Class-Act Coaching: A Podcast for Teachers and Instructional Coaches

Season Wrap-Up: Collective Teacher Efficacy, Clarity, and True Engagement

• SREB • Season 1 • Episode 23

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In the final episode of the school year, the Class-Act Coaching crew is back together! Ashley is joined by co-hosts Jason and Dan to reflect on the biggest takeaways from this semester’s episodes — and this time, Dan takes the reins as host.

Together, they dive into three powerful themes that kept coming up in coaching conversations:

  • Collective Teacher Efficacy: What it really looks like in action — and how to tell if it’s missing.
  • Teacher Clarity: Why learning goals and success criteria matter, not for compliance, but for student understanding.
  • Authentic Engagement: The difference between fun and purposeful learning — and how to get students thinking deeply (not just moving around).

With examples from classrooms, podcast guests and even Ashley’s own students, this wrap-up connects all the dots and leaves you with plenty to reflect on. Plus, find out what Ashley told a student that she realized she should’ve been telling herself.

We’ll be back in the fall, but until then — enjoy your well-earned summer. And if you’re joining us at the Making Schools Work Conference in New Orleans (July 15–18), be sure to say hi!

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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Welcome back. This is our last episode of the school year. I don't know how many of you out there are winding up and how many are already finished listening to this now, but we wanted to do like we did last semester wrap up episode to end the school year. And I am here right now with both of my co-hosts from this semester, Jason and Dan. Hi Jason and Dan. Hello, Hi. Hi Ashley. So last semester we ended by talking about the themes we saw from the first half of the episodes that we did. And so we did that again. We found some themes and as we're pulling themes from the episodes, from the 2025 season episodes. Dan had a few questions that he wished had been covered, and so we decided he's gonna take over this episode. He's gonna be the host today, and we're gonna talk about these themes we noticed as Dan guides us through his questions. So Dan, you wanna take it from here? Oh boy, this is my dream. It's finally coming. True. I'm trying to laugh at your jokes now because you told me one time I don't laugh at you enough, so Yeah. See, very funny. Well done. See, he learns. These are the priorities on this podcast, Yeah. Jason and Ashley. Three things that I saw come up, in a lot of these conversations. One was the power of collaboration and that kind of falls under this idea that I think Michelle spoke about which is. Collective teacher efficacy, they talked about this guy, John Hattie, who's done meta research where he takes all of the different research that's been done, or a lot of it combines it together and does a statistical analysis to see what has the most impact or what the different impacts are of different factors from the home, from school, from the teacher, from the student, and the one that has the highest impact on student achievement beyond beyond strategies or the way that the student comes to class or acts in class or the way the classroom is structured. number one is something called collective teacher efficacy. And I hear that and I think to myself, okay. What does that mean? And I did a little research and it says here, it is the collective belief of the staff of the school and their ability to positively affect students. that is from John Hattie himself. So then I think to myself, okay, great. So all I gotta do is believe it's kind of like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell. Yeah. Maybe if we can all just out loud, I believe then our school will be successful. This is, it's like wizardry, I don't think it's that simple. So my question is, what does it mean? But more importantly, what does it look like? Jason, you've been going out. To schools for 20 years now. so you've seen probably a lot of examples of high collective teacher efficacy and maybe not so much. so can you talk about, like, in your view this looks like? Like what would you look for in a school if you're trying to see if that's in place That's a great comment. I think, first of all, I wanna I think if you ask teachers the question, do you believe your instruction positively impacts student learning? I mean, what teachers really gonna say no, right. We all believe that, right? Or we would say it. That's what I was thinking. You they'd say it. Do they actually leave it? Yeah, Yeah. everyone correct. then I go into the classroom. We go into the classroom we visit, and there are, I mean, I always wanna say every action they take either reinforces that they believe what they say, or that their actions reiterate what they say, or sometimes their actions speak a different tell a different story. And so, like example, in, in a math classroom, the questions teachers ask, let me know. Do they, I they ask questions, they lead kids to the answer. The kids are simply there's a step, multi-step problem, and the teacher breaks it into individual steps so that the student doesn't have to. Problem solve at all. tells me something versus, Hey, go ahead and pose a difficult problem and everybody goes out and tries it and their struggle. One