• Activities are atypical

• Schedules are atypical

• Students may be stressed about the upcoming break

• Teachers are stressed by all the activities and all they have to do in their personal lives—hosting family, traveling, shopping, cleaning, cooking, wrapping, and of course making it to the last December day of school

And let’s be honest: People WILL think about quitting over the winter break.

By day 13 of drinking coffee by the fire, who hasn’t thought “Hmm, what would happen if I didn’t go back?”

So December is not the ideal time of year to give feedback for growth.

It might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back—I think we all worry about this, and rightly so.

More broadly...

It’s never a good idea to give feedback just for the sake of giving feedback.

“I need something to write in this box” is not a good enough reason.

The reason you should give feedback should always be that you have something to share that the teacher needs to hear right now.

Just because you realized it today doesn’t mean the teacher needs to hear it today.

It’s often a good idea to give yourself time to think, and wait for the right opportunity. And that may mean January.

See, teachers don’t change their practice just because we tell them to.

If we’re trying to improve professional judgment, we can’t just share information and advice and/or give an order.

Sometimes feedback isn’t the right way to change practice.

Often people need forms of support other than feedback.

Maybe the support a struggling new teacher needs isn’t feedback from you, but a person—the assistance of a mentor.

Got a retired teacher named Karen (shoutout to all the great people named Karen!) who would be more helpful than any feedback you can provide?

Great—send Karen, and toss the feedback in the trash for now.

But you won’t know if you don’t go.

Getting into classrooms builds relationships and gives you information.

So keep getting into classrooms this month, even if you back off from feedback.

Think of this as Cycle 1 all month long.

Subscribe now

Recommended Resources:

10 Evidence-Based Feedback Questions That Don’t Trigger Defensiveness

Now We’re Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership

The Original Claim: “Learning 10x Faster”

@LamarDealMaker (apparently a developer for Alpha or a Texas Sports Academy school using Alpha’s model model) claimed that students are “learning 10x faster” than with the “old model”:

Note: Alpha School’s canonical claim is “Learn 2X in 2 hrs” according to this photograph that appeared in Wired Magazine.

Wired reports:

MacKenzie Price, one of the founders of Alpha and 2 Hour Learning, told WIRED: “ Our students are learning twice as much, our classes are top 1 percent across grades and subjects, and we’re doing it all in a much, much shorter amount of time.” (Price’s claim is based in part on comparisons of standardized test data. While Price initially said that Alpha would share its data with WIRED, it has not done so.)

The claim “our classes are top 1 percent across grades and subjects” is both unverified and likely to be largely the result of Alpha’s 5-figure tuition.

My Original Rebuttal

I replied that students learning 10x faster is not happening:

Since the original claim was presented without evidence, I am under no obligation to provide evidence that it’s false—nor is it ever incumbent upon the skeptic to prove a negative. Rather, the burden of proof lies with the party making the extraordinary claim.

The “10x faster” claim is implausible and would be extraordinarily difficult to prove, given strong selection effects such as Alpha’s $40,000/year tuition and selective enrollment.

Indeed, even free public charter schools that admit students on a lottery basis have been shown to have strong selection effects that make it difficult to compare them to traditional public schools—let alone to attribute achievement results to a specific feature of their program.

One often-touted form of triangulation for Alpha’s model is their campus in Brownsville, TX, which charges only $10,000 rather than the usual $40,000+.

The Alpha model clearly works well enough—for enough students—that multiple campuses across the country are viable.

However, “We have succeeded in attracting an adequate number of paying students” is a very different claim from “Students are learning 10x faster.”

Q: Do Students Learn Faster With Alpha’s Model?

A: My assumption is yes, students learn slightly faster with Alpha’s model, which involves spending about 2 hours a day on a computer with AI and other educational technology to deliver core content.

However, there is currently no data available that can definitively answer this question.

Q: Why Can’t We Tell if Alpha’s Model Is Superior?

A: Because Alpha’s student population is far from typical, most effects we observe in its outcome data are likely to be functions of enrollment, not instruction.

This is an issue that plagues all education research, not just assessments of Alpha School’s effectiveness. For a detailed overview, see ’s article Why Selection Bias Is The Most Powerful Force In Education.

Freddie deBoer

why selection bias is the most powerful force in education

Imagine that you are a gubernatorial candidate who is making education and college preparedness a key facet of your campaign. Consider these two state average SAT scores…

Read more

9 years ago · 29 likes · Freddie deBoer

However, the issue is particularly pronounced in the case of Alpha because of the extraordinarily high tuition.

Q: Why do you assume Alpha’s model won’t work?

A: I don’t make such an assumption. Pointing out the lack of evidence is not the same as refusing to believe any future evidence that might emerge.

Q: If tutoring is the best instructional model, and human tutors are prohibitively expensive, isn’t AI-driven tutoring a great option?

A: Ironically, human tutors would probably be significantly less expensive than Alpha.

At any rate, Peter says:

My response is that individual tutoring hasn’t been demonstrated as an overall schooling model at any kind of scale. It’s used only very narrowly, e.g. for actors who can’t be in school, or for focused remediation in single subjects.

Some ed tech including AI is probably helpful, but we should not expect it to be a 10x breakthrough.

Specific Points by Pat Azi

This detailed post by Pat Azi raises several issues that I’ll address one by one.

“Zero evidence that teacher-led classrooms will remain optimal against new paradigms like Alpha.”

Pat says:

You claim: “school is unmatched at getting kids to learn stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise learn.”

“Unmatched” only means best system so far. It provides zero evidence that teacher-led classrooms will remain optimal against new paradigms like Alpha.

Correct. I am not claiming that traditional classrooms are the best approach that will ever be discovered.

However, I’m arguing that Alpha has not yet proven to be a superior model. It remains to be seen whether it can match, let alone surpass, the status quo in an apples-to-apples comparison.

I made this point on Dr. Phil Primetime in response to my interlocutor Jeanne Allen, who advocated for alternative models like Alpha’s:

Transcript:

I would find that a more compelling argument if these schools had a track record. But what they have a track record of doing is marketing and attracting families and skimming families from public schools. Then not a lot to show for it after that. I think we would have seen much greater shifts in the population toward that type of school. But the reality is most of what they’re talking about is experimental. The thing about experiments…I was a science teacher. The thing about experiments is, they’re difficult. And most of the time you don’t find something better in an experiment. So whenever we criticize the status quo, we have to realize that the good results that we’re getting are coming from the status quo as well as the bad results. And if we’re going to shift to something completely different, we have to make sure that that alternative can deliver the good results that the status quo is currently delivering, as well as address the shortcomings of it.

“With personalized learning…students learn more.”

Pat says:

You ask: “Think about how much you learn in one course in the span of a year. Is there any other scenario where you would have learned all of that stuff?”

Yes. Traditional classrooms artificially constrain learning volume and velocity by forcing one pace for 30 students. With personalized learning, faster students aren’t held back by class pace, and slower students don’t accumulate knowledge gaps that compound over time. Both learn more than in a one-size-fits-all model.

Pat is missing my question here, and answering a totally different question.

To my earlier point that school is unmatched at getting kids to learn stuff they wouldn’t otherwise learn, Pat offers nothing.

However, I’ll respond to his claim that both faster and slower students “learn more than in a one-size-fits-all model.”

This is easy: there’s simply no evidence for this assertion.

Nearly all education in the US is delivered in what Pat would call a “one-size-fits-all model.”

Traditional schooling currently operates at scale. How it functions and what it accomplishes are widely known (though sometimes misunderstood).

New paradigms like Alpha do not operate anything like the societal scale of public schools; they are a specific type of expensive private school, where selection effects swamp any effects of the instructional model.

So far, we do not even have any clear evidence that Alpha’s model isn’t worse—and to be clear, there are three basic possibilities of interest:

• It’s roughly the same—no major difference between Alpha and traditional classrooms

• It’s significantly better

• It’s significantly worse

My money is on the first possibility. I think Alpha’s model is probably fine, but not significantly better or worse.

“Instruction and motivation are two different tasks…few excel at both because they’re completely different skills.”

Pat says:

You argue: “we are going to always need human teachers because it’s not about just the explanations and the information, it’s about the motivation.”

Instruction and motivation are two different tasks. Traditional teachers split cognitive load between content delivery and student motivation. Few excel at both because they’re completely different skills. Alpha unbundled them: AI handles instruction with consistency and personalization impossible for any human to give 30 students. Guides focus exclusively on motivation with zero time spent on lesson planning or content delivery. Then the system enforces learning with periodic mastery gates that block advancement until proficiency, and validates growth by requiring 90%+ on external third-party tests to pass a grade level.

As an educator, I find this to be a rather odd framing, and I’m not sure what evidence Alpha has that its “guides” are actually effective at motivating students to learn the content.

If a student loses motivation, they can simply leave the school and disappear from Alpha’s statistics. This is not an option in traditional public schools, where failures to learn are visible.

Again, this is not an issue unique to Alpha; it’s also a major barrier to research in charter schools, which suffer from high rates of attrition.

“Choose to be like the Alpha founders.”

Nate seems offended by my skepticism and suggests that people choose to be more like Alpha’s founders:

To be clear, I’m not insisting that it won’t work. I’m insisting that it’s unproven—Alpha’s model has not yet been demonstrated to be superior to traditional classrooms.

Simply wanting something to work is of very little value. One might even argue that it’s unethical to sell something for $40,000 a year when you can’t even provide evidence that it works. But to each their own.

Listen at Principal Center.com »

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder, PhD (00:00):

This episode of Principal Center Radio is brought to you by the Project-Based Learning Network, Dr. Amy Baeder, the director, is a professional curriculum writer and the leading expert on standards-based PBL. She trains teachers how to write high quality PBL units in the project-based learning curriculum developer certification program, and she teaches leaders how to implement successful p PBL initiatives in the project-based Learning instructional leader program. Learn more at Principal Center dot com slash pbl.

Announcer (00:28):

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here’s your host, director of The Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder.

Justin Baeder, PhD (00:38):

Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Dr. Jean Twenge. Dr. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and is the author of more than 190 Scientific publications and several books based on her research, including 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World, which we’ll talk about today. Generations iGen and Generation Me among others. Her research has been covered in Time Magazine, the Atlantic Newsweek, the New York Times USA Today and the Washington Post, among other outlets, and she’s been featured on television media such as today. Good Morning America, Fox and Friends CBS this morning, real time with Bill Maher and NPR. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters. And we’re here today to talk about a book on parenting, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a high tech world. And now our feature presentation. Jean, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

Jean Twenge, PhD (01:31):

Thanks for having me on.

