Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This is #5 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — the countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher. Ranked on total downloads including re-airs, this conversation has been heard 25,508 times.

It originally aired September 29, 2021 under the title “Blended Learning Best Practices During the Pandemic with Thomas Arnett” — episode 765. I have retitled the re-air, because the framing dated fast and the practices did not.

Thomas Arnett researches instructional models at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He came on to share what the Institute had learned from administrators and teachers running blended learning under pressure — which turned out to be the best natural experiment in blended learning anyone has ever run.

This was an extremely popular episode, understandably. There are still some truths to learn and reflect. I think it is important to learn from what happened so we can do better in the future.

Listen to the Show

Resources from This Episode

• Potential unfulfilled: COVID-19, the rapid adoption of online learning, and what could be — the Christensen Institute report behind much of this conversation.
• Carpe Diem: Convert pandemic struggles into student-centered learning — the companion report.
• Thomas Arnett’s research at the Christensen Institute — everything he has published since, which is where to go if you want the current version of this thinking.

About Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on using the Theory of Disruptive Innovation to study innovative instructional models and their potential to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education.

Thomas began his work in education as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City Public Schools through Teach For America and as an Education Pioneers fellow with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee and board president for the Morgan Hill Unified School District in Morgan Hill, California, and currently serves as the chair of the board of Compass Charter Schools in California.

Connect with Thomas: Christensen Institute | @ArnettTom

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Read the full transcript — Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up (e989)

Announcer (00:00)
This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:04)
We’re continuing our countdown of the top 10 episodes of all time for the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast as we approach our thousandth episode. Coming in at number five was a fascinating episode from Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute as he shared what the Institute learned from administrators and teachers about the best practices of teaching that happened during the pandemic. This one was also a little over 25,000 downloads. Today we have my friend Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute, and we are going to discuss some new research, Tom, that you and your organization have done about teaching during COVID-19 pandemic. What are some of the findings of your research, and would you describe it to us a little bit in terms of the audience that you surveyed?

Thomas Arnett (01:00)
Yeah. So back in the beginning of the pandemic, we decided, you know, we really need to get a snapshot of what is going on in schools to get a little bit more nuanced than just kind of the broad brushstrokes that you see in a lot of the media. And so over the last year, we’ve done a series of surveys, two, well, I should say two last year and two in this upcoming year. One to a national representative sample of administrators, school and district administrators, and then another one to a nationally representative sample of teachers. And we’re basically, we’re trying to get at, you know, what does instruction and online learning look like during this time of the pandemic? And there’s a bunch of findings in there. And folks can go to our website and read our reports on this if they’re interested. But a couple of things I’ll highlight. One is that in terms of in-person versus remote versus hybrid, it was actually a mixed bag. When we asked teachers, what was the model that you used the most throughout the year, they divided pretty much evenly into thirds. But a third of teachers had been mostly in person, a third had been mostly hybrid, and a third had been mostly remote. But when we asked those that were mostly hybrid, what did it look like?

Thomas Arnett (02:03)
By far, the dominant approach was what’s often called Zoom-in-room, or what we call in the reports, concurrent instruction, where teachers are working with students that are in the classroom with them and working with students over Zoom at the same time. And from a logistical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense why schools went to that because it was an emergency situation and people had to scramble and figure out what they were doing. And in that kind of a situation, you don’t want to throw out everything you’ve ever done and have to invent everything else, everything from scratch on the fly. The most logical thing was to say, well, let’s try and take the way we usually teach and preserve as much of that as we can and do it over Zoom. But unfortunately, what we found in the free response comments in the survey was teachers just said that was impossible. It was I can teach students online or I can teach them in person, but I really can’t teach them both well at the same time. And this isn’t serving anyone. And it’s exhausting and overwhelming. So one of the things we wanted to say is just like, you know, look, this is, although the logistics for a school administrator may have been easier in this kind of a model, it didn’t work well for teachers and therefore, you know, likely didn’t work well for many of their students. But there was some optimistic side too. I’ll pause there. But there’s some other pieces that were a little more encouraging.

Vicki Davis (03:14)
So just to clarify, you know, some schools had it that if a student was in quarantine or had to go home for a period of time, that they would be handed off to another teacher who had only remote students. And then when they moved back into the physical classroom, they would move back with the other teacher. I guess you had no way to get at that particular approach, but it sounds like that would probably be better than requiring teachers to try to teach both.

Thomas Arnett (03:39)
Yeah, we did see students in our survey. We asked about things that got at that. And there were, in the nationwide survey, there were some teachers that did that. But it was just that concurrent approach was about 79% of teachers that said that they were teaching both at the same time, as opposed to having teachers work with different staff or work with teachers at different times.

Vicki Davis (03:59)
So you said there was some encouragement. I think we probably all needed about now. What were the encouraging findings?

Thomas Arnett (04:05)
Well, again, in that free response part of the survey, it was so telling, kind of the night and day contrast between the two general types of comments. One was the one I’ve mentioned of teachers just saying, this was really hard, hardest year of my career, harder than being a brand new teacher. And I’ve been teaching for 30 years. But on the other hand, you know, there was a small minority of teachers that said that this actually worked really well. But what they did was very different. They weren’t doing concurrent instruction. Typically, what they were doing was something akin to what we’ve called from before the pandemic, the flipped classroom model, where they were taking their lessons and creating them as online resources that students could go through at their own pace.