of the things that I love to do as a teacher, that almost tells me do they believe their kid, that their instruction positively impacts students, that their students can do it. I just, after the lesson's done, oh, Jason, I did this cool problem. Oh, great. Can I see the student work? looking through the student work. Every paper looks the same. What's that? Communicate, When they analyze, like if you see every paper's the same, Right. you did too much as a teacher. Right? You gave it away. I need different, I need like if, or you're just, you just nailed it, and I guess, but most of the time if I have variance in student work, that's a good formative assessment picture and that, and then I can bring that to the, to the teacher meeting that we're having. And I can share my batch of student work and I see another teacher's batch of student work, and we can start to have quality discussions about the instruction that occurred. so you're saying if everybody has the same thing, it means that you're just teaching them how to do something lower level Think that they're able to do it I would contend Yeah. means that you, maybe you over scaffolded, I think it came up in Jen Lina's. Episode is she taught this lesson. She thought about Pharaoh, Egyptian Pharaohs. She was underwhelmed by how it went. Well, when she reflected, everybody's paper looked the same. She gave them the three categories that they were gonna collect , before her reign. During her reign. After her reign, right? And so everybody's paper looked the same, if she would've just given the graphic organizer and said, and that's what we talked about in this lesson, in this, the podcast. And if she would've just given the graphic organizer said, Hey, I want you to read this. I want you to break this into main categories. Go I. Some kids might have looked at different categories, it wouldn't have always been before, during, after. I think that's interesting versus everybody's looks the same. I think that communicates something about, do I believe my kids can come up with these major categories, or do I have to give it to them? So over scaffolding sort of not giving kids opportunities to think is communicating what you believe that they can do. And so I think the other thing I would say is collective teacher efficacy means collectively. I think that collective is an interesting point of it collectively analyzing what we're doing And how we're doing it. So I wanna say though, I, 'cause this is reminding me of something. When I was getting my master's, I read. And so it's been a while. So hopefully I'm quoting this person accurately or the concept of the paper accurately. But I read this paper of, this would've been a college level teacher, but it was teacher at a two year college, not a high performing school, a lot of non-English speaking students. And she took over the English this, the English department, and she basically said, well, the curriculum's too easy. And they're like, no, that doesn't make sense. They're struggling. And she was like, yeah, they can handle harder work than this. Trust them. And basically increased the work, not increased the amount of work, but the difficulty and the interestingness of the work. And she said, trust the students and they're gonna do better. And she was right. And that kind of is what I'm hearing you guys say, reminds me a lot of that, that it's. You can kind of be like, oh, well the students, this is, they're not gonna get this, so I'm gonna just kind of walk'em through it and give them the answer. And then they're not gonna learn anything. But if you trust them and they're like, Hey, they're gonna figure it out then they'll actually start learning. So that's how I'm taking what you're saying. yeah, and I think that collective, the pla, the collaborative planning that we talk about can hopefully reinforce that because, we look, we open the, we open our teacher's edition, it has this assignment that's laid out and we look together. I'm like, it, or it could reinforce either, right? Oh, there's no way our kid, my kids can do that. got to give them something versus Or, sure my, I'm not sure if my kids can do this. Let's give it to 'em and see how they do. Or, I know my kids can't do this comma yet. Right. So I walk over to Mrs. Johnson and we look at it and we break it down and we say, okay, what skills do they need? And then what are some ways I can build those skills and then build on those skills and then build on those skills so that by the end they can do it. It's not, they can't do it, so I just do the simpler thing. I may be doing something simpler first the intention of getting to that standard or to that whatever that assignment's Right. Another thing that I think is important for collective teacher efficacy as a look for, as something to build into your classroom and into your school is how you use data and how you use assessment data. So I go to some schools and maybe there's a benchmark, maybe there isn't. And if there is, it's kind of, yeah, butted or, well, it's not really well aligned. Well, it was too hard for them. Well, blah, blah, blah. And it's sort of brushed to the side as Seinfeld would say. It's yada yad. Whereas I think collective teacher efficacy, if I believe. That I have the capacity to teach my students and to have that teaching, have a direct impact on them learning standards, then I'm going to want to know times exactly how much they know Right, and that