedman: If I could just interject one thing, I think and people kind of look at me strangely when I say this, but yes, they are seventh graders, but seventh graders, all levels of students can will live up to your expectations, set high expectations, give them appropriately leveled tools. I can't expect them to read ninth, 10th grade material, right, but I can take that level of material.
[00:27:06] Jill Stedman: I can adapt it down. And I will admit I used AI to do my adaptations, but it did a really nice job and the kids can work with that material and they are capable, highly capable of doing complex, critical thinking. If you give them the appropriately leveled materials, you give them really clear directions.
[00:27:31] Jill Stedman: You provide them with the support. They can do hard things. And they need to be encouraged to do hard things because the world is complex.
[00:27:39] Craig Randall: It is and they're invested in anyway, so they enjoy more so it's better for you and for them chill I Think there's going to be people that are listening today. They're gonna Want to learn more. They might want to steal your unit. I don't know. But I think you've talked about so many, which have so many so many interesting, so many impactful things we've talked about today.
[00:28:03] Craig Randall: So would you be willing to share your work contact information? So if anybody wanted to reach out, they could.
[00:28:08] Jill Stedman: Sure. I can be reached at jill. stedman at loveit. org.
[00:28:16] Craig Randall: Steadman is S-T-E-D-M-M-A-N. Jill do Steadman at Lovet. Will you spell Lovet?
[00:28:22] Jill Stedman: L O V E T T.
[00:28:25] Craig Randall: So Jill, do steadman@lovet.org. Thank you so much, Jill. It has been an absolute pleasure nerding out with you over over teaching for the last 30 minutes. I was looking so forward to this after you brought all that stuff into the reflective conversation. So thanks so much for joining us today. I'm really grateful.
[00:28:43] Jill Stedman: for having me.
[00:28:46] Outro: Thank you for listening to 20 Minutes of Teaching Brilliance. If the show resonated with you, you can help other teachers by liking, sharing, and subscribing. More importantly, if you don't like the way you're being evaluated, don't like being nitpicked and scored, then check out Trust Based Observations at TrustBased.com, where we know the path to growth is through safe spaces for risk taking. Tell your principal about it, and change your school's observations to a model of trust and support, and join the thousands of teachers who now experience the joy of observations the way they're meant to be done.