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Class-Act Coaching: A Podcast for Teachers and Instructional Coaches
Join us each week as a different SREB instructional coach walks our host through different teaching concerns in the world of K12. Teachers will gain valuable teaching insights and instructional coaches will see a model coaching session.
Class-Act Coaching: A Podcast for Teachers and Instructional Coaches
From Planning to Collaborating: A Semester of Learning
In this special end-of-semester wrap-up, Ashley and Dan reflect on the four major themes explored in this semester's podcast episodes: Planning, Creating Authentic Work Experiences, Collaborating, and Building Connections with Students. They share key insights from their conversations with instructional coaches, highlight strategies that resonated, and discuss practical applications for teachers and coaches alike.
Ashley reflects on what she's learned as a teacher, while Dan connects those lessons to coaching strategies that help teachers succeed. Whether you're a teacher looking to enhance your practice or a coach seeking ways to support your colleagues, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways.
Key Topics Covered:
- The power of intentional planning in saving time and improving teaching outcomes.
- Why authentic learning experiences engage students and how to incorporate them into your classroom.
- The role of collaboration in fostering deeper learning and teamwork skills.
- Strategies for building meaningful connections with students to improve engagement and achievement.
Resources Mentioned:
Quotable Moments:
- "Your schedule represents your values." — Daniel Rock
- "The person doing the talking is doing the learning." — Ashley Shaw
- "If you want students to do what you want them to do, you have to make those connections." — Ashley Shaw
Don’t Miss:
- Ashley's creative teaching tip: Wikipedia Roulette—a game to help students develop critical thinking and research skills.
- Dan’s advice for coaches: How to effectively support teachers in collaboration and planning.
Enjoy your break and get ready for more exciting episodes in 2025! 🎉
The Southern Regional Education Board is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with states and schools to improve education at every level, from early childhood through doctoral education and the workforce.
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Hello and welcome to our special end of the semester wrap up edition of the Class App Coaching Podcast. I am Ashley Shaw and I am here with my co-host, Daniel Rock. Hi, Dan.
Speaker 2:Hey Ashley, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1:I am pretty good. It's the end of the semester. We're about to go on a long break. It's nice to be able to relax. How about you?
Speaker 2:Man, I know every teacher out there is just ready to put this semester to bed and refresh and get ready to get back out there. So I'm feeling all of my teacher friends who are just you know I'm not going to say limping to the end zone here, but you know, maybe pushing themselves to end strong. So I feel everybody out there with that.
Speaker 1:Well, to end this semester strong, as you said, and to help already get us thinking about next semester because I know that's what we all want to do is immediately start thinking about next semester I thought what we could do today is kind of talk a little bit about what we've learned Together. We have pulled four different themes that we saw across all the episodes we did this semester and we're going to talk a little bit about them from what I learned from the coaches as a teacher that all our teachers out there also hopefully got from these, and then Dan's going to talk a little bit about what the coaches can take away from those themes. That right, that's right.
Speaker 2:I've tried to pull coaching strategies from what our friends have shared, but also brought in some of the things that I know would be effective for a coach working with teachers on these big ideas and themes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great because you get to talk about what all our SREB coaches do and do well, but we don't often get to see all the great things you do as a coach, so I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to add to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm looking forward to sharing.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm going to get us started with our first theme. One thing I noticed as I was listening back through all the episodes is how much planning was emphasized. I mean, we obviously Debbie Robertson had a whole episode on planning and it was great, but that wasn't all it was. It wasn't just planning the lesson. That's sometimes what I think of as planning. It's like, of course, you plan the lesson, but you don't have to plan every aspect of the class. Except for what I learned this semester is the things that I was struggling with. It'd be do better if I actually put some planning in it. And so I noticed that pretty much every one of our coaches that came in, no matter what they were talking about, were like oh, you'll have to plan for this or you should put some planning in this. Jason Adair came in and he talked about asking great questions and he said in there, if you want to ask great questions, you actually have to sit down and plan it ahead, actually have to sit down and plan it ahead I always think about with teaching.
Speaker 3:When I was a teacher, I was throwing myself under the bus. I was doing the best job, I knew how, but I would say a majority of the questions I asked in the classroom were off the cuff. I hadn't planned them. I didn't plan my questions very often Now, whenever I'm teaching a lesson or if I'm coaching a teacher in the planning process, we always strategically plan our questions teacher in the planning process.
Speaker 1:We always strategically plan our questions. Then we had Don Kirkwood came in and talked about note-taking. I always knew my students weren't great note-takers, but I never thought about the fact that I needed to plan on things they could do to take better notes. So that was really fascinating to me. We had that with class discussions. Keisha King said hey, you actually have to plan.