visually, and then take that and work with people to understand what that data means and what it's telling me and what it's not telling me. Michelle Herata a beautiful job in her in her episode talking about teachers in collaborative groups asking themselves, what do my students need to know? will I know if they learned it? will I know if they didn't? What will I do if, what will I do if they learn it, if they don't know it? And what will I do if they do learn it? Now, those are questions for PLCs in school that has high collective teacher efficacy. Those questions, and that process is in the DNA the school, it's visible to the teachers and to the students because we believe, I wouldn't put these numbers up if I didn't think we could do it if I didn't think that we could hit this goal or meet this annual yearly progress to use a, an old gone by or meet this standard based on this criteria. I wouldn't put it up here so. Put, making data part of your classroom and part of your school and part of your processes probably a foundational part of that. Any other thoughts on collective teacher efficacy before we go to another theme that we saw? I think I thought I had is, like you said, a couple times a school where we have high evidence that they do have it. I think the other side of it is the school that where the teachers are regularly saying, well, would never work with my kids. Things like that. I think start focusing on collective teacher efficacy as a school, that's how we change that behavior, right? We in our PLC meetings, we're like, oh, remember we, it, it really matters that we show this collective teacher efficacy, so we're gonna change our behavior and so, right, data leads to a change, correct. adjusting practice. There's a connection. So it's one thing to get benchmark data and it's another thing to use that Yep. to adjust practice. And we have a norm that we're gonna hold each other accountable When somebody says, well, that's not gonna work with these kids. I love what you said, Dan, yet, right? We're gonna have that power of yet that says, it might not. But we're gonna challenge our kids. We're going to, we're going to make them think we're not going to bail them out. We're going to, the advice I give to teachers all the time is be less helpful 'cause you're helping 'em in all the wrong ways. And, we're going to be less helpful. We're going to challenge our kids. We're going to make 'em problem solvers and critical thinkers. We're not gonna over scaffold. So that can be a lever to change behavior. right. And then and then just thinking about, one thing I see that's an indication of collective teacher efficacy is are teachers in each other's classrooms. If I know that Doing really well in this area. If we have a collective viewpoint, then I need to be in your classroom observing what you do. you need to be in my classroom, giving me pointers or some way to, to do that. And it should be a structure. Sometimes people use instructional rounds and such. I wanna get to our next theme that we saw over this last few weeks. So we talk a lot on these podcasts, Ashley, about planning. You Yes. how, that's something that you're to improve, that you sometimes have ideas and you have a great idea, and then you're like, I'm gonna do this idea. And that's your lesson and you're trying to be more purposeful and you got suggestions from our coaches on how to do that. Yes, I am both the biggest planner you'll ever meet and the worst planner you'll ever meet because I'm the person that likes to plan the fun activity, the party the whatever it is that's gonna be, but then it's like the details of that plan, like I wanna do the creative part of the planning. I don't wanna do the details that make that creative plan work. So, and that's just in life, not just in teaching, but definitely in teaching too. So, for example, I'll be like, oh, I have an idea for this great assignment, and I'll plan out the assignment, the fun assignment itself, and it's gonna go like this, and we're gonna have balloons in class, and we're gonna have a clown and whatever we need. And then I never do the next step or probably the first step, which is the most important part where I then say, okay, well when we're doing all these fun things, how are they going to make the connections to the learning that I need them to do? So, Does you, does, do they, does the person at the party like clowns, do they have a clown phobia? right, their idea of a right. So one, so one thing almost everybody said who, who did planning? I'm thinking about Christie, Michelle Juliana, Deborah, they all talked about learning goals and success criteria and they talked about like taking a lot of time. To take your standard do learning goals and success criteria. And I, I go on Facebook sometimes I try to avoid it as much as possible, but sometimes it just sucks me in. And I was on the other day and there was a newspaper article about two teachers that got into a fight, and the comments was just hundreds of comments. And they were all these really funny but snarky comments like, well, did they have their learning target up? What was their success criteria? Did they, were they, did they have their learning standards posted? Which indicates to me while people like you and I, Jason, who, tell teachers or recommend to teachers the importance of posting learning targets and success criteria and sharing them with students and all of that. And we