Justin Baeder, PhD (01:33):

Well, I’m excited to speak with you because you are, I mean, to put it mildly, a serious researcher. You’ve been doing serious academic research in your field of psychology for many years now, and yet you have not shied away from communicating with broad audiences and especially parents. What prompted you to write this particular book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a high tech world? What did you see happening in the data and happening in society?

Jean Twenge, PhD (01:56):

Yeah, so I’ve been doing work in this area around adolescents and their technology use and their mental health for almost 10 years now. So my book iGen came out in 2017. An excerpt of it was printed in the Atlantic, and I’ve got some people talking about smartphones and their effects and social media and how adolescents are growing up differently now. And that’s how I originally got into looking at this because I researched generational differences and started to see some really concerning trends in terms of adolescents mental health that started around 2012, A little bit of delay in that data coming out, so didn’t realize that was going on until about 2015 or 2016, but trying to figure out why was Teen depression going up so much at a time when the economy was doing well and there wasn’t anything else really obvious that was going wrong.

(02:46):

And then realizing that the end of 2012 was the first time that the majority of Americans owned a smartphone. That’s also around the time that teens started spending more time on social media. So doing that research, I started to give a lot of talks at schools to parents, to administrators, to teachers, and also my own kids were growing up. So in 2017, my kids are pretty young, but they’re now all teenagers now. So I was seeing this at home as well, that what happens when that school laptop comes home of what about phones in the classroom of, but mom, I have to be on social media because all of my friends are on social media. When are we going to give our kids phones? All of these things was what I was hearing from parents and experiencing in my own life with my own three kids. So this book is really kind of the collision of the research and that practicality of, okay, we know this is a problem, then what do we do about it? I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of really concrete advice about what do we do about it? So that’s what really inspired me to write this book, to try to make it a little easier for parents to try to manage their kids’ tech use because it’s tough.

Justin Baeder, PhD (04:00):

It is. And I think one of the things that will strike people most immediately when they pick up the book and start reading it is that it is concrete advice. You do not shy away from using, even in the title of the book, the word rules, which we tend to not really default to very much anymore. We like to say, well, we’ll educate children on effective, appropriate social media use. We’ll educate students on how to use technology in school. And you say the education approach is necessary but not sufficient. Why is that?

Jean Twenge, PhD (04:30):

Yeah, well, I mean in brief it doesn’t work. So yes, we should talk to kids. Yes, we should educate them. I’m all for, I don’t really like the label digital literacy, but that’s often what’s used. Let them know what some of the dangers are out there, give them an idea what they’re up against, but they’re up against a lot. So social media is a great example. Those companies have poured billions of dollars into making their apps as addictive as possible. They call it engaging. Other people would say addictive. Basically they make the most money when people spend the most time on the apps and keep coming back to them as often as possible. Children and teens are their best customers because they don’t have the self-control to put that down. And they’re at a developmental stage when their social life is very, very important. Understanding who they are and where they stand is very, very important.

(05:23):

And there’s the draw of all of my friends are on it. So it’s a really tough battle. And there’s one dad I talked to has five children, and the way he put it I thought was very accurate. He said, look, I’m all for talking to kids about algorithms and all the things that they’re going to experience on social media, but I’m in my fifties and the algorithm gets me and then imagine being 10 or 12 or 15. So you can’t just learn about algorithms, you have to have some protections place. So I sometimes think about it this way with driving is a great example that would we say, oh, let’s just teach 12 year olds to drive and that’s cool. Some of ‘em are going to be ready, let’s let ‘em go do that. No, we’ve chosen an age when we think that most kids are going to be ready 16, 17 in some states, and we stuck with it. And I think we have to do the same for these technologies of not introducing them too early and not going with, oh, we’re going to talk to kids about it and then expect them to be able to put down their phone when they’re being shown video after video on TikTok, which is very compelling. It’s hard for adults to do that. And I just think we can’t expect kids and teens to do that either.

Justin Baeder, PhD (06:45):

Even using a phrase like digital literacy, excuse me. And even using a phrase like digital literacy implies that there is a lot of similarity or enough similarity between say, books, the printed word and technology. And certainly books can have alarming material that may not be age appropriate for all students, but it’s very, very different from the almost kind of intentionally predatory design of a lot of what’s out there on the internet. Books do not jump off the shelf and take pictures of you while you’re naked and send them to other people. That is literally what is happening on some of these platforms. And you share some pretty alarming statistics about just how common it is, especially on social media for kids to get targeted, for kids to get extorted for pretty horrible things to happen. And that’s not to say we need to be totally afraid of everything, but as you said in the book, almost everything in society that is for adults is age gated in some way for kids. We don’t just say, Hey, just talk to your kids about alcohol and then just let ‘em make good choices about alcohol. It’s like, well, no, you’re not allowed,

Jean Twenge, PhD (07:54):

Right, and we’re going to leave. We’re going away for the weekend. And the key is in the liquor cabinet, but you’re not supposed to do that, right? Yeah, we don’t do that.

Justin Baeder, PhD (08:03):

Yeah. So these are, you say probably not everybody’s going to stick with all 10 of these rules successfully a hundred percent of the time, but they are rules, and that is very intentional. And the first rule that I love that is one that we’ve always followed as parents is you don’t take electronics to bed with you at night. Why is that such an important rule? Or it’s actually not the first rule in the book.

Jean Twenge, PhD (08:26):

It’s the one that if you can’t follow anything else, you should follow that one. Rule two, no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. So for a bunch of reasons. So first, the research on this is so clear. We know of course that sleep is really crucial for physical health. It’s also really crucial for mental health. Not getting enough sleep is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression, self-harm, even suicidal thoughts. So we want to preserve sleep and technology interferes with sleep. Even having the phone in the bedroom if it’s off can interfere with sleep, is what a bunch of studies have shown much less when it’s going off and kids are looking at it in the middle of the night. So common sense Media did this study where they tracked kids’ phone use, so it wasn’t just self-report. They saw when and what kids were doing. And six out of 10, 11 to 17 year olds were using their phones between midnight and 5:00 AM on school nights. Dad shows you the scope of the problem.

Justin Baeder, PhD (09:26):

So the phone is actually waking them up, or they’re waking up and getting on their phone in the middle of the night while everybody else is presumably asleep. And that’s not only allowing them to get into the various types of trouble that you can get into online, it’s also interrupting their sleep. And you say that sleep has a very strong link to a variety of poor mental health outcomes. Is that right?

Jean Twenge, PhD (09:49):

Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s a known risk factor, and especially for teenagers, they’re up against a lot of challenges already. Their circadian rhythm during adolescent shifts later, especially if they have an earlier school start time, they’re having to go to bed before they truly feel tired. And so if that phone is there as a temptation on top of that, it’s all over. It’s not just the middle of night, it’s also staying up too late because that phone is so tempting

Justin Baeder, PhD (10:21):

In a way that reading a book makes you sleepy, but scrolling on your phone seems to do the opposite

Jean Twenge, PhD (10:27):

For two reasons. First, that there’s a psychological stimulation to pretty much everything that we do on electronic devices outside of maybe watching a TV show that’s not quite as bad. But the other problem is physiological, the blue light from these devices, especially when held close to the face, they emit blue light that tricks your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, then your brain doesn’t produce the melatonin, the sleep hormone that you need to fall asleep quickly. So a lot of kids would be like, yeah, but I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight. Sometimes it’s because they were looking at their phone or laptop right before they went to bed, and then they just can’t fall asleep because it’s thrown off that circadian rhythm and that melatonin production.

Justin Baeder, PhD (11:17):

Yeah, absolutely. So no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. And again, I misspoke. That’s not the first rule. The first rule is you are in charge and it’s, I think absolutely right, but kind of strange that we have to say that today that this is something that parents do need to exert some control over with some rules. And I would say you seem to be a little bit on the forceful side on that issue. How do you see the role of rules and parental authority and tell us about your animal metaphor for the different parenting styles.

Jean Twenge, PhD (11:51):

Sure. Yeah. So psychology research has looked at different parenting styles and the one that consistently is shown to be the best, it’s called authoritative, so loving but firm. And that’s opposed to being permissive, where it’s kind of loosey goosey. You just let things happen. And then the other one is authoritarian, so it sounds too close to authoritative. So that’s why I said, okay, let’s throw it out the window and use a sea animal for each. So some people have called authoritative parenting, the best one, dolphin parenting. So firm but flexible like the body of the skin of a dolphin. So my kids would call that analogy cr, but I like it anyway. It makes some sense. So the loving but firm having some flexibility because then, yeah, you can do all the stuff that modern parents are really good at of talking to their kids and understanding where they’re coming from, but also in some cases having rules because they need that structure as well.

(12:51):

So having those rules in place and standing firm of sure, having empathy, but also saying, that’s it. This is the rule. So that’s the dolphin parenting. There’s another type called authoritarian, which is my way or the highway, and not really showing much love and then having the rules. So I call that tiger shark parenting. So really high expectations and just not being flexible, not having the empathy and having the rules and permissive c sponge parenting kind of let kids do what they want. You don’t have many rules. And then a fourth type is uninvolved, where there’s not the rules or the love. I call that fish parenting. You lay the eggs and you swim away. We know that the dolphin parenting is the best that you do have some of that structure, but you also show the empathy and love.

Justin Baeder, PhD (13:41):

I love that set of metaphors because I mean, obviously dolphins are the best animals, but it shows that combination of warmth and affection, but also boundaries. Speaking as a psychologist, why do you think we’re so uncomfortable with boundaries? I see this in education, I see it in among parents, and it used to be self-evident to everyone that everybody needed boundaries and that there was nothing unkind about boundaries. What has changed in our society?

Jean Twenge, PhD (14:10):

So that’s in my wheelhouse as a generations researcher. And I think a lot of it comes back to individualism, just more focus on the self and less on social rules. A system that has a lot of advantages and it’s become more common. And I think it’s just the idea of being an authority figure for a lot of parents feels weird. It feels uncomfortable. It’s like, why can’t we be equals when you’re not going to be equals with your kids until they’re a lot older, and you have to accept that. That was hard for me at first as a parent, just realizing that I had to be an authority figure. I’m like, wait, what’s going on with that? I’m a Gen Xer. And that just seemed a little odd, but quickly that that structure was super important to kids. And even teenagers, having structure really helps ‘em.