Speaker 4:So to get them talking, what that takes is you planning up front, like anticipating this. Whatever my problem is, I'm going to work that out myself and anticipate the student solutions and misconceptions they may have.
Speaker 1:Even things like Rod Leonard talking about connecting with the students. Connecting, making connections with people seems like such a natural human thing. You don't have to plan for it, it just happens. You just talk to somebody and you make a connection or you don't make a connection, but the thing is with your students. You actually need to plan it because you're not going to connect with every student students. You actually need to plan it because you're not going to connect with every student and you actually have to think about ways to make connections where maybe connections aren't easy to make. So anyway, just some things I noticed from listening back through our episodes what about you?
Speaker 2:well, as I listened to the episodes, I really was taken by how people are intentional about what they're going to do, and you talk about planning right, and if you plan well, then everything you do has a clear purpose.
Speaker 2:One of the aspects of planning that our teachers are going to say is hard is time, and as a coach, one of your jobs is to be a manipulator of time. You've got this schedule of classes and you've got, you know, teachers assigned to certain times and kids assigned to certain times, and we sometimes let that schedule drive our life and make the decisions for us, and then what happens is learning becomes a variable based on time and planning. You know I'll plan a little here and a little there, and that changes because of the time that's set in stone by our schedule and in some level, that you know has to be that way. Great coaches are those that make time a variable, who are able to build time in to the schedule or to the semester or the month, to actually do real planning with teachers and ensure that their planning time is productive and ensure that their planning time is productive, yeah, and that to me that's something.
Speaker 1:I'm really glad you said that, because that's something that I was thinking of as I was listening to these episodes, because I do that a lot, where I say I'm not going to plan the questions out and the note-taking process out and the conversation out, I don't have time to plan for that. I plan to let them know. That's good enough. But I was realizing all the things that I wasn't doing well in my class. I would have saved myself time if I'd planned that out. If I did some pre-planning it would have saved me in the long run because I think I wouldn't have had to go back and repeat myself so much. I would have had more time to do actual different lessons and get through things, because hopefully the students would be getting it more. So, yeah, if coaches can help us figure out how to do that, because I do think it would save time in the long run. But still taking that initial time to plan it out to get to that point seems like a lot of work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, it can be. I would also add that step one is finding the time, and that's about building a schedule for you and your teachers that prioritizes planning and collaboration with you and your teachers. One person once said your schedule represents your values. So if your schedule is designed so that the teachers don't have time to collaborate, to plan, to work with a coach, then that just tells you what you value as a leader, and so that's something that you can talk with leadership about. And then the question becomes well, okay, now let's say we built time for planning. We've heard a lot of great ideas, all those things you described. I want to just add something that Debbie Robertson probably she talked about and she and I have worked on, which is unit planning. So you were saying how it's less if I plan up front. Well, it's less work in delivery. It actually saves you time when you're teaching because everything's ready. Yes.
Speaker 2:And that's what great unit planning is, and so I just want to briefly share. I know people are probably listening, but we're going to share these resources, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll put them in the show notes so you can click on a link here. What I'm showing you here is a concept map that teachers use to lay out their units. We'll put this PDF in the podcast link At the top is what I really want to look at, which is big ideas. When teachers start with their big ideas, what do you want your students to know a year from now, three years from now, what are the most essential concepts? And then you build learning experiences and learning targets and assignments from that. Then you're able to be very intentional about what you're teaching.
Speaker 2:So one thing I just encourage our listeners and coaches to think about with your teachers is finding a strong unit planning model. Many of your curriculums have unit plans and maybe that's what the teachers are teaching. Then that time spent walking through the curriculum and deciding which of these assignments, instructional strategies, informative assessments we want to use and which we don't want to use because they don't get to the core ideas and big topics we want to talk about. So that's just something when you think about intentional planning and you listen to these podcasts, thinking about how we can build units around that. So let's go to our second theme. Our first theme was intentional planning. Our next theme is something that's, I think, just as critical, which is understanding your students, understanding who they are, academically, emotionally, behaviorally. So, ashley, can you tell us a little bit about what you learned about knowing your students from our coaches at SRIB this semester?
Speaker 1:I got was how important it is to connect with my students and to understand them in order to build relationships with them, because then they're going to be better learners because of it, and just thinking of the fact that each student learns in their own way, they have their own personalities, they have their own academic, emotional and behavioral needs, I thought it's something that I think, if you ask anybody, hey, are your students different?
Speaker 1:They're going to say yes, it's something everybody technically knows, but I don't think we always at least for me as a teacher think about how important it is to actually build that into our planning, to actually think about it and make a point to think of those things. And so, as I was listening back through the episodes, there were some episodes that were really obvious that I was going to talk about. Shelly Gibson had a whole episode on encouraging our students and she talked about the importance of connecting with them and make those connections so that your students will feel more empowered, and Rod Leonard had a full episode where he talked about how to connect with students.