heard it multiple times on these podcasts. In the real world of classrooms, it's sometimes viewed as a checklist, as a it for the admin for a walkthrough. Like, if someone comes in, they want to see, and it's not always making a connection to like, how does this, how will it help my students do better on their tests, their essay, their their benchmark. So why do you think this keeps coming up? And why is it important for teachers to actually take seriously? I. So I think it keeps coming up because sometimes we, meaning it could be coaches, it could be the leader in the building, don't always sell the why set Simon Sinek. Why, how, what start with the what you need to put learning targets on the board success criteria. And so it becomes going through the motions. I remember as a teacher, we had to put, I taught in Florida, we had to put the Sunshine State standards on the board. I literally wrote SS m Do point, right? That meant nothing to the kids, 9.2. Thank right? Woo. Thank goodness we got to that one. I was worried. is coming around the corner. Right? Right. It meant it had no effect whatsoever. And so if we don't sell the why if we don't have the learning is for the, is not for the teachers to use learning targets, right? Like if I'm selling the, if my learning target for telling them is why do they wanna look? My learning target is to understand that The more clear you are, the better the students will handle what's coming. And a learning target is how you. The success criteria is how you add clarity to a lesson. Here's my test as a teacher. I go in and here's my favorite story I'm gonna share. My son comes home from school. He's in 10th grade. What'd you do in math today? We played with Skittles. Interesting. We explored deeper into it. Eventually he told me he got to the math of the lesson, that his takeaway from the lesson was Skittles. played with Skittles. I went His teacher, and we I'm friends with his teacher. We had a discussion about it. Fast forward four years, my daughter's in the same class, comes home. What'd you do today? We modeled exponential decay using Skittles. Dang. class. using learning targets. So now all the sudden. She didn't just play with Skittles that day. She saw the math. And I mean, it was because of that event and the discussion we had with the teacher. I don't even, I don't even, I don't coach at the school. We were just sitting at a tennis match and we had this discussion. He is like, Ooh, that's interesting, Jason. Let me try it. So he starts, and learning target mattered. It added clarity to the lesson. So we didn't just play with Skittles as a coach, go in the classroom as a teacher. At the end of your lesson, be like, whisper, Hey, tell me what you did today. All the time. I walk around, I'm like, tell me what you're doing right now. The kid's like, like, and it has nothing doing whatever. We're cutting out cards and pasting them to a piece of paper. Oh, great. Big deal. That's not the lesson. That's the. Engaging thing that makes 'em happy it's not the lesson they're creating a top down topic web, something like that. So you're really, when you're writing, so, so your goal when writing a learning target, I can statement success criteria. You're, the question you're asking yourself is, how do I make crystal clear to my students the purpose of this lesson and what they need to do and why they're doing it? How do I communicate that? And one way to communicate that through learning target Yeah. So I know. I am really guilty of what we're talking about here. Yes. Hopefully not that, don't talk about that on this podcast, but I have my learning objectives in my syllabus because it's required to be there. And when I, on the first day, we go over the syllabus and I don't even mention them. That's in the part of the syllabus that like, you can read that on your own. And we go straight to the important parts, like my rules in the classroom or whatever. And then we never bring those up ever again. And I don't even, I mean, I'm just assuming well they're there. Like, yeah, it's, I'm gonna be teaching them research this semester. I'm gonna be teaching them argumentative. Like we're hitting all those goals. But I never actually look at them. And if I'm not looking at them, they're definitely not looking at them. And so I know this, everything you're talking about right now is definitely, I'm like, doing that thing when you're in a meeting and you know you're the one that they're talking about and you're just kind of like looking away, avoiding eye contact. But I know that's something, and I'm liking what you're saying because I always did think about it as more work for me. Like, oh, if I'm sitting there and then I have to reverse scaffold and I have to do this and I have to do that. But it's, what you're saying, or what I'm hearing you say is it's not for me. I mean, it is for me too, but it's for the student, so it's helping them. If I put more of a focus on those. When I go to a school and I hear teachers say or even coaches or supporters say, they want to see when they come in, They wanna see this, or it's important to have this because it, they expect this. I, that's a warning for me, because it kind of tells me that the focus is on compliance with Right. And maybe the administration hasn't been exactly clear about. The target about why and the purpose. Now, depends. But that just is something I kind of stands out to me with a lot of these