(15:00):

And having some boundaries and rules and guide rails really helps ‘em. And you have to have that, and you can also have that loving relationship with your kids, but you do have to have those rules. And I think a lot of parents are reluctant to have rules because they don’t want to fight with their kids and they want their kids to be happy. But there’s a couple aspects to this. First is you have to think long-term, not just short term. You don’t want your kids just to be happy in the short term. You have to have them be happy in the long term. When my kids were really young, somebody said to me, remember, you’re not raising children. You’re raising adults. And I had that was so insightful, and I’ve thought about that almost every day since. That’s what you have to do, think long-term about what’s going to be good for them as they grow up in the longterm.

(15:48):

The other piece is, and I know a lot of other parents have had this experience too, when you have set rules, you actually have to fight with your kids less. So for example, one of the rules in the book is you get your first smartphone when you get your driver’s license. So that’s one rule. It’s a line in the sand, it’s a clear event, and then you don’t have to fight with them every day about it. If you have a squishier rule or not even a rule, just like, oh, we’ll get you on one, you’re ready.

Justin Baeder, PhD (16:19):

Yeah,

Jean Twenge, PhD (16:19):

You’re going to be fighting with your kids late every day, if that’s what you’re saying. So that’s the whole, it depends. And I don’t know. It’s actually easier in many cases to have a set rule.

Justin Baeder, PhD (16:31):

Absolutely. And some of those rules will strike readers as extreme. The idea of not giving a cell phone or a smartphone to a child until they’re 16, that’s far later than normal. What’s the average age these days for getting the first smartphone?

Jean Twenge, PhD (16:46):

I think the average age is 10 or 11, which is just way too young. And I have to be clear, I am seeing smartphone, an internet enabled phone, so you probably are going to need some sort of stopgap. Most parents want to be able to contact their kids mom by the time they’re in middle school, maybe they start taking a bus or they have sports practice or there’s some kind of reason. So what often happens is parents want to solve that one problem of school pickup or sports practice pickup or something like that. Or I really want to be able to get in touch with my kid, and that’s not what your kid’s going to use that phone for. You have to know that going in, you’re solving that one problem and you’re creating 200 others. So what I’m a big fan of is having something as a stopgap metrics.

(17:32):

So you can wait a lot longer to give them that full internet enabled smartphone is have something that’s more like the training wheels of phones. So there’s phones designed for kids like Gab, Tru, me, pinwheel, and they can have that, which generally you can call and text maybe a few other apps, but there’s no social media. There’s usually no internet browser. And importantly for today, there’s no AI boyfriends or girlfriends or AI sexy chat, which is the whole big thing now. So you can’t do that on these phones. So it’s easing them into having a phone in a way that makes a lot more sense for a 13, 14, even 15-year-old than a total smartphone

Justin Baeder, PhD (18:17):

And almost like a learner’s permit for driving. Right? There’s a little bit of ability to communicate, but it’s progressive. It builds up over time, and it’s not just hitting kids with the full internet and all of social media and every app in existence right out of the gate. Exactly.

Jean Twenge, PhD (18:33):

Yep.

Justin Baeder, PhD (18:33):

It really is remarkable having just been in an airport to see how much kids are on phones, even as babies. Kids are kind of glued to the screen from infancy Now in a lot of cases, and I know your book focuses primarily on students having their own phones, which you say 10 or 11 is far too early. We’ve got to phase this in and at much later ages, but phones are not the only technology that you talk about. You talk a little bit about gaming consoles, and especially for our purposes in schools, laptops, often school laptops are a major way that students are getting online. Talk to us about some of your thoughts on school laptops and what happens during the school day with cell phones.

Jean Twenge, PhD (19:14):

Okay, well, let me rant a little first to get it out of my system. As a parent, the school laptop is the bane of my existence. You can’t put parental controls on it. Many of them, you can access YouTube. I just found out two days ago that my 13-year-old, she was able to access Disney plus on her school laptop. And that sounds like, oh yeah, they’re going to watch some Disney cartoon. It’s all a BC content. So she ended up watching some cop show where women got kidnapped, and I will stop there. There was a lot of gory details on the school laptop where I can’t, she’s supposed to be doing her homework.

(19:56):

So yeah, please administrators work with your IT departments to block Netflix and Disney Plus and all of these things, and YouTube, if you can. Now, I know YouTube can have educational purposes. I use it in my own teaching in college, but maybe that video can be incorporated in Canvas or something or some other link because kids are watching that one video for social studies class, and then it’s video after video after video on there. It’s terrible. So yeah, really, really hard to manage that school laptop where they’re supposed to be doing homework. So I think that has to be on administrator’s radar that that’s a huge, huge problem. And I know I’m not the only parent who has had that experience either, unfortunately. So I did get my kids’ personal laptops with the idea that, okay, most of the time they could do their homework on that.

(20:53):

That’s worked out for my high school student. But my middle school student, they, and I don’t blame the administrators for this, they banned the personal laptops for taking them to school. I totally get why, but then that at least you can put parental controls on it, which I strongly recommend because most of the time, if you follow the rules as I have them roughly laid out, your kid’s not going to have an internet enabled phone until they’re older. But for homework and other things, they’re going to need some access to the internet. But if you don’t put parental controls on it, they can very easily open social media accounts, access, pornography access, all kinds of other sites. There’s a bunch of sites out there that tell girls how to starve themselves. Anorexia websites, they’re everywhere. So you’ll need to have those parental controls in place to block those. And I think a lot of parents think of the laptop, oh, they’re going to do homework, not really processing. I certainly didn’t at first that you got to have some filtering on this, otherwise it’s going to be a big problem.

Justin Baeder, PhD (21:52):

Let’s talk just briefly about some of the other platforms that are out there, because often we think of video games as just a thing that comes on a cartridge and you just are playing it by yourself. But that’s often not the case anymore with gaming.

Jean Twenge, PhD (22:04):

So most games kids these days will play them on laptops, sometimes on consoles, but they’ll play them with friends. So that’s very common. So Roblox works that way. Minecraft does too. And so it’s not as obviously toxic as social media say, because those games, they’re often playing with friends and interacting with them usually through voice in real time, and that’s kind of cool. However, you still got to worry about time limits because that’s fine for an hour a day or so. But if you let a kid do that unlimited, you’re going to have a hard time getting them to do their homework or see people in person or go out and exercise or do anything else for a lot of kids. So I recommend that if that is something your kid enjoys, especially if they enjoy doing it with friends, that’s cool, but put a time limit on it, maybe an hour a day at most on weekdays and two hours on the weekend. That part, the exact role is going to depend on the kids. My kids, it’s 30 minutes on weekdays and one hour a day on weekend days,

Justin Baeder, PhD (23:09):

And hopefully it is friends. I think that’s worth looking into as well.

Jean Twenge, PhD (23:12):

That’s the other piece. Yeah, right, because right. The other thing, those platforms, unknown adults can enter Roblox, and there’s all kinds of predators. Social media too, a lot. I think a lot of people don’t realize just how easy it is for unknown adults to contact children on most social media platforms.

Justin Baeder, PhD (23:33):

I wonder if we could close by talking a little bit about the school day, because you point out in the book that there’s a little bit of hypocrisy among Silicon Valley tech executives who send their kids to extremely low tech schools who don’t give them devices, who have them interact in the real world and do work with pencil and paper, and yet they’re the ones developing these platforms that absorb so much of our attention and so much of our kids’ attention. What do you think the school day should look like and what is happening in schools with electronics that deviates from that vision that you have?

Jean Twenge, PhD (24:05):

Yeah, so let’s start with smartphones. So a lot of states, school districts are increasingly coming around to the idea that we should not allow phones during the school day belt belt. So not just classroom to classroom, not just during instructional time, but the whole school day, including lunch and breaks and so on. So the benefits there are then it’s more consistent. It’s kind of like some of the other rules in the book that you have one simple rule, it’s actually easier to enforce, and then it’s also not teachers love it, then it’s not, oh, the cool teacher lets me have my phone, and then the not cool teacher doesn’t let me have my phone. And then what some of my teachers have done, oh, you can use your phone if you finish your work. Oh my God, really? Because how’s that going to go with your average 15-year-old?

(24:57):

Then they’re going to rush through their work and then be on their phone. So if it’s the whole school day, then they talk to each other at lunch. Then there’s not the drama of the social media during the breaks that gets people going and fighting. There’s not, and you mentioned this earlier, there’ve been all kinds of discipline incidents at schools too, where kids are filming each other in the locker room or under the stall in the bathroom and then posting it, thinking it’s funny because they’re kids and they’re going to do dumb things, but let’s not give them the ability to do those dumb things. If they don’t have access to their phone during the school day, that problem should go away. Then if they have the phone, then you already know something is going

Justin Baeder, PhD (25:40):

Wrong. So the way for the day is the way to go. And I certainly have appreciated from the school perspective when states step up a little bit and say, alright, we’re not even going to leave this up to the individual school. We’re going to back you up and not make you the bad guy. We’re going to be the bad guy and say, statewide, we’re just going to have phones away for the day. I think that’s not always a popular policy, but I like it for that same reason that it takes the heat off of us and allows us to just have fewer arguments, just do what we’re here to do, which is just teach and learn, and that’s what it’s about. Speaking as a parent, and particularly a parent who remembers being a kid or a teen in the eighties, early nineties, what is some of what we experienced in those decades that you wanted and want your kids to experience Now, even though we’re completely surrounded by technology?

Jean Twenge, PhD (26:30):

Well, for one thing, speak of no phones during the school day. It would be great if kids and teens could have the experience that Gen X kids had in the eighties and early nineties where they got a break from their parents during the school day.

Justin Baeder, PhD (26:47):

Not what I thought you were going to say, but I see where you’re going.

Jean Twenge, PhD (26:49):

Yeah, because heard about this a lot from both students and parents and also teachers. There was an op-ed by a teacher, which was very eyeopening to me. I think she teaches freshman English at a high school, and she said she’s had students where the parents are texting all the time of, Hey, how’d that test go? Did you get your grade back on this? And you asked most parents, most of whom are Gen Xers who have kids that age, would you have liked it if your parents could have contacted you at every second during the school day? And the answer is usually, heck no. I’m really glad that that wasn’t going on, because it stresses kids out a lot of times. And it can also be, even if they’re stressed from something else and then they’re reaching out to mom or dad, then they’re not learning how to deal with that on their own, which they’re going to have to do eventually.