Speaker 2:I know we teach standards and we we harpo growth and mastery.
Speaker 4:But none of that. None of those things occur without a significant relationship with students.
Speaker 1:Those were pretty obvious that that's what it's going to talk about. But I saw that theme popping up in other episodes as well that maybe I wouldn't have thought about it so much.
Speaker 5:So, for example, in Erin's episode she talked about how to engage your students about how to engage your students, and one thing that's really interesting is that student engagement really has three parts that sometimes we overlook. Student engagement is cognitive. It's about the thinking right Student learning. We have our lesson plans and our standards that we're teaching students, but we have to engage them cognitively. The second part is behaviorally right, and we think about how they behave in the class, but also in that lesson planning, what are we wanting them to do with the tasks that we give them? The third part, and this almost all the time we forget Students feel certain ways about what they're learning and what they're being asked to do and sometimes, ashley, the key to student engagement is really engaging kids in those three spaces. What are you thinking, what are you doing and how do you feel?
Speaker 1:You can't just think of them as academic things in your class. They're people and they have emotional and behavioral needs as well.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, they're what.
Speaker 1:Things. I said things, robots, whatever. They're not robots, they're people. Okay, hold on, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Let me write this down.
Speaker 1:The students are people. The students are not robots, they're people. That's the quote.
Speaker 2:I have to remember that, because I may not think they're robots Sometimes. I think there's something else that I wouldn't say.
Speaker 1:It is sometimes very hard to remember them as like wait teenagers and middle school kids and elementary students.
Speaker 2:They are humans, still they don't always act like they're humans, but they're a special type of human. They're a human in development, right Exactly.
Speaker 1:They're not baked, but they do have these emotional and behavioral needs that affect the way that they are picking up the information and how engaged they are with it. And if you don't think about those things, it doesn't matter that you planned your lesson's not going to go that well. So that's something I got as I listened back to these episodes.
Speaker 2:It's interesting what you're talking about. I think something that a coach can do to help their teachers is really take on that data coach hat and think about what are ways that I can collect data for my teachers. Or show my teachers how to collect data on academic for my teachers, or show my teachers how to collect data on academic, behavioral and different types of, even emotional selves or states. So you know, obviously most of our schools have diagnostic and formative assessments built in, whether it's district assessments or computer assessments that are out there and I've seen so many teachers do these assessments, get the data and say, wow, my kids are low. And then they're like bam, it's a lot of work for me. And then they get back in it and teach what they were going to teach anyway. So, as a coach, helping them understand the students' needs with that data and helping them categorize what type of instruction will be appropriate for those different levels and making sure that those are present in variety different aspects of the lessons so not just collecting the data, academics, but that response to the data is the part that I think teachers could use a lot of help with. Yes, I agree, I also think behavioral-wise, emotional-wise, there is a lot of work we can do to listen to students more.
Speaker 2:There's something that we do at SREB we are part of different improvement networks, using improvement science, and part of improvement science is about knowing the pain points and of the people you are trying to serve and really understanding that. We do what's called empathy interviews, where you really look at the student or the teacher, the person who's experiencing the problem. In this case, I would say it's the student who's experiencing the problem of not learning, of being bullied, of feeling uncomfortable and talking to them and trying to understand the user experience. Right, Do we really listen to students about what the user experience of being in school is like and really try to get that information from them? I don't know that we do that a lot. Them, um, I don't know that we do that a lot. So that is one thing that I recommend and that they recommended a lot.
Speaker 1:It was just finding different ways just just to get their voice heard and get let them feel like what they think matters and and actually it can matter sometimes yeah and I want to add to kind of what you said, something that that, again, as I was listening to these episodes, I heard you saying quite a few times as to what works for coaches. This theme is understanding student needs, but I think we could easily say understanding teacher needs as well, and I know that's something that you talked about in a couple of episodes was the idea of the coaches can't just come into the classroom and say, okay, teacher, here's what you're going to do.
Speaker 1:Just like the teacher needs to connect with the students, the coach should work to connect a little bit with the teachers is that correct?
Speaker 2:yeah, and, and so you're modeling. First of all, it's effective and second, you're modeling how teachers can approach students by listening, by understanding where they are, what their goals are, what they want and obviously having a clear expectation of what quality instruction looks like at our school, but molding how you support them based on what they say they need and what their interests are them based on what they say they need and what their interests are.