things like learning targets and posting things that are posted. There's usually a reason why those are there. a great teacher often looks past some of the cultural, the, I say the culture of the school vibe might accrue and actually asks themselves, well, why is this important? Why do they want me to do this? Why is this a practice? Because practices are usually beneficial if done well. They don't usually just come out of it nowhere. And learning targets specifically, like you said, Jason. Teacher clarity is up there with collective teacher efficacy as one of the highest highest impact or practices. And I think about the millions of parents who have asked their children, what did you learn today? And probably large percentage of that is a teenager being a teenager, but there's also maybe a percentage of that's also, teachers maybe could have been a little more clear about what they're doing. I, I'd like to see, I'd like to do some action research and follow my 16-year-old son through the day, and Yeah. him that que like invisibly, and then ask him that question. But Yeah. a tough one. I think that, I think you're right. I think it's, something that it's it, that can be formative assessment for a principal too. Like if we're walking around, if the kid, if the teachers are doing it just to go through the motions. I love what you said about compliantly. That's formative assessment for me as a principal or a coach that says, I, I better sell this better because it only has it, it has a high effect size if right, the teachers aren't just going through the motions. Right. When I was putting ss, blah, blah, blah on this, I was just going through the motions because I needed, when the te when the principal came in with the evaluation form, I needed that check mark on that little box that said, teacher put standard on the board. Right. It had no effect on student learning whatsoever. Head note. I updated my observation that I use form, and what I say is I. Can the student explain the lesson, Yes. of the lesson? Like, like, it's often, is it posted, but to me that's not as, doesn't tell me as much as can the student explain the purpose of the lesson, which gets to, that's an indicator about learning target. Anything else you wanna say about teacher clarity? Jason before, or Ashley, before we talk about our last theme that we noticed? Oh, I can't wait for them. The last theme. Okay. This last theme is SS 6.1, three two. Okay. We noticed that engagement is the word that comes up the most in these podcasts. If we did a search and looked for the word that is mentioned the most, that's gonna be it. And if you ask. At our planning. That and planning. And Yeah. ask every, principals and assistant principals, what do you wanna see in your classrooms? What do you wanna see more of in your classrooms? They'll all tell you engagement. And that's because one, there might be a, it's a, it's one is, I think, and we work mostly in secondary. It's hard to get teenagers interested in things. It's just really hard and it takes work and it's not something that just happens. So that's one factor, I think a root cause. But because we believe in teacher, collective teacher efficacy, we believe that we have the ability to do that. So, Christie did a great job talking about engaging students through curiosity. She talked about how to. Start lessons with questions or tasks. What you were saying, Jason, that the kids may not exactly know the answer to or have a clear answer, but that sort of builds interest because it's a little challenging. And I followed up on that and talked about why, starting off with open-ended questions that have more than one answer, or concepts that challenge what kids think they know can have an impact. So I talked about what, engagement a little bit. I guess my question is, when we talk about engagement classrooms what do we really want? what do we sometimes superficially think we want? I think there's an i, a vision we have of engagement, and then there's like true engagement that leads to learning. And how do we navigate through those two? That's a big question. I think that's something that I'm gonna say struggle with, I guess. I just, I feel like everything you've said at, I've just felt like that's something I struggle with. Like kind of pick a theme next time of something that I could say I'm really good at that I'm like the expert, but it's, I have no problem, like what you said, I deal with, I have teenagers in my classes, like all my, like it's all teenagers and I can get them, unless I have an 8:00 AM class, that's the exception to what I'm about to say. I can get them up and moving and talking. Like I can get them in. I'm putting this in quotes that nobody can see engaged. That is not a struggle for me probably because I am the person that when I said I plan the fun parts, but not the work part. And so then you look at my class and you're like, man, her class is so engaged. Like, how do I get my class like that? But that doesn't mean that they're doing any better on a test that in fact they might be doing worse or on a, on an essay because just 'cause they're having fun doesn't mean they're learning. And so to me, you can talk about engagement all day long, but you have to address what you did, just what you just said. Which is, okay, is engagement, they're up and moving and discussing in class or is engagement, they're up and moving and discussing in class in a way that's