(27:36):

And some of this perspective too is from teaching college and talking to a lot of people who work on college campuses, everywhere I go, they say, I have more and more students who can’t make even simple decisions without texting their parents. And these are adults, but that’s set up during high school. And some of that is the phone. Some of it is that parents have not given their kids the same freedoms that they had when they were children and teenagers. So rule eight in the book is give your kids real world freedom because you’re going to raise an adult. It’s not just reasonable limits around phones. It’s also that they need to have those experiences of being independent to build resilience. So when they’re really young, that could be you’re in the grocery store and you say, Hey, I need the mac and cheese. It’s the next style over. Can you go grab it for me? Or having them help around the house when they’re older, they can go into the grocery store themselves, pick out a few things, and pay with the credit card and talk to the cashier. Even though that’s cringe. And I know that from my own kids, walk or bike to school, get that driver’s license when they’re old enough, go out with their friends, have those independent experiences so they’re not getting to college like I heard about this recently and not knowing how to use a washing machine among other things,

Justin Baeder, PhD (28:55):

More experience in the real world, less online. Love it. So the book is 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World. Dr. Twenge, if people want to follow your work or learn more about your many books, where’s the best place for them to go online?

Jean Twenge, PhD (29:10):

So I have a website, jean twenge.com, so J-E-A-N-T-W-E-N-G e.com. And that has a little bit about each of the books and the speaking engagements that I do, some of my op-eds and videos, podcasts, and so on.

Justin Baeder, PhD (29:27):

Thank you so much. It’s important work, and I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you today. Thanks for your time.

Jean Twenge, PhD (29:31):

Thank you.

Announcer (29:32):

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at Principal Center dot com slash radio.

The Teaching Show

FASE Reading & Vocabulary in the Science Classroom with Marcie Samayoa

Show notes, links, and transcript…

Listen now

7 months ago · Justin Baeder, PhD

Book: Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, by Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan

As summarized at Vocabulary-Matters.org:

Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) proposed categorizing words into one of three tiers for the purpose of vocabulary instruction.

In this model, Tier 1 words are basic and frequently used, so probably do not need to be taught; Tier 2 words are more challenging but used across disciplines; and Tier 3 words are rare and specific to a certain domain.

As summarized by the Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College Columbia:

One of the ways we decide which words to teach is by using the tiered vocabulary concept developed by Dr. Isabel Beck. Beck thinks of vocabulary words as belonging to one of three categories:

Tier 1 words are basic words that students typically know, unless they are an ELL, and in that case they may need to be taught that word. Tier 1 words include: computer, sunlight, coffee, sleep, etc.

Tier 2 words are those that are often used in classrooms and extend beyond one particular subject area, including: analyze, tweak, estimate, determine — words in that academic arena.

Tier 3 words are highly specific for each content area, and are housed within a particular subject. Examples of Tier 3 words include: parabola, hypotenuse, simile, monarchy, osmosis, etc.

An important insight:

Tier 3 words are easy to identify; these are the words that we need to teach in order for students to understand a particular concept. … Tier 2 words, however, are often not taught explicitly since the assumption is that students already know what they mean. It’s the Tier 2 words that need extra attention in our classrooms. These are the words to spend time teaching and modeling for your students. What this looks like will vary depending on your grade level and content area. link

Listen here or in your favorite podcast app

Announcer (00:28):

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here’s your host, director of The Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder.

Justin Baeder (00:38):

Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Brig Leane. Brig is an education consultant and former principal of Fruita Middle School in Colorado, which under his leadership became a national model professional learning community, a veteran of the United States Coast Guard. He began his second career as an educator in 2000 and has served as a principal, assistant principal and teacher at the middle and high school levels in inner city, suburban and rural schools. Break has also been an adjunct professor at Colorado Christian University and his work has been published in Phi Delta Kappan, principal Leadership and elsewhere. And he’s the author of Singleton’s in A PLC at work, as well as the new book, the PLC Dashboard, implementing, leading and Sustaining Your Professional Learning Community at Work, which we’re here to talk about today and now our

Announcer (01:27):

Feature presentation.

Justin Baeder (01:29):

Brig, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

Brig Leane (01:30):

Justin, I’m honored to be with you today. Thanks for the invitation.

Justin Baeder (01:34):

Well, I’m excited to talk about your work helping schools implement PLCs. And I understand this started with your school when you were a middle school principal. What was it initially that got you going with PLCs? Why did you pursue and go so far with the PLC model as a principal?

Brig Leane (01:54):

To be perfectly honest, I started, I had many false starts in the PLC process meetings that when I was in the classroom as a math teacher in high school meetings that were called PLCs, but they really weren’t doing anything like was in the books, but I didn’t know it at the time, so I just thought PLCs didn’t mean much. Then I got asked to go to a middle school that was struggling to be a math teacher there, and I went and my partner there was a guy named George. He was an out of retirement math teacher they could find for this position. And at the time I was getting my master’s degree in ED leadership and I read my first DE four PLC book and I thought, wow, what I’m reading in this book is nothing like what I’m hearing people call PLCs. So I went back and said to this out of retirement teacher who was also teaching eighth grade math, I said, George, would you be willing to try this thing called A PLC with me?

(02:53):

And to my surprise, he said yes. And we just did the simple determine an essential skill, have a short way to assess whether kids could do it or not. Brig Leane: “And we did that 14 times over the course of the school year, just 14 skills that we thought kids should learn. And George went back into retirement at the end of the year and I got a job and assistant principal and I didn’t think anything of it until the state test results came out. And we were the highest growth of any level third through 10th grade in our 22,000 student school district by far. And it was really the simplicity of just doing the PLC process of determining something they had to know, having a way to assess where they can do it and intervening for those when they can’t.” And I became kind of a believer at that point. And since then I’ve been an assistant principal and most recently I was the principal of Fruit of Middle School, as you mentioned. And now I work with principals and teacher leaders all over the country, try and implement the PLC process in a doable way. And so that’s my background on PLC work and where I developed just the experience to know it works

Justin Baeder (04:10):

And what a dramatic and visible impact in your own practice. And how many years had you been teaching at the point when you started doing this with your colleague?

Brig Leane (04:18):

I’d been teaching about seven or eight years, and I felt like I was a very good teacher, but I really didn’t know how to collaborate in a meaningful way. And I certainly had no idea how to implement the PLC process in a doable way either.

Justin Baeder (04:32):

Right. I agree completely that it’s one of those things that everybody has heard of and everybody thinks they’re doing, but if you look at what people are doing, it’s all over the place and people often are not talking about the same thing at all. And I imagine a lot of your work is involved with helping schools get that right and get those key elements in place.

Brig Leane (04:48):

It is, and I end up working with a lot of principals and teacher leaders who they’ve maybe tried the PLC process in the past, but it just didn’t take or it didn’t go. And yet we keep coming back to the research on collective teacher efficacy and we keep coming back to the research on a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And Justin, I’ve just found that many people just don’t know where to start in the PLC process. Maybe they’ve tried it several times in the past and they didn’t quite get the results they want, but we keep coming back with the research that says Collective teacher efficacy makes a big difference. A guaranteed and viable curriculum makes a big difference. And the PLC process does help people make those things happen in the classrooms, but you got to know how to begin that. And that’s where a lot of people, I think struggle is they just don’t know where to start. They don’t know how to do it.

Justin Baeder (05:42):

I know there’ve been many, many books written on how to do PLCs. Right. And your book is called the PLC dashboard. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the dashboard idea itself. Take us into where that dashboard came from and what that looks like today.

Brig Leane (05:56):

Well, the started, because what really I think is happening is there are many principals who just through the natural things that take place in a school, they don’t end up with much time to devote to the PLC process, not because they don’t want to, but just because of the urgent issues that come up in a principal’s life. And the dashboard is a simple way, it’s really low tech. It even could be on a bulletin board in a team meeting room, it could be on a Google sheet. But what it really does is it just is a way to tabulate which teams and which singletons have gotten the expected PLC products done. And so the simplicity of the dashboard, it starts with what I call the seven-step learning cycle. And the seven-step learning cycle just puts a little more meat on the bones from the four critical questions that do four and his colleagues came out with initially.

(06:50):

And so this seven-step learning cycle is captured in a one page template. The one page template is very similar for a singleton as it is for a team. And that one page template is captured on the PLC dashboard. It could be with like a tiger paw if you’re the Tigers, it could be with a tiger paw next to the team name like the Algebra one team or the third grade team or that singleton art teacher, Singleton band teacher. And what it allows for is a principal who’s swamped. I know when I was a principal, we used to have to worry about getting subs on Fridays. That was a real challenge. Now it’s a challenge. You get a sub any day. There used to be hiring pools of educators you could hire. Now we’re hiring pretty much the only applicant at times. And so I think all those things are taking up a lot more administrative time on a day-to-day basis where the principal might want to spend more time on the PLC process. They just can’t. And so with the dashboard, they could say, well, it looks like the Algebra one team or the second grade team is not getting done what’s expected. That’d be an indication to an administrator to say, I better join that team. And so that’s what the dashboard is about. It’s about a way to sustain this process, recognizing that principal don’t have a lot of capacity, they’re not looking for things to take up their time. Those things are coming and finding them.

Justin Baeder (08:22):

So Brig, one issue that I’m hearing is that sometimes PLCs are not getting the traction they need to, not because of some esoteric difficulty, but because the basic steps aren’t actually taking place. Is that right?

Brig Leane (08:36):

That’s right. In my experience, the PLC process educators struggle for three main reasons with the process. The first reason they struggle is they’re not sure. Why are we trying to make a shift from teaching everything to ensuring the learning of the essentials? They’re not sure why we do that with a collaborative partner. They just don’t know why. Maybe they’re more in the more traditional mindset of teach, teach, test, assign the grades and move on. Whereas the PLC process says, let’s start by determining something that we love these kids too much for them not to have learned. So there are some that struggle with why. There are also some that struggle with the second reason they don’t know how they might want to collaborate. They might want kids to learn the essential learnings, but they just don’t know how to do it. And the third reason they struggle is they don’t have the time or the support to do this work that’s expected.

(09:33):

And so those are the three main reasons that I find that educators struggle with the PLC process. And that’s how the book, the PLC dashboard is laid out. It starts with just a refresher of why would we do this collaborative thing? And I start with 10 reasons why my top 10. And if you don’t understand why we’d be doing something like the PLC process, all the other stuff just seems like one more thing to do. But there are plenty of people who do have the reasons to do this process down. Some of my main reasons are new teacher support. Some of my main reasons are to give kids hope, but once they’ve got that, they really do want to know how to do it. And that’s the bulk of the PLC dashboard book is how to do this process in a meaningful way. And then the dashboard itself is just a way to see who needs that more time and support. So that’s kind of how the book’s laid out.