Speaker 1:And in the same way I just said, the coach should be doing that for the teacher. I think that model works for the teachers as well, because I know I can think of it that way. If somebody came into my classroom and just started telling me, ok, this is what you need to do, this, this, this, this, this, I'm going to get frustrated. I would be like OK, I know what I'm doing. Like who are you? But if I have somebody, come in and build that relationship and explain to me this is why we're doing this, this is why it works, I'm going to be much more willing to try those things because I know that they have my best interest in mind.
Speaker 1:And I think that's the same thing when I do that in my classroom. If I come in and I'm like okay, when you write your essay, you need to do this, this and this. And they're like why I want to do it my way. But if I can show them that I actually care about making them better and do those connections with them and understand their needs and work with them, I'm like, okay, I'm not just telling you what to do because I want to be your boss. I have like a power trip and I just want to boss you around. I'm doing it because these things are actually going to work and make it improve you and make you better, and they're going to be more willing to do the work. So I think it goes both ways.
Speaker 2:It does. You know, just what you said really sparked something in my mind, because when a coach or a principal or a fellow teacher says to me, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this, based on being in my classroom, all I'm hearing is you suck, you suck what you're doing is wrong.
Speaker 2:What you're doing is wrong. You should quit. You're in the wrong profession. All your life choices were mistakes. Discussion all your life choices were mistakes. Whereas if they ask me what do you want to learn? What do you feel your strengths are? How can we build on? Ooh yeah, you're really good at that. I've noticed you're really good at that. Maybe you could show other people how to do that. And then I wonder how we could use that to maybe even push a little bit more this other area that you would like to work on. You know, but use that strength in order to help with areas that I say I know I can probably, you know, do a better job at.
Speaker 1:I agree. I think that's really great.
Speaker 2:To help with students and teacher relationships. One tool is thinking about how can I collect feedback intentionally about how the students are responding to my lesson knowledge. But the best feedback a teacher can get is not from their administration, of their peers, but from their kids in an honest but kind and productive way. And Jim Knight recommends, you know, metacognitive questions at the end of lessons. You know questions like what part of today's lesson did you enjoy the most and why was there anything today that made you feel confused or frustrated? What could help you understand it better? So we're helping the kids be metacognitive, we're honoring their thoughts, feelings and experience of the lesson and we're getting feedback.
Speaker 2:Um, and then there's another I I just have some Likert scale questions here. So at the end of your lesson for the closing, instead of you know, a three question quiz or a, I think I wonder I'm confused by, but really having some better reflective questions, and I think we're going to talk later about group work and collaboration. You know you can have questions like I felt supported by my classmates during group work Strongly agree, agree, you know, neutral, disagree, yada, yada. I had the opportunity to share my ideas and listen to others during group work. So by giving students voice in the learning experience, you can increase your connection to the students and your students' ownership of the learning and build a community of learners, and this is a tool to help.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you for the tool. I think what we're hearing here is, if you want people to do what you want them to do, you have to make those connections and help them see why they're doing it and help them reach their goals and not just order them around. That kind of leads us, I think, into our next point, because the idea of helping them see why they're doing something instead of just telling them to do it, and helping them feel like what they're doing is what they want to be doing. It goes to connecting with students, but it also goes to this next theme of creating authentic learning experiences.
Speaker 1:So, as we just mentioned, everybody wants to feel like what they're doing is not just busy work, it's not just something that somebody's telling them to do so they have to do it. People want to understand why they're doing it, and the more we, as teachers, can connect the things that we're learning to to authentic real world experiences whether it's work or whether it's something they do outside of class doesn't matter what it is. I don't think, as long as they can see those connections, it's not just because I told you to, it's because it actually helps them in some. Somebody once told me, never call, never say real world situations, because isn't classroom the real world? It's not like you step in the fake world when you walk in the classroom, right?
Speaker 2:we're not.
Speaker 1:We're not living in a simulation exactly, but authentic outside of the classroom experiences. It'll help them want to do the work more. I'm not going to say students are going to want to do the work, but be more willing to do the work.
Speaker 2:It's like, let's say, you've got 30 kids in your classroom. Nothing you do is going to get all 30 kids riled and ready to go 100%. I love this. I mean I could be wrong. There could be some teachers out there who do that. I want to meet them. Most of the time you're working percentages right. So the question is what practices are going to increase the percentage of students who are inherently motivated to do the learning that we want them to do? And what you're saying is you heard teachers say our coaches say real I might say real world authentic experiences, right, experiences that match what they're going to do in the work world or in their adult post-school world.
Speaker 1:Right, we had quite a few of those, leslie E. Obviously she did a whole one on creating authentic work experiences in the classroom. So clearly she saw the need for that and the idea of coming up with these plans to show students, like she had the idea of bringing in outside partners to kind of say this is how I am a baker and this is how I use what you're learning in my bakery every day, so they can kind of see those.