going to get them to learn what they need to learn? It sounds like you're saying engagement can be fun, but it doesn't necessarily have to be fun there. There's overlap between fun and engagement, Yes. also other types of engagement that matter. It's fun. Is the tool or the vehicle or fun should be, if it's fun, it should be the vehicle that gets you to the destination, which is learning. It shouldn't be the destination itself. Fun can be an on-ramp towards debt, Yes. Yes. Skittles, Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the. The defining question when I go in and outta classrooms is, are they engaged because of the teacher or are they engaged because of the lesson, the content. And I think we're looking for engagement, based on the content I go to as a classroom teacher. I think a lot of times I was pretty engaging as a presenter. Funny, crack a joke here and there. Kids are leaning in, when you break into song and dance. Taught in taught in Star Wars masks sometimes, stupid stuff that, that got stood on. Desks, stuff that got 'em leaning in, but it wasn't always because of the math. and. Authentic engagement is centered around the task itself. Something that's making its way around in math classrooms it's called a vertical, non vertical white, non-permanent surfaces. Right? And so they're standing at these boards working in threes doing math, and it's engaging. Just the fact of them standing up and working on a surface is engaging. The problem on the board matters if I'm really gonna label this lesson as engaging. right? They could be up there doing playing hangman, Yep. and so they're engaged, but what are they engaged with? I mean, a kid sits on their cell phone, they're engaged, right? right? What are they engaged doing? The assignment matters. And that takes us a little bit to my, our friend Marty Yeah. and his episode. If anybody is interested in, career and alignment and career engage career Connects. I'm sorry, I'll figure out how to talk today. If anybody's interested in how to connect their instruction to career interests aligning it to career, that's a great episode. And he thinks about instruction through the design process.'cause he comes from industry and he looks at learning as the old saying, understanding by design, right? From our friends, Wiggins and such. if you instruction. If your lesson is aligned to careers students are engaging in something that is interesting because it's important to them and it's important to what they want to be or what they want to do or just something that they're interested in they're engaged with the content, right? And they're engaged in doing something that matters to them. If you think about your lesson from the perspective of what are my kids going to do and what are they gonna learn and what are they gonna do to get to that learning, you can think about a lot more in terms of. What's actively gonna, make them think, what do I want them to think about and how do I want them to think? All of those questions, I think lead to engagement. they all lead to students having an experience with something, having. And that's another part of curiosity is having an experience. What is the experience that these students are gonna have with what they're learning that's going to make it memorable, They're gonna make it memorable. We, I think what you described in terms of the verticals, I do think the experience of standing up and working with someone and talking engages more brain than sitting by yourself looking at a paper. Agreed. so it probably will in does increase some learning. I. But again, what they're engaged with makes a difference. There's a famous podcast from the Cult of Pedagogy where she talks about Grecian urns, and it's called the Grecian Urn. And she talks about her name is it's just slipped my mind right now. But it's called The Cult of Pedagogy. And she says she's seen classes where kids are learning history of ancient Greece and to teach that make a Grecian urn Yeah. Newspaper and paper mache and they have these beautiful Grecian urns. what they don't have is they haven't read anything, they haven't written anything, and they don't have an understanding of what I. Greece was what the democracy was, who the people were, why they're important, how they affect us today. but so, so all the, if you walk into that classroom, they're talking, they're creating, it's hands-on. But they're not doing a lot of thinking. So to me, when I think of engagement, my question is what type of thinking are the kids doing and how are they making that thinking visible? if a teacher thinks through those two things, you're on your way to engagement for learning. Yeah. and I think Marty's episode really shows that, and he shows if going with Ashley through the process of thinking that through. a, and one way to do that is as from the perspective of career. Go ahead, Right. Yeah, no, I was gonna say and think of, I was just gonna tie it back to the learning and what guides, guides. The first part is the learning target and the success criteria. The learning target is the content now. Now what comes next is now how can I engage them? If it's Marty and it's, if we're thinking like that in something that's authentic to a career, it could be in a problem that's worth solving if it's Christie, right? It's all these things, the learning target guides, what I'm looking for them to be doing. engagement is how I'm gonna get them gonna to