Justin Baeder (10:26):

Well, thinking back to when I was a principal and we did something that we called PLCs, and what I would always try to do is circulate among the meetings. Most of the meetings happened at the same time. All of them pretty much met simultaneously with maybe a few exceptions due to individual schedules. But I would try to get around to all the meetings and I never would be able to, even in a fairly modest sized elementary school, there were just too many teams. We had at least six or seven teams meeting at once, and I just couldn’t be in all those places at once and I didn’t really feel like I needed to. But it sounds like one type of information that you have when you’re using a PLC dashboard, this is who needs additional support, who as you said, is not really getting it done. Is that right?

Brig Leane (11:08):

That’s absolutely it. And really you could use the PLC dashboard as a way to humiliate or a way it gives you a lot of insight, that’s for sure. But what I coach principals to do is just to say, you know what? This is just your indication that that teacher or that team is unsupported. And I’ll give you an example. I was working with a principal in Arkansas just last year, and I remember I said it was an elementary principal and I said, well, how are your teams doing with the collaboration and the PLC process? And he said, oh, they’re doing great. And I said, well, how do you know? And he said, well, I just go and look in their Google Drive. And I said, oh, fantastic. Would you be willing to give me access so I could look too? And he said, sure. He gave me access.

(11:51):

And I went into the kindergarten teams folder and there were like 26 folders in there, all of ‘em with different PLC names. And I thought, oh, okay. And I looked through some of the folders and couldn’t find the thing that made sense. And then I went into the first grade team and it was like 19 folders there with different names. And I quickly realized this is too much to look at. So I went back to that principal and I said, how do you really know how the teams are doing? And he got a smile on his face and he said, I’ve got my hunches. I said, that’s kind of what I thought. And so he and I developed the PLC dashboard on his campus, which is really just a listing of teams and singletons. It’s a hyperlink if you’re using a Google sheet to the actual one page template that teams and Singletons ought to be going through.

(12:40):

And every time I show that one page template to teams and singletons, they all are like, yeah, these are great memory joggers. These are great prompts that are on this. And when I started this, Justin, the template used to be four pages, but over the last decade, educators have said, Hey Brig, could you shorten it here and could you make this more clear? And now it’s down to just a concise one page template that really feels doable to educators and can give that principle who wants to know who’s doing okay, the insights they need in seconds. I mean, you can look at the dashboard and know if you’re doing it right, you can know in seconds which team needs more support.

Justin Baeder (13:22):

And I think what’s really helpful there is the specificity, because there can be obvious problems if somebody is missing the meetings or if the team is not meeting at all. But often it’s easy to overlook it if a team is meeting and they seem to be making good use of their time, they’re having a nice conversation, it seems productive. They took notes. And I think that was the accountability that was in place in my school was teachers had to take notes during their PLC and they’d get saved somewhere. So I could look at their notes. But as I look at the seven step learning cycle in your book, the dashboard, I’m realizing that a lot of those details that probably make all the difference were probably not in place.

Brig Leane (13:59):

What you’re saying just cracks me up and I get that, could I have a great agenda? Could I take great minutes? And really no kid is growing and no teacher’s learning new instructional strategies. Those things could happen. And I’m with you. It’s kind of like I once had a principal require lesson plans from every teacher to be printed and put in his office by Monday morning. I wanted to write on my lesson plans, if you read this, please fire me because I knew he never read ‘em. And that’s not to say that you or other people don’t read the agendas and minutes, but I just think you could have a great agenda like you said, and still maybe not meet the two purposes of the PLC process, which are one that kids are learning, the things the teams say are essential, and two, that the professionals are learning in community, those new instructional strategies. So you’re absolutely right.

Justin Baeder (14:53):

Well, and as I look at the first step in the learning cycle, determine the essential learning target, I think that was probably not something we asked people to do on a consistent basis is actually articulate that those essential learning targets set smart goals and go through the rest of the cycle there. Talk to us a little bit about that cycle and how long it takes and how big grain size wise those essential learning targets can, should be ideally in order for this process to work. You have a lot in the book about filling in the graph of how many students have achieved mastery, but we also have very different ideas circulating in the profession about how much time those learning targets should take up. Do I set a new one every day? Is this for the whole quarter? What’s kind of the interval that we’re talking about here?

Brig Leane (15:37):

Well, what another great question because what I coach the teams that I work with to do, first off, I say let’s start kind of like if we were to learn how to play football, we wouldn’t get out all the yard markers and hire referees and put helmets on. We’d just throw a ball back and forth. That’s where we’d start. And when I work with teams, that’s where I start with them. I say, alright, what’s something in the next three to four weeks in the curriculum you’re teaching or in the standards that you have to make sure you cover? What’s something that you’d be embarrassed if a kid couldn’t do? And usually these teams are like, well, yeah, I’d be embarrassed if they didn’t know their letter sounds or if they couldn’t find the surface area of a rectangular prism or graph a line or cyto source, they know what those are and they’re usually pretty good at that.

(16:29):

And so that’s where I tend to just throw the ball back and forth. I say, all right, in roughly a month, what is that skill? And it comes from a learning target, it should come from a learning target, a standard that’s been broken up into those learning targets. But at the very beginning I give teachers a little bit of leeway there. I really say you got to pick something that comes from your heart. I think one thing we struggle with is just getting good at the PLC process at first. And so you ask, how long would this process take with the average learning target, let’s say there’s three to four learning targets per standard. The average learning target to go through this process when teams can meet roughly an hour a week would be they could get through one essential learning target every three-ish weeks at the beginning.

(17:21):

And I think that’s really doable as you get better at it, maybe you’d go up a little bit more than that. But I really think a real important principle is the Goldilocks principle. Not too many, not too few, but what power it would be if every kid who left Algebra one could do nine or 11 grade level rigorous skills. And if that were the case, that would change things for those kids. I mean, algebra one’s a real gatekeeper to graduation. And I think the same thing’s true for third grade and fourth grade and first grade is that if there were 8, 9, 10 skills learning targets that a team got good at in that first and second year, that would change things because it’d bring a lot of equity, a lot of academic equity where it wouldn’t matter which teacher you were assigned in third grade, you’d come out with those same essential skills or at least have been given a lot of in-class support if you hadn’t learned it. So it’s a good question to kind of say what’s the pace? And I kind of think when you start out, less is more, but the Goldilocks principle applies, which is if you’ve got time to collaborate, let’s make sure it’s filled with the PLC process.

Justin Baeder (18:40):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Brig, that’s helpful and gives us a little bit of flexibility, and I think it’s also helpful to think about what’s done with that learning target. So the next step in the cycle is to set a smart goal and create a common formative assessment. Tell us about that.

Brig Leane (18:55):

Well, that’s where a team, let’s say for instance a kindergarten team that says, by the end of the year kids got to be able to work within 20 or know their numbers one through 20 or zero through 20. The smart goal says, okay, in a three to four week period of time, the teachers on that team are going to set a smart goal for all their kids to be proficient. And the smart goal isn’t shared with the kids, but it’s something that behind the scenes we say, you know what? By October 15th, we’d be thrilled if we can get to 73% of our kids proficient in graphing a line or in knowing their first five numbers. And that’s what a smart goal does is it tends to bring that second big idea of the PLC process into the team, which is collective responsibility. They’re not your kids, Justin and my kids, they’re our kids.

(19:53):

They’re not that teacher’s kids on an IEP and that teacher’s kids that are English language learners. They’re our kids. And so we’d set a smart goal on the grade level skill for a three to four week-ish period of time that would include in class tier one intervention. Then that creating the common formative assessment, which is also done before we teach the unit, that’s that quiz like way to assess whether kids can do that skill or not. It could be a pencil and paper assessment, more like a quiz than it would be an end of chapter test. It could be a observation, it could be a presentation, it could be a project, it could come in a variety of sources, but it would be one of those things with a team together decided, yeah, this would be evidence that a kiddo can do that work proficiently. So that that second step is after you’ve determined that essential learning is,

Justin Baeder (20:49):

I’m thinking of one team that I worked with in my school that had especially strong writing instruction, and one of the things that they would do is common formative writing assessments. They would on a pretty consistent basis throughout the year, I think it was probably not as frequently as you’re talking about, I think it was three times a year, they would have a prompt, they would have a rubric and they would cover up the names with sticky notes. They would mix up all the papers and score them with the rubric and compare scores. I think two people would score every paper, and if the scores were different, they would confer and figure out what score to end up with, and then they would take the sticky notes off, look at the names, record the scores, and then figure out what to do. Talk to us a little bit about the assessment and the scoring and the interrater reliability piece because I think that kind of thing is pretty rare. My sense is that most people are scoring their own assessments. They’re not really talking with their colleagues about scoring or assessing collaboratively. What are your thoughts on that?

Brig Leane (21:46):

Well, that’s step four in the seven step cycle, and that is, you’re absolutely right. It is a critical step to take. And the reason is because there’s so much professional development in it. Remember that second purpose of the PLC process is that the teachers are learning as a result of this process. And you put a group of teachers together who, like you just mentioned, when we establish integrated reliability by grading student work where I put my grade on it and you put your grade on it, maybe you gave the final writing a four because you said they had great ideas and content and I gave it a two because they didn’t capitalize and punctuate Well, who’s right? That is a fantastic discussion. And so the same thing applies in math. I mean, I’ll get math teachers, I’ve put ungraded student work from a common formative assessment on the doc camera with math teachers, and one of them gives it full credit because the kid got the answer and the other one gives ‘em no credit why they didn’t show work and who’s right.

(22:49):

What a fantastic professional discussion. And what I find is that when you do that with three or four pieces of ungraded student work on a team, you quickly do establish inner rate of reliability where we get the feeling, okay, this is what proficiency is. And the real reason that’s powerful in my experience is that you take a new teacher, someone who’s new to our profession, it is pretty darn tough in 2025 to put a grade in the grade book if you’re a new teacher. That especially is a low grade because when I started teaching, parents knew the grades every nine weeks and then they’d maybe be upset at that point. But what happens to a teacher in 2025 when they put a grade in the grade book,

Justin Baeder (23:30):

This book gets a phone call right away.