Speaker 6:So when it's possible. Community partners are a way that we can put the bow on a learning experience and I want to be very clear. I do not think that everything has to involve an outside person coming in. However, when you do students perk up, it is. It used to drive me crazy. As an engineer, I knew what my kids needed to do. An engineer, I knew what my kids needed to do, needed to study, but I was teacher, I was Mrs Eves, I wasn't engineer, mrs Eves. When I would bring in an engineer to work with the students, talk to the students, share their experience with the students, the students perked up. They listened more to that expert coming in because it was something different, it was something novel, they could you know it. Just it rang truer for them, it rang more authentic because it was somebody coming in from the outside community.
Speaker 1:And then we had Marty Shedier came in and he talked about a common teacher thing that probably every teacher listening right now is used. He talked about think common teacher thing that probably every teacher listening right now has used. He talked about think, pair, share, but he changed it to be a simulated workplace environment. So it wasn't just the same old, same old that they do every day, like, ok, now I have to do this thing where my teachers may have me talk to the person sitting next to me about this topic I don't care about. He helped them to see how they would be doing those exact same things in a workplace, no matter what they ended up working in.
Speaker 7:Regardless of whatever I was doing in the Navy with math and science, which were my strengths and my degree was in I had to write. I was listening, I was communicating, I was, you know, technical drawings and following procedures and reviewing safety.
Speaker 1:So I felt that bringing that into the classroom might leverage students into maybe taking a harder look at the math vocabulary, and one of the things she talked about was if you want students to get the words and you want them to be able to understand the words and use them more than just a memorization tool for the test, then show them the real world context, show how those words connect to things that they know and understand already.
Speaker 2:You know the age old question of why are we doing this? Right, we're using quadratic equations and polynomials, or analyzing a poem Like when am I going to have to analyze Robert Frost's walking, you know, in a woods, walking in the snow.
Speaker 1:I forget what the name of the poem is I do that every day, that's like my whole job. Yes, robert Frost.
Speaker 2:Every day you are Robert Frost, my family. Every night, before we eat dinner, we take out a Frost poem and read through it and do a full explication. And when I interviewed for my job at SREB, they asked me to explicate an Emily Dickinson poem. No, they did not. So the question as a teacher is like why am I doing this Right? Is it because I just was told to do it? Is it because it's in my curriculum and it's the only reason? These are almost obstacles sometimes. The curriculum it doesn't always connect to the big picture of how this skill is applicable in life.
Speaker 2:So as a teacher, you might want to actually connect to some of my CTE teachers and think about with them what academic skills are needed in your engineering class. How do students do math in your repair class? In your nursing right, they obviously use science, but they also have to write certain reports and there's a certain technical writing involved. As a coach of teachers or a leader facilitating conversations among sort of your career tech aligned teachers if you're in high school, or we call them specials or electives, maybe in middle school and looking at how we can infuse academics into CTE classes and how we can infuse CTE sometimes and some of those experiences into the other classes.
Speaker 2:One thing that I want to share is the Association for Career and Technical Education has recommendations for middle school for all students, not just career tech students, and there's six of them, but I want to share three very briefly because I think they get to what our coaches were saying is important. One thing they say is to incorporate career-related project-based learning in classrooms. So if I'm an English teacher, how can I have students do a project that has them connect with something that a English major would do? You know whether that's journalism, being a writer, being a novelist, being a lot of English majors become lawyers, something that requires extensive reading and writing in a career and projects that are like that in a career and projects that are like that.
Speaker 2:Another recommendation they have which I think is important and gets to this idea of incorporating authentic learning is employability skills. Like that's something that teachers should know about. Right, what are the skills that employers say they need? And if a student graduates from your high school or leaves your middle school, can you say with confidence that you have systematically and purposefully built those skills into your curriculum across every classroom?
Speaker 1:My master's thesis was on how to teach the soft skills employees actually want. There you go In an English class.
Speaker 2:In an English class, so they should call you is what I'm hearing. If they want to learn more about this, or just, you can just send them your thesis and that'll solve most of their problems. Can you give us a big, just one juicy recommendation from that, from that, you're on the spot here.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's see. Well, it's easy for english teachers, I think, on this one, because a lot of the soft skills that employers want are like communication, verbal and written uh, teamwork. It's things that you're already doing in your classes anyway, so it's kind of a cheat a little bit, but one of the things that I talked about was just helping them see connections. So basically, the way I did this is I watched a bunch of students do research projects and this protocol thing that they did where they knew they were being watched, and they basically had to do a think out loud process where they said everything they're thinking. And one common thing that I saw students doing was they thought things had to be very literal.