meet that success criteria and make it visible. Yes. make it Yeah. And what are they, how are they gonna interact with the content? Sometimes we need to read, and that's okay, right? And if everyone's reading, but as they're reading for a purpose. Then they're engaged in the lesson. So this is a conversation if we're, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tie it back to the top here. If we are on collective teacher efficacy, then we wanna have a collective definition of engagement come to agreements about what that means, what that looks like, and how do we, what are our sort of assurance processes that help us think about, are my students engaged in assignments that matter, in tasks worth doing? In learning targets that actually aligned to the standard? And we have ways to look at that in our classrooms. Sorry, all this is making me think of this. It, this conversation I had with this student one time, he kept coming up to me and asking if we could do, 'cause like I said, I do try to make it a little like it's inter entertaining. And I had a student that came up to me and he would always ask if we could do something in class. I don't remember what it was now, but let's say sing a song. He wanted to sing a song in front of the class. And so every day he would come, or every class he would come and he would ask me like, when are we gonna be able to do that? When am I gonna be able to sing the song? And that's not really what it was, just in case that's not clear. But I just don't remember. And finally I said, listen, I'm gonna make a deal with you. If you can come to me and you can tell me how doing singing that song in class is going to help us hit our learning objective, how it's gonna actually help us learn that what we're doing for the day, we'll do it. And he could never do that. He could never make those connections. I thought I was so proud of myself. I was like, what a good teaching move that I did. But as I'm hearing us say all this, I'm like I told that student what I should be doing for all the things that I should be doing in my class to get them truly authentically engaged that we're saying. I, I feel like I did a good job of telling him what he needed to do to create an engaging lesson, but yet I don't do it myself as the teacher. Know what he wanted to do every I don't remember what it was. It was something that he thought like would be fun for the whole class to do.'cause they would do things like this. What was that little canoodle or whatever was really fun or really popular, whatever the little quiz taking game is and the. Kahoot. Kahoot, that's what it was. I could not remember. And we would do Kahoot quizzes on the vocabulary or whatever, and students would like do things like, I wanna write the quiz for the week. And I would let them write the quiz and they would have their own question, like they would do the Kahoot quiz questions anyway, so I let them do all this stuff. So he was like, this is what I wanna do, since other students are getting to do these fun things in class. And so, but we just couldn't figure out how it would work. I wish I do remember what it was. I feel like it was like a, I think it really was something related to singing. I think that's why that example popped in my head. But it was like, let's have a rap battle in class. Like it was like something like that. English class meets American Idol. It sounds yeah. like a class I'd want to be in. Yeah, exactly. But see, like, but I, so I told him, I was like, listen, I'm willing to take anybody's ideas. It saves me some planning time, but you just have to do the exact things we're saying to do here. And I've never really thought before, right now that I'm like, oh yeah, I hit it on the head telling him what he should do when he's creating lesson plan, Right. but I don't do it. were coaching him. Create a standards aligned lesson. Yes, exactly. So I should have been telling myself I should have been coaching myself through that, though. Well, we'll interview you about that on the next episode. Thank you. We can bring him in and ask him to sing a song for us. Yeah. Well, a wrap. Who's gonna do a rap battle? I really think that. I think that might be what it was. Okay. All right, Ashley, why don't you close this out today. All right. Well, we are going to take off for the summer because, we want a summer break, but also we know all the teachers out there listening, don't wanna listen to us talk about teaching all summer long on their summer break. Go listen to some. but go on. Go listen to some True crime podcasts for the summer and get your mind ready for in the fall when you come back to school and we're ready to teach people, except for when you do need that teaching fix. You can come to the Making Schools Work Conference in New Orleans, July 15th through 18th. I'll put that sales pitch there. That's where you can get all your learning needs in and your education needs and all the things you're missing on the podcast every week.'cause by that point, you're gonna be missing us so much, and you can come to the conference and get it all there Make sure if you do come, you come say hi to me or Jason or me. Yeah, I'll be there. yeah. we'd love it. All right, well, thank you guys both for doing this. I think this is another great episode. Hopefully the people listening do as well. And you guys are great as always. Okay. All right, Ashley, we'll see you later. Yeah. All right, bye.