Brig Leane (23:32):

Yeah, you’re getting that. And I feel like that first year teacher who has a kid who writes IDK or something like that on his paper and is thinking of putting a zero in the grade book that’s going to basically torpedo that grade is going to be under such scrutiny themselves. But what about if that teacher is sitting on a collaborative team, that first year teacher and gets to say, what should I do about this? And they get to hear from those experienced teachers who say, here’s how I’d handle something like this. That’s such a benefit to our profession, and it’s just one of the many benefits of integrated reliability. The other benefit to integrated reliability, you brought it up in writing, which I love, is that when one teacher raises the bar up, if you do that alone and you’re the only one maybe in your department or in your building who’s got the bar high, whether it’s in behaviors or academics or writing, it’s pretty tough to keep it up there. But when you’ve established inner rate of reliability or calibrated your grading with a group of other individuals, and this is especially effective across English and social studies, when you’ve done that, then everybody’s willing to hold the bar high and we feel like we’re in it together and the kids can meet that, but not when it’s the bars down at the baseline level in one class and then the next one it’s high up. It’s not going to have the intended effect.

Justin Baeder (24:56):

Well, and I think if we are honest with ourselves, that is the reality most of the time that people actually do have fairly different expectations for their students. They set the bar in different places, and we find that out when we do this calibration work and we realize, oh, some people are scoring way up here. Some people are scoring way down there, the same piece of work, and that has consequences for how much students learn, right?

Brig Leane (25:20):

That’s right. Along the same lines, one thing that was kind of cracked me up when I was in the middle school as the principal, we were discussing different teams, essential learnings that they decided, and this social studies teacher team in our building had picked an acronym for kids to cite sources using this acronym, and this was for seventh graders. Well, as it turns out, the English team, same grade had a different acronym for citing sources. And you just have to think we all kind of laughed, but I basically just said, guys, I don’t think this is going to take me to decide this. I don’t care which acronym we use, but let’s use the same one. And when we figured out these fewer essential learnings, things like that happen, and I think it’s for the benefit of the students that we serve.

Justin Baeder (26:15):

And that really strikes me as the difference between a meeting where maybe people say what they individually do and kind of cross their arms and look at one another and don’t respond or don’t adjust in order to get on the same page. Don’t align. Don’t calibrate the difference between that and A PLC where there is collective responsibility and a collective commitment to have a high bar and have it consistent across classrooms and score consistently, no matter who’s scoring the paper and figure out if we’re not getting the results we need to in one classroom, what do we need to do differently?

Brig Leane (26:50):

That’s right. And you bring up that next step in the seven step cycle in the dashboard book, which is sharing results. And I always mention to the teams that I work with, I say, we’re not sharing results to judge one another. We’re sharing results to figure out what’s working best. Because one thing I like about one of Marzano’s landmark books, it’s called the Art and Science of Teaching and Teaching is both. And so I can’t be Justin and Justin, you can’t be Brig. But if we both have the target, we want kids to be able to graph a line and we say, we’re going to take three weeks to teach this and then to give the common formative assessment in three weeks. I love it that in the PLC process, you get to go at it your best way and I get to go at it my best way.

(27:32):

But we’re going to give that assessment on the same day and we’re going to share results. And it’s not to judge, but it’s to say, you know what? What’d you do that got those great results? Because if we just share opinions before we have any results, I’d rather go with my opinion. But if you’re using some instructional strategy, maybe you use manipulatives or there was a video link that you gave kids access to and it got really great results. That sure opens my eyes up a lot more to saying, Justin, what’d you do? And that’s one of the things I love about the PLC process. One of my reasons for doing it is embedded professional development because we’re going to do it in this unit. We’re going to do it in the next unit, and we’re going to do it in the next unit, and we’re going to keep doing that. And that job embedded ongoing professional development that’s focused really at just getting the best results is a big deal because it not only allows new teachers to pick up some new instructional strategies, it also allows our experienced teachers to share some of the ways that they have taught that they know really work and they get to do it in a way that’s not preachy. It’s just saying, Hey, I got better results. Let me share what I did. And then people are really open to it.

Justin Baeder (28:52):

I mean, it’s hard to argue with the results when we agree in advance on the criteria, but if we each have our own approach and then we are free to assess and evaluate however we want, we’re probably going to just defend whatever our approach was instead of having that commitment to saying, okay, we’re going to do whatever works. So if I don’t have the best results, I’m not going to dig my heels in and say, well, I know that my way is best. I’m going to have to admit, basically I agreed in advance to admit that my way may have not been the best, and if I need to change something, I’m doing, let’s do it. Let’s do whatever works for kids.

Brig Leane (29:30):

And that’s step seven in the seven step cycle is make changes to our instruction. And that’s why in step two, we set that smart goal. We set that smart goal not for your kids individually and my kids individually. We set that smart goal for our kids. And I can’t make that smart goal if you’re not a part of it with me, and you can’t without me. And so really the PLC process binds teachers together in a very reasonable way with the best of intentions, excuse me, with the best of intentions. And that is for the kids to learn this essential and for us to grow as professionals throughout the process. And all this is in my 127 page book, which is the book I wish I would’ve had when I was a principal trying to figure out this PLC process. I wish I’d have known to make sure we knew the why for this and to know how to do it in a meaningful way. And for myself as a busy principal, I wish I’d had a tracking way to do it. That’s a dashboard that can let you know in seconds who needs more support.

Justin Baeder (30:32):

Well, I wonder if we could take just a second to talk about that support because after we have the data from that formative assessment, there’s an opportunity before we move on to the next unit or the next learning target to intervene and to say, okay, not all of our kids are there yet, but we’re not done. We’re going to do something to get them there and take that second attempt or that next attempt. Talk to us a little bit about that action plan for intervention and extension that happens in step six.

Brig Leane (30:59):

Yeah, that one really seems to get some people really confused in the RTI or MTSS pyramid. Tier one is all about knowing those essential learnings and then intervening in class tier two is once we’ve left the unit, because we’re probably not going to get to a hundred percent of kids have learned it, but there comes a point at which we need to leave the unit and go to the next thing when we know which kids still don’t have it and we go onto that next unit, those kids on that list are ready for tier two. But too many people think that a kid who doesn’t at first learn something that a teacher team said was essential, too many educators think that that kid needs to go to an interventionist or something else. Oh no. That first intervention in the seven-step cycle that you’re talking about in my book, that first intervention that’s mentioned there is in class.

(31:56):

In other words, if we gave that formative assessment on a Tuesday by Thursday, give those kids the feedback and say, Hey, you seven for the last 20 minutes of class, you’re with me. And while I’m with the seven kids or 12 kids who couldn’t do it, the other 15 or 18 or however many they are who did get it, should be doing some type of an extension at that point. Maybe they have some choice. I’ve seen some teachers who for the extension group will put maybe three post-it notes on the whiteboard and they’ll tell the kids who are over there doing the extension, you can come ask me three questions, but when you come ask me, bring one of the post-it notes, and when the post-it notes are gone, you’re done asking me questions, which gets some of those extension kids to be asking each other working together to solve some of this.

(32:45):

And that gives the teacher a little bit of breathing room with that intervention group who needs that teacher the most to really help them get that reteaching and maybe even using a different modality. And then I’ve seen teachers call that time win time WIN. It’s what I need time. It’s not punishment time for the kids who didn’t learn it and reward time for the kids who did. It’s win time. I got to grow you all kids. I got to grow the kids that know it, and I got to grow the kids who don’t quite have this one yet. And so that’s really what it is. And sometimes a teacher might do that for 20 minutes right after the common formative assessment, maybe a day or two after. Maybe they’ll do it twice, 20 minutes, two times after it just for that reteaching. But it really is that acknowledgement that when we give kids quick feedback and we intervene on those essential skills more rapidly, not less rapidly, kids win. Kids grow. So it’s not some complex thing. It’s not sending them there. And the other thing I like about it, it’s not saying this, it’s not saying kids, any of you who want extra help come in at lunch or coming after school. Justin, I don’t know your experience, but mine was the kids you really needed to see never came in. So the only time we can guarantee we’ve got those kids is when they’re sitting in our classrooms. And that’s where that tier one intervention takes place.

Justin Baeder (34:14):

And there are a lot of pieces here for teams to get right. But if I’m understanding a lot of the magic of your approach in the PLC dashboard book is making that all visible to principles so that if a team does need support, as you said, that can come to leader’s attention and the team can get that support. Is that the idea?

Brig Leane (34:34):

It is. I certainly encourage guiding Coalitions, which is a teacher leadership and administrator team, to pull up the dashboard at each guiding coalition meeting and let’s just look at it together. What do you observe? What do you see? And it doesn’t take long for everybody who’s on that guiding coalition to know everybody’s paying attention to this for the benefit of the kids we serve. And when that happens, everybody tends to do just fine. I kind of liken it to this. If you and I were playing basketball against one another and we were just having fun shooting some hoops, we’d probably be playing kind of hard or however hard we’d want to. But then if somebody turned the scoreboard on and they were keeping track of Justin’s score and Brigs score, we’d probably play a little bit harder. Just kind of human nature. It’s that thing of something getting monitored. And that’s kind of the idea of the dashboard, which is how do people in the school know what matters to the leaders of the school? It’s those things we monitor. It’s those things we celebrate. And the dashboard gives principals and teacher leaders a great list of things to celebrate and to acknowledge that are going well. And that’s a big part of this process, is letting people know what we care about.

Justin Baeder (35:53):

So the book is the PLC dashboard, implementing, leading and Sustaining Your Professional Learning Community at Work, Brig Leane. If people want to get in touch with you and learn more about working together, where are some of the best places for them to go online?

Brig Leane (36:07):

Well, the best place is my website. It’s at BrigLeane.com, and my last name is not spelled typically, so it’s L-E-A-N-E brigleane.com. I’m also on Instagram at BRIGLeane, and I’m on X at @BrigLeane as well. So those are other places as well.

Justin Baeder (36:25):

Brig, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It’s been a pleasure,

Brig Leane (36:28):

Justin. I’m honored to have any of us spend this time with you, and thanks for what you do for educators.

Announcer (36:34):

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at Principal Center dot com slash radio.

From Walkthroughs to Wins with Justin Baeder

Full Transcript:

Courtney Groskin (00:21):

Welcome back to another episode of C3. I’m Courtney Groskin and I’m here with

Sandy (00:26):

Sandy Heiser.

Courtney Groskin (00:28):

We’re so excited to welcome Sandy to the podcast. Sandy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up here?