Speaker 1:So, for example, I don't want to call the student on the spot, I'm not saying their name or anything but one of the students in this project was doing a research paper for his English class on how the Lakers could create I'm going to make up the teams because I don't remember but how the Lakers could create a dream team. That was their topic and they found an article on how the Golden State Warriors had created the dream team and they said in their Think Out Loud process well, I know that seemed like it was going to be good, but I know I can't use it because it's not about the Lakers. So I was like, ok, so students think literally like if your source has to be the exact thing you're looking for, that was the critical thinking, like okay, so how can I look at things like that and help them make the connections that things can fit together? You have to be creative about how you fit them together, and so I started doing this game in my class when we were learning research. It's called Wikipedia roulette. Okay.
Speaker 1:Where I give them two words that seem like they would not be related at all and they start on the first words Wikipedia page and they have to get to the second words Wikipedia page without going back. They have to click links in the article to get to the second word and the group they're in groups for this, the group that gets there the fastest wins like a little prize or whatever. It's a game we play in class and the idea is they really have to sit there and think how can I connect word A to word B? It might be like insane clown posse to Walmart, but the idea of it was that I did look at like where are they? What soft skills should you be learning in an English class? And where are they not? Where are they struggling with those issues by watching the research process and then trying to figure out ways to build in those things into my class.
Speaker 2:That's something that I've heard a lot of teachers say. Kids are struggling more and more with. Yes Is sort of giving up very quickly when things aren't immediate and obvious. I just want to move to the next, my last authentic learning experience point from my friends at the Association for Career and Technical Education, which is interacting with business and community leaders related to your content. Business and community leaders related to your content. You'd be so surprised how powerful it is.
Speaker 2:If I'm teaching poetry, bring in a poet right. If I'm teaching history, to bring in a lawyer who has to look at precedents and use precedents to you know, argue a case and how history is important to the law. If I'm teaching science, obviously there's a million, a lot of scientists out there doctors. So when you bring in people from the field, what you can do is have them share what they do and how they use the content. But then that next layer is being able to give feedback to students on their work. So when you design projects and have them do something that's aligned to career areas from a poet, right on your poetry or a scientist, about your experiment and how you're drawing conclusions and using variables that adds a deep level and can really build excitement in the classroom.
Speaker 1:And as an example of that, I have a friend who runs a nonprofit that basically he goes into jails and teaches creative writing, and so I had him come to my class Field trip.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, not going on a field trip but he came into the class and he came in with a short story that one of the prisoners had written.
Speaker 1:He gave me that ahead of time and I gave them that was their homework and they were supposed to just come in prepared with some questions to ask him. That might have been the first time, and maybe the only time, that every single student in the class it was a small class, but every single student in the class was prepared, they had questions, they were interested. They came in not because I asked them to prepare questions, they didn't care that I assigned them to ask questions. They came in prepared because they had questions, they wanted to know and seeing them when they had to write a short story for their next assignment, thinking about how much that meant to prisoners to be able to express themselves and to be able to communicate things that maybe they've never been given an opportunity to create or to express man, those students are interested. Giving an opportunity to create or to express man, those students are interested. So from personal experience I can say I mean I guess it might depend on who the guests did, but having a guest come in really changes things a lot.
Speaker 2:So let's get to our last theme. One thing that we've heard our SREB colleagues talk about is collaborative learning how they can use students' collaborative experiences and create collaborative experiences in the classroom to help students learn. What have you heard about that from your discussions with them?
Speaker 1:I thought it was amazing how many of the coaches, no matter what they were talking about, brought in the importance of teamwork, of working with other students in the class to hear other students' ideas. I know, when we talked about things like creating think-pair-share but making it a workplace experience, it required teamwork. It required, obviously, that's the pair part and the share part of think-pair-share anyway, but it needed those students to work in groups to understand that they're going to be part of a team one day. They're not going to. No matter what you do, even if you're like a solitary author that works at home, at some point you're going to have to work with your editor. You know you're going to have to be able to have those teamwork skills Speaking of the skills employers want. So we also had, obviously, in Keisha's episode on creating great classroom discussions. To have a great discussion, it's not just one person talking. To have a great discussion, it's not just one person talking. A few different teachers talked about the fact that the person doing the talking is doing the learning, and so it's important to have the students talking to each other and helping each other figure out what the lesson is, as opposed to me, the teacher, just being at the front of the classroom lecturing and I'm the one learning and they're not.
Speaker 1:One really fascinating one to me that I never in a million years was expecting in the lesson was in Don's episode on note-taking. Note-taking is a solitary activity, so I thought, and then he was like okay, have them write their notes down, then explain their notes to somebody else and then take notes on the notes that the students gave them, so they're reinforcing what they're learning and keeping it going. That is a teamwork activity and note-taking that I never would have thought of.