Sandy (00:35):

Sure. I’m happy to be here. This happens to be my 30th year in education. I started as a high school social studies teacher, but I’ve taught high school, middle school, and I became a middle school instructional coach in 2009, and it really changed the way I looked at education. I loved that job so much. From there, I ended up going into administration, so I’ve been an assistant principal at the middle high school level. I’ve been a middle school principal, and then currently I am serving as an assistant principal at Skyline High School here in St. Brain

Courtney Groskin (01:16):

Bring. So you really bring an administrative perspective along with your coaching perspective as well as that middle school perspective as well. So you’re going to really help in us to deepen our conversations on C3.

Sandy (01:29):

Yeah, I hope so. I definitely know the administrator side of things, really do try to approach it with a coaching perspective as much as I can.

Courtney Groskin (01:39):

Yeah, thank you for that. We would like to welcome Justin Baeder to C3. Dr. Justin Baeder is the director of The Principal Center and organization dedicated to enhancing instructional leadership in K to 12 education with a PhD in educational leadership and policy studies from the University of Washington and a master’s in curriculum and instruction from Seattle University. Dr. Baeder combines academic expertise with practical experience. He previously served as a principal and teacher in Seattle Public Schools. Dr. Baeder is the creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, a program that has supported over 10,000 school leaders across 50 countries in making daily classroom visits a consistent practice. He is also the author of, now We’re Talking 21 Days to High Performance Instructional Leadership and co-author of mapping professional practice added to develop instructional frameworks to support teacher growth. Welcome Justin. Thanks so much for being on C3. Can you tell us about yourself?

Justin Baeder (02:39):

Sure thing. Well, thank you Courtney. I’m honored to be here and excited to talk about instructional leadership. I’m driven by, I don’t want to say regret, but reflection on my own time as a teacher and principal and always wanting to be the one who gives good feedback. I think every principal wants to give good feedback. Every instructional coach wants to give good feedback and we all have that. If I knew then what I think I know now, maybe things could have been even better than they were. But I had a great experience as a principal, got to work with a lot of great teachers in Seattle Public Schools and for the last 13 years I’ve been an independent consultant and author at The Principal Center where I try to help administrators get into classrooms and have good feedback, conversations that change teacher practice and as a result of that, make better decisions at the school level. I think that’s a lot of the connection for me is decision-making at the school level. If we can get into conversations with teachers every single day, every decision we make as leaders is going to be better. So that’s kind where I’m coming from

Courtney Groskin (03:47):

And I know I can tell this is resonating with Sandy, she’s an administrator, so I can see her eye lighting up of like, tell me all the things.

Sandy (03:55):

Well, it’s that time too, right? I was in classrooms today doing some informal observ and it’s goal setting time as well, so it’s so relevant what you’re talking about.

Justin Baeder (04:05):

Well, I think so much of what we do in the evaluation process from goal setting to formal observations to written evaluations is so high stakes precisely because we have so few at bats, we might do one or two formal observations and that’s it for the year. So there’s a lot of stress, understandably, around this process for teachers. There’s a lot of stress for administrators, and my general take is that the more we make this a normal thing to do, the less stressful each individual interaction is, and that really increases the chances that it’ll be a good interaction, that it’ll be a good conversation. It’s kind of like saying, alright, you’re going to meet the love of your life, but you only get to go on one date and then you have to make a decision. It’s like, well, that sounds like a good setup for a reality TV show, but not how I would want to live my life.

Sandy (04:53):

Oh my gosh, you’re so right. And I feel like with all the administrators I’ve ever worked with, the area where they typically feel the most unsure is teacher evaluation every time. So your work is so important

Justin Baeder (05:13):

And it’s full of high stakes decisions that are based on only a fraction of the information that exists, right? If I’m good at observations, I do everything I’m supposed to do, I’m still going to see what 0.1% of a teacher’s teaching in a given year, and if I’m really consistent in getting in the classrooms, I might see 1%, and yet we have to make decisions on the basis of that tiny, tiny proportion of the whole that we see. So yeah, I think the more we can get perspective from teachers, the better decisions we’re going to make. Yeah.

Sandy (05:50):

Well, with that, why don’t start our question. Importance of feedback being both clear, actionable. So what do you see as the key ingredients of a feedback conversation that actually leads to a shift in practice?

Justin Baeder (06:05):

I think the first key to a feedback conversation that changes practice, and this is going to be kind of step zero, is it has to actually happen. And when I talk to people about their goals for classroom walkthroughs or their goals or feedback conversations, they often describe to me a very complex process that doesn’t seem very doable. And I think we often let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So we generate these very complex processes that don’t seem likely to be sustainable, that don’t seem likely to occur on a consistent basis. So I think the first design consideration when we’re planning how we’re going to approach conversations, is this something that realistically we can do over and over again every single day or pretty close to every single day. And from there, we can build in the elements that are going to have the impact that we want, but often we work the opposite direction and we think, how could I achieve all of my wildest dreams as an instructional leader in one conversation go, and then we develop a process that’s so complex, so cumbersome that it just doesn’t happen. And I think that’s the number one scenario. The number one circumstance that people find themselves in is that they have a really great process that they never actually do.

Courtney Groskin (07:23):

And if you can’t carry it forward, why are we going through the motions we have to launch? Right,

Justin Baeder (07:29):

Exactly.

Courtney Groskin (07:30):

So many leaders worry about balancing encouragement with constructive critique. How can feedback conversations strike the right tone so that teachers feel supported but also motivated to make change?

Justin Baeder (07:41):

I think there does come a time when we need to share critical information with someone, either because they are not aware of it and we need to make them aware so that they can decide what to do or after they’re aware if they haven’t done anything about it, so that we can push for that change that needs to occur. I think most of the time though, these conversations can happen without that kind of positive and negative judgment on the part of the coach or administrator. And that’s the best case scenario to me because I think in order to change their practice, we want teachers to have as much ownership as possible. We want teachers to say, okay, I’m a self-directed learner. You can help me a lot by being in my classroom and talking with me about my practice, but I as a professional am going to improve faster if I retain ownership of that practice.

(08:33):

And that doesn’t always work. People sometimes don’t retain ownership of their practice, but that’s what we want to strive for, that people can be professionals, that people can be self-directed. So I think the framework that I use for thinking about that issue is one of autonomy, and I think of it like a two by two grid, and I’ve gotten this published in an article here or there, but I think about attention and control, and I think for most teachers, they don’t get paid very much attention to. And I remember in my final year in the classroom thinking, you know what? Nobody’s really paying that much attention to what I’m doing day to day as a teacher. So I think the norm is that people don’t pay very much attention to teachers. Most of the time they’re in their classroom with their students and nobody else is paying attention.

(09:17):

So if you are getting into classrooms, if you are talking with teachers, you’re definitely in that small percentage of people who are approaching it differently. So I think our obligation as instructional leaders is to pay attention, to show up, to engage, to talk, to listen, to be curious, and to get teachers telling us about their practice and about their thinking. The second axis of the autonomy matrix is control. And sometimes we do need to exert control because unacceptable things are happening. We do need to be directive and say, Hey, this is really not okay. You can’t do that, or You need to be doing this and you’re not. So it’s appropriate sometimes to be directive, but I think often when we’re directive, we take away the autonomy that teachers need to actually do the professional work of teaching and make their own decisions. And I think we can look at a couple of different things that can change as a result of feedback.

(10:09):

And the most basic one is behavior. So if we have a behavior that is unacceptable on the teacher’s part and the behavior needs to change, well, that is a time when we could give directive feedback and be critical and say, Hey, this is not working, or this is not acceptable. I really need you to do X, Y, Z. And we kind of know those situations when we come to them, they tend to be those kind of bright lines that stand out to us, but they don’t apply that directive frame. That directive relationship doesn’t really apply to most of the decisions that teachers make to most of what we see, especially for people who are doing fine. If you have someone who’s doing fine, it doesn’t really help for me to be the decision maker about your practice. We need teachers to retain that ownership of their practice so that we can be a reflective partner.

(10:58):

So I think of that role as much more of a coaching role where it’s our job to get at the decision making that teachers are doing and have an influence at the level of decision making rather than simply just second guess and critique what we saw. I’m very much about that teacher autonomy. I think when we get a high degree of information, we’re paying a lot of attention, but we’re not exercising a lot of control over the teacher’s practice. We’re not being directive when we don’t need to be. That’s when we have what I call professional autonomy. Now in the shift from ignoring teachers and staying out of their classrooms and leaving them completely alone, sometimes we go to the opposite extreme and go from low attention, low control, to high attention, high control. And I think sometimes we aspire to that because we think it would give us the opportunity to help people improve more.

(11:47):

But what I think that often turns out to be is micromanagement when we exert a high degree of control over someone else’s professional work. I don’t know a better term for that than micromanagement because if it’s professional work, the professional needs to own it and the professional who needs to own, it’s not me, it’s the teacher in the classroom doing the teaching. So I think we need to, as much as possible, avoid grabbing the steering wheel in teachers’ classrooms unless there’s a serious issue that needs an immediate change. I think we want teachers to have their hands on the wheel most of the time.

Sandy (12:19):

No kidding. Courtney, this is making me think so much about cognitive coaching right now. Courtney and I are facilitating the foundation seminar right now of cognitive coaching and everything you’re saying, Justin, just trying to create self-directed people and have people own their own journey and their own progress. It’s everything you just said, Sandy. It’s like you were reading my mind. Yes. In your experience, what are some common pitfalls leaders fall into during feedback conversations that maybe make them less effective or even counterproductive?

Justin Baeder (12:56):

Yeah. I think one choice that we make sometimes is to do a postmortem on the lesson rather than to just get the teacher’s reflections on the lesson. And sometimes we do that postmortem so that we have the opportunity to suggest what could have been done differently. But I think that type of feedback or that type of critique is too late to really make any difference in terms of what actually happens during the lesson. The lesson is over. Our opportunity in these conversations is really at the level of teacher judgment, right? When we’re trying to improve teaching, we’re not just focused on the physical actions, the things that took place on that particular day. Our big leverage on teaching practice is on professional judgment because professional judgment is what guides those decisions every single day. So if I saw something in a lesson that I didn’t think was very great, maybe time was wasted, maybe something was unclear, maybe I didn’t like the way behavior was handled, I can critique that, but I have to recognize that that’s a postmortem.

(13:59):

It’s second guessing what the teacher did. And what I’m really interested in for the purposes of change and growth and improvement is what’s the judgment behind that decision? What’s going on in the teacher’s mind that led to that choice that I didn’t particularly love? That’s what I’m interested in. And yet, we have to be very careful about how we ask that because if we’re not careful, that can be What were you thinking? Why did you do that? And of course, that’s kind of a confrontational question. So I think a better way to frame that is curiosity. Tell me about what went into that. Tell me what was kind of going through your mind when that student got up and started walking around the room. And if we press for elaboration rather than justification, we learn a lot more and we can figure out, okay, why did they do what they did?

(14:46):

It’s not enough for me to just say, you should have done something different. I’m trying to develop a person who will independently have judgment that I’m happier with that I don’t have to come around and second guess because we’re on the same page as far as the thinking and the decision making, but often we don’t get to the why behind the decision and asking why directly makes people defensive. So I think we’ve really got to press for elaboration and ask open-ended questions that get people to share their thinking. I think that’s the most valuable thing we can do in a feedback conversation is get the teacher to share their thinking because their thinking is what produced the teaching that we saw.

Courtney Groskin (15:23):

Yeah, it’s so important to give them the space for self-reflection and then to walk through that metacognitive process of what were the decisions that you made? If you were to go back again, would you make that same decision and really get them to recognize those metacognitive cues of what would be different maybe the next time?

Justin Baeder (15:42):

Well, and I think often the answers that we get when we press for elaboration or the insights that we get about the teacher’s thinking, leave us wanting to change something that we may not be able to change in the moment. We want to immediately fix it. We want to give advice. And when it comes to professional judgment, often there’s not a quick fix. I can’t just tell someone do better. It’s a very limited ability that teachers have to just do better when we say, do better, you made a dumb decision. Don’t make dumb decisions. Well, that’s not very, we would be pretty upset if a coach told our kid that on the field, and that’s not especially useful. So we have to unpack the background. For example, one reason I think that at the elementary level, we often see teachers struggle to teach math is that they don’t have a strong content background in math.

(16:38):

Math was not their favorite subject. They didn’t do particularly well in math, and that’s not something we can fix by giving feedback, Hey, be better at math. Well, that is absolutely useless as feedback, but what it is useful for is our decision making. We might realize at the school level, or I might have a few people that I need to send for training in a particular area. That’s the kind of action that we could take that would actually improve the teacher’s judgment, me saying, Hey, be better at this, or, don’t do what you did. Do what I would’ve done in your shoes. That’s not going to be nearly as helpful.

Courtney Groskin (17:11):

Yeah. Nine times out of 10, most teachers know their areas of weakness. So instead of highlighting them, how do we build capacity and get them what they need so they can elevate their practice?

Justin Baeder (17:23):

And if it was something that is fixable through second guessing, who’s the best person to do that? Second guessing, right? It’s the teacher who is sitting there reflecting with you and is eager to show that they’re ready and willing to improve. So often we don’t need to be the ones grabbing the steering wheel there. If people know, Hey, here’s an opportunity I missed. Here’s what I could do differently. Here’s what I’ll be on the lookout for next time.

Courtney Groskin (17:47):

And building this culture of reflection helps people to start doing that on their own and coming into a space ready to admit maybe some things that didn’t go as great versus a situation where they feel they have to come in on the defensive and be ready to plead their case of why things didn’t go the way they had wanted.

Justin Baeder (18:06):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Courtney Groskin (18:09):

So you alluded to this a little bit earlier, but if you could go a little deeper, how can school leaders or coaches ensure that feedback isn’t just a one-time conversation, but part of an ongoing cycle that results in measurable improvement in classroom instruction?

Justin Baeder (18:24):

I think we want that impact and we want it quickly, and we want it every time. So we think, well, I’ve been getting into classrooms and observing teachers once or twice a year. Well, what if I just did that a lot more often? Well, one thing that we’re going to have to accept is that many of those interactions are not going to lead to much. And I think that’s okay. And I think accepting that is really essential to being consistent about it, to saying, okay, this is not going to be life-changing every single time. Sometimes it’s going to be a dud. Sometimes I’m going to come into the classroom and the kids are working on essays and they’re doing great. They’re using their time productively. They’re using what the teacher taught them, but there’s not really a lot of teaching that I can give feedback on, and that’s okay.

(19:09):

If I’m afraid of that reality, then I’m going to avoid getting in the classroom in the first place. I have to be willing to say, Hey, I stopped by today. Looks like students are hard at work. I’ll see you later. That kind of thing is going to happen all the time if you’re in classrooms all the time. It doesn’t happen if we set it up and say, okay, this is the day. This is the high stakes day when you’re going to be observed and evaluated. Well then of course people put on a dog and pony show to make sure that we see something good, but it’s kind of fake. It’s a little bit artificial, and hopefully it’s indicative of what the teacher’s capable of. But I think everybody knows it’s not a normal day because it’s been set aside for this purpose because it’s been so prepared for and anticipated.

(19:52):

So I think on a normal basis, we just have to expect it’s going to be hit or miss. We’re going to see some things that are really worth talking about, and we’re going to come when kids are taking a test and there’s almost nothing to talk about. And what I think some people do in those situations is they try to find something, anything, and that does not work If you try to give somebody a suggestion when you don’t have any suggestions or you try to give somebody a compliment when you don’t have any compliments, people can tell that it’s fake, right? People can tell that you don’t really mean it. You just had to say something, you had a box to fill in your mind or on paper, and it just doesn’t ring true. And I think because we know that we tend to just not engage, we just tend to not show up at all when we know, and this is not going to be real feedback, but I have to give feedback. So I might as well say something kind of pointless. Well, you’re going to find something else to do as a school leader, you’ve got plenty else to do and it’s going to keep you from getting into classrooms at all. So I think we’ve just got to lower the stakes and be okay with only some of the time feeling like we’re having a real impact through those conversations.

Sandy (20:56):

I love that, Justin, because you’re talking about, it’s almost as permission as an administrator if you are a little bit stressed or insecure about instructional leadership or evaluation. It’s like you’re giving tools to help people get better at it, but also in a way, give yourself some grace. Give yourself a break. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Justin Baeder (21:18):

Absolutely. And I think we have in our minds this sweet spot where there’s low hanging fruit for improvement. We see something that we can say something about, and just by saying it, just by having a conversation, we can make somebody better. That does happen. That does happen sometimes, especially with new teachers who are making obvious mistakes that we’ll be able to see, give them some good advice on. We can actually see some pretty big improvement. But that’s kind of rare. You might have a significant number of new teachers and you could stay busy with that for a while. But if you have lots of veteran teachers who are very strong, that was my situation as a principal. I had lots of people who had been in the building for 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, and were just really, really good. So they weren’t making obvious mistakes.

(22:01):

There was not a lot of low hanging fruit. People were doing really, really well, and I realized I’m not going to be able to bluff my way through this. And if I do try to find things to critique, they’re going to be very, very petty. If you are an amazing teacher, if I force myself to critique you, that critique is going to have to be about something very minor and very petty, or I’m going to have to pick some sort of big philosophical difference to fight over, and that’s not going to be good either. So that’s one extreme. We have people who are great and don’t need that kind of low hanging fruit feedback. On the other hand, we might have people who are struggling so much that our words alone are not enough to get them where they need to be. They need some sort of more intensive help, whether that is training, whether that is coaching, whether that is somebody sitting in their classroom with them and guiding them, whether that is a change in their responsibilities. So most of the time we’re outside of that sweet spot. We’re outside of that range where there’s easy feedback that can change practice, and we’re working with people who either don’t need that feedback or it’s not enough. And I think we’ve just got to recognize that reality and not try to force those other situations into the low hanging fruit situation.

Sandy (23:13):

Well, if a leader wants to elevate their feedback practice, what is one strategy or shift you would suggest they try in their very next conversation?

Justin Baeder (23:24):

This is a strategy, but a mindset of curiosity. I think assuming that we don’t know everything based on what we saw is one of the most important things that we can do as leaders after getting into classrooms in the first place. If we just think, okay, there’s thinking here that I’m not privy to, we’re headed somewhere. The students are headed somewhere in this unit that I’m not fully up to speed on. If we can approach that interaction with the teacher with some curiosity, we will end up in much more productive places because the teacher with their hands on the steering wheel will take us there and they’ll tell us, here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s what I’m already balancing. Here are the trade-offs I’m making. Here’s where I think we’re going. Usually that takes us somewhere much more productive than if we just pick something at random to critique. So I think that curiosity really is the number one recommendation I have.

Sandy (24:21):

I love that. And just the fact that you owe a couple of things. Going back to you talking about just your attention and presence in the classroom, most, many, many teachers who’ve been in the classroom for a long time are just used to evaluation being kind of an afterthought in a lot of cases. And then also, so just your presence, your attention, and then that idea you just spoke about now, which is just acknowledging that there’s a lot going on here that I was not part of is such a big deal for teachers.

Justin Baeder (24:54):

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Courtney Groskin (24:57):

So we’re going to shift now to our rapid fire portion of the podcast. So in about 15 seconds or less, we don’t have a buzzer or anything, so no pressure. Where can we learn more from you?

Justin Baeder (25:09):

I have a lot of articles. Principal Center dot com slash FAQ has my rapid advice on classroom walkthroughs. So that’s my classroom walkthrough, FAQ Principal Center dot com slash faq, and that’s a great place to start. It’s got lots of links to other resources.

Courtney Groskin (25:24):

Thank you. What’s one strategy every coach should have in their back pocket?

Justin Baeder (25:31):

I think I would say patience and recognizing that often people need more than we can give in the conversation. So our goal in the conversation should be to try to figure out what that is, even if it means not really doing anything in the moment.

Courtney Groskin (25:46):

If you had 60 seconds with a new teacher, what’s the one thing you’d tell them?

Justin Baeder (25:50):

I would tell them this is a hard job, but it’s a rewarding one, and it’s one that has a long learning curve, but it’s worth climbing. So please don’t quit. Don’t give up. It’ll be worth it, and you’ll get there.

Courtney Groskin (26:01):

Thank you so much for your time today. We learned so much and we appreciate you joining us on C3.

Justin Baeder (26:06):

Thank you. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.

Courtney Groskin (26:08):

Thanks Justin. Justin shared great insight into how to get into classrooms and make the experience of giving feedback positive. One of the things he stressed is in the importance of consistent classroom observations and making feedback a normal low stakes practice. How might you begin to do this today as coaches? How might you support your administrators in this task? Thanks for listening to another episode of C3. Be sure to follow us on social media, C3 Connecting Coaches Cognition. Who’s thinking? Will you mediate today?

Announcer (26:53):

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