Speaker 8:What I've really encouraged and what has been powerful is note-taking between students. So a lot of times if I have them read an article, I want them, you know, maybe underline the critical information, the key ideas, and then I have them take that, they put it into their notes, they elaborate on it, and then I'll do like an inner outer circle, but I had them take their notes and share their notes with the person across from them, and then that person across from them was taking notes on the notes that they were sharing with them and the goal is is just to go deeper into that content that we're presenting now, and then after a minute I have one of the lines, rotate one down, and then they share again and they rotate one. So, like five minutes, not only are they building confidence in the notes that they took, but they're also validating and getting the feedback and really, I would say, refining those ideas.
Speaker 1:So, no matter what aspect of the class it is, it seemed like if I wanted my students to kind of do better in a certain area, having them work together to come up with it is a big part of that, and that is something, when I was doing my master's that came up. A lot was the idea that if you put students in a group and maybe they don't all get every aspect of the assignment, of the project that they're working on, whatever that is but one of them knows this part and one of them knows that part and one of them knows this part, and together they can figure it out. But also, as they're figuring it out, they're teaching each other, and so that's a big part of why teamwork works. What about you?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of that comes down to the science of learning and the fact that we are social by nature yes, and the fact that we learn through socializing right.
Speaker 2:That's how kids learn how to talk is by hearing other people talk, and then we learn to have a conversation, and through those conversations we're learning about the world. And as we explain something, we're not just delivering information like in an email. We're actually learning that information by sharing it Right, and that's the best way to learn something, is to teach it Right, and that's, you know, the best way to learn something is to teach it. So I think what a lot of our coaches were hitting on was when we create opportunities for students to work together. It's not just about saving time and you do this job and I do that job, so we have this final product, but it's not about the product as much as the process and the process of talking, listening, sharing ideas, building on each other, and that, like you said, is also a soft skill. So you're hitting a lot of domains by building opportunities for collaboration and discussion.
Speaker 1:And not to try to get out of my work, but I want to try to get out of my work. Having a group project means fewer papers. If I have five groups write something as opposed to 26 essays, it saves me a little time too.
Speaker 2:As long as everyone participated and did you know what they were supposed to. Oh right, right.
Speaker 1:I'm sure none of the groups in your class have one student doing all the work for all the others, or I have when I do group projects, like more than just an in-class assignment, when I have them do major group projects, part of the grade is they grade each other anonymously. They don't know I mean I know that's not not anonymous to me but they don't know which of their partners are giving them the grade. They just know every one of their group mates gives them a grade and then I average those together and that's part of their grade. So they have to actually participate or their group mates are going to give them a bad grade. And when they don't know what their class, I'll tell you they will give fair grades. They're not going to let even their friends, they don't let it get away with anything because they know their friends not going to know it was them that graded them.
Speaker 1:I will say, when I did that one time I learned I have to put some parameters on it. I think that you're not being fair. I can, like I can not count yours in to their grade, because I did one time have a student and they have to explain why they gave that grade. They have to write like a little paragraph saying why they gave their roommate that grade. And I had this one student that said, well, she did most of the work, but she kind of annoyed me so I'm giving her an F, like that's what they?
Speaker 2:that's so like Sounds fair to me.
Speaker 1:I had to discount that one. I learned that I have to write that in. If your rationale doesn't make sense or I, you know it's like something way away from what everybody else in the group gave them, I have the right to eliminate yours. But I think that does really help me actually get good groups, because it's not just me looking at them, it's their partners deciding how good of a partner they were, and that's really helped me.
Speaker 2:Let's think about collaboration from a teacher's perspective. As a coach, teaching is an isolating experience. You're in there with those 25 to 30 kids and you're by yourself, or you have a collaborative teacher and it's up to you to deliver that lesson and there's nobody coming to help you. It's like survivor Survivor. A lot of teachers actually, I think, don't like collaborating. I think a lot of teachers just want to be sort of solo and I got this and I don't need help or want help. And I also believe that a lot of principals or leaders sometimes feel that if they put teachers in a room together, that's a PLC, a professional learning community, and that's not necessarily the case. If you are a coach or a school leader, you almost have to teach your teachers how to collaborate. In some cases not all cases Sometimes you walk into a situation with a high-functioning team cases not all cases. Sometimes you walk into a situation with a high functioning team but you have to be prepared for a team where does her own thing. Bob thinks the kids can't learn and planning is a waste of time and Mr Johnson, you know, just wants to do sports and you're like let's PLC and plan a unit or look at data and they're not having it and they stare at you like how long do we have to be here? Or they find excuses to leave. That's going to happen as a coach and you're going to have those experiences. So, having some preparation for that through protocols and norms, having a team set expectations for themselves because they'll do the exact same thing that the kids will do, right, one person will make all the lesson plans and send it out, or everybody will just, you know, go to Teachers, pay Teachers and buy that and email it to everyone else. Maybe they'll split the bill. I don't know. If you don't have clear protocols and expectations for your teachers during those collaborations, it's not necessarily just going to happen automatically the way that we want it to.
Speaker 2:And also, starting with why. Why do I feel as a coach or as a leader, it's worthwhile for you to look at this data together, because sometimes you only have one teacher per content area, so it doesn't make sense for them to collaborate on units, but they might see data and can collaborate on responses to that data and sharing strategies based on what the data shows. I'd say the most powerful type of collaboration with teachers is when they make choices about students' assignment to classes during the school year. So you are an expert at poetry and I'm an expert at nonfiction. So we see the kids who have the low scores in poetry during this time period they go to you and the kids who have the lowest scores in nonfiction go to me. And that's a type of teacher collaboration and using formative assessment that has the biggest impact is really driving your instructional choices as a team, based on what the student data shows.
Speaker 1:And that reminds me of in Debbie Robertson's planning episode. We talked about different subjects, collaborating to create some issue, some concept that can go across multiple classes.
Speaker 9:I know my students would sometimes. Sometimes they would say, hey, like we did this in science. Yeah, you did, because this is a usable skill, you know, and this is a life skill that's going to apply in multiple situations and multiple scenarios. So anytime students see the connection, multiple scenarios, so anytime students see the connection, that piques their interest as well, because then it kind of creates this need to know. Oh, I need to pay attention to this because I want to know this, because this is going to help me and support me in other areas. So it's not just an isolated, that's a math thing and that a science topic and that's an ALA topic. No, these things all support the whole student.
Speaker 1:The example I remember we used then was we talked about a time that my sister in real life lost her dog and we had to make all these posters for it. And so I in my class came in and had students not for my sister's dog, I didn't make them do the work for me, but it gave me this idea that they came in and they made lost dog flyers for class and we talked about how to get your message out there with as few words as possible, because obviously on a flyer you don't want a dissertation, nobody's going to read it but you still have to give enough information that they know what they're looking for and what they're going to get if they do it all that. So I mentioned that and she talked about how in an economics class they might talk about what are the cost benefits of creating the posters and how do you determine the reward and what would be. You know what are the odds of somebody finding the dog and things like that. That's statistics. So a math class could talk about it from statistics.
Speaker 1:But how you could have the same thing like the lost dog, maybe a more heartwarming topic across all the subjects, but something like that where you can learn about it from different angles, so that you're really kind of going back to authenticness. You feel it throughout all your classes and you see how the classes relate to each other. But we talked in that one about how to do that. You need that math teacher and the science teacher and the English teacher collaborating to come up with the problem and their angles on that problem, and so it doesn't have to be, I don't think, english teachers working together, even though obviously English teachers can work together too but it's also all the subjects in the grade working together. It's working with the grades below you and above you, so it's not just me working with other, whatever grade I'm teaching 10th grade English teachers working with all the 10th grade teachers. It's working with the 9th grade teachers of the 11th grade teachers.
Speaker 2:To be a STEM certified school in Georgia, you have to have collaboration among all the teachers on project based learning and that's what you know sort of the standard for high level STEM certification. The standard for high level STEM certification, you know where every teacher is part of the theme that all students are working towards. So one school, they did space, so all the different projects were about space. They had different aspects and they collaborated on how they could teach certain projects about space together. And that's high level learning and that's how kids become excited about school. That's when you have less attendance problems, this unified place where everybody's working together to create really exciting experiences.
Speaker 2:One of the level of instructional practice that research shows is something called teacher efficacy right, where teachers basically believe that what they do impacts learning more than anything else. Right, which is actually not that common. A lot of teachers believe that it's about this, it's about the family life and it's about so many factors, which are factors. But if you believe that what you do actually can impact the learning, everybody works together towards that goal and that's a huge. That's what the highest functioning schools do, I think that sounds great.
Speaker 2:That's my TED Talk.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we've covered these four themes pretty well. I hope, if you are back in school again, that you had a great break, and if you have not, if you're listening to this right when we released it and you haven't started your break I hope it's an amazing break. We at SREB are also going to be closed starting on December 13th, so we will also not be releasing any new episodes during that time, but we're going to go enjoy our break and we will be back in 2025 with new episodes. Ben, as always, it's been great talking to you.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to a great 2025. All right, bye.