Thomas Arnett (04:42)
And then class time wasn’t focused on how do I cover my material during my class time with students. It was focused more on, you know, let’s check in. Let me check in with individual students and find out how they’re doing. Let me answer questions that have come up as they’ve been going through those online materials. And teachers that did that kind of an approach had really positive things to say that, you know, I got to know my students better than I usually do. And it was easier to keep track of where they’re all at in their learning and to know how to cater to their needs. And so, you know, kind of as a corollary with that, we asked teachers, you know, what kind of tools do you use for online learning, both before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and what do you maybe plan to use afterwards? And the tools that were used the most were learning management systems like Canvas or Schoology or Google Classroom and video like, you know, Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. But in a smaller subset of teachers, roughly, you know, 30 to 40%, they said they were using tools for creating their own online lesson materials or for video recording their lessons and posting those online. And we saw, when we looked at the comparison between who was using those tools before the pandemic and who planned to use those after the pandemic, we saw the biggest jump in adoption in those areas, which I think corresponds to those teachers, the teachers that had figured out how to flip their classroom, kind of change the instructional model to make it work better in an online setting. And we think those are the teachers that are really, that are driving that jump in adoption.

Vicki Davis (06:09)
Instead of trying to force fit, you know, I’ve seen some teachers who have gone back to in-person and basically dropped most of what they did online. And in my observation, it was the teachers who were having students take pictures of their work on paper and who were uploading handouts for the students to print at home. So there was no change at all in the instructional methodology. So you’re saying those who actually changed their methodology plan to keep…

Thomas Arnett (06:35)
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Vicki Davis (06:37)
Well, isn’t it kind of discouraging to come so far and go backwards? Are we thinking that perhaps maybe although some teachers have gone online, it’s not really been an improvement?

Thomas Arnett (06:48)
Well, I think it’s a mixed bag. I think there are teachers that just found the experience frustrating and they’re eager to just get back to the way things were, the things that they were used to, things that worked for them before the pandemic. But I think we also see, again, it’s a minority of teachers in our survey, but that small minority that figured out, and in some ways, they took advantage of the opportunity too. They said, you know, there’s not as much pressure around test scores right now, or there’s not as much pressure around other forms of accountability. So let me take this moment to say, let me try some things. Let me experiment. Let me see what I can do differently. And it’s that smaller subset of teachers that we see learning things during COVID that in our free responses said, you know, I plan to keep doing XYZ that I learned because I found it really useful. I found it, you know, easier to not have to worry about if a student is absent, how do I catch them up? because I can just point them to—here’s the materials online now and you can go catch up. Or if you need extra review, I don’t have to spend as much time figuring out how do I pull together resources to help you review. It’s all right there, accessible. So we suspect that in the long run, like a lot of things are going to revert back after the pandemic, but there’s going to be some folks that continue to move ahead. And I guess my optimistic hope is that those folks continue to improve what they’re doing and they share it with their colleagues and you start to see wider use that may drop after the pandemic, but grow in the longer haul of time.

Vicki Davis (08:03)
Well, and you say that some teachers are going back what worked for them, but the question is, did it ever work?

Thomas Arnett (08:09)
I think that’s a fair question, yeah.

Vicki Davis (08:11)
So when you look at the teacher survey and then you look at the administrator survey, do you think that administrators had an accurate picture of what was going on in their classrooms? Or were there any discrepancies between the two sets of observations?

Thomas Arnett (08:25)
Well, I think there were some discrepancies. One of the questions we asked to both groups, the teachers we asked, how well have you been able to provide effective instruction? How well have you been able to support social-emotional needs? And to administrators we asked them, how well do you think your school system has met students’ needs? And administrators tended to be pretty optimistic. We gave them kind of a slider they could put anywhere between zero and 100. And most of the responses were kind of toward the end of like 60 to 100. But they were pretty optimistic that, you know, in spite of the challenges, things were going well. With teachers, especially for teachers that were either hybrid or remote for most of the year, we saw a pretty strong split. Where some were more optimistic, not very many at the high, you know, 100 end of the scale. But there were some that were in like the 70, 80 range. And then there was another cluster that were in like the 30 to 40 range. So I think it was a really split experience for teachers, whereas for administrators, it was generally more optimistic. I think administrators were, in many cases, not seeing what teachers were seeing on the ground.

Vicki Davis (09:24)
Where do we go from here, Tom?

Thomas Arnett (09:27)
Well, you know, in the report we put out, we kind of make three areas of recommendation that hopefully, no matter where you are, you can see the one that fits for you. And I will say the recommendations we geared them toward administrators, but I think they’re applicable to teachers too. One is, if you’re one of those teachers that found new tools… Keep using them. Keep trying to figure out how to leverage them to transform your instruction and to better meet your students’ needs and to better differentiate. If you’re an administrator, recognize that there’s some teachers that have that experience and give them the support they need. Don’t cut off the software licenses when the pandemic’s over. And, you know, look into things like there’s a professional development nonprofit that I’ve become a big fan of called the Modern Classrooms Project. And they have free resources online to teach teachers how to shift to a blended, mastery-based, student self-directed model. And so, you know.

Thomas Arnett (10:18)
Help teachers find access to that kind of professional development support. That’s one. Now, that’s not going to work for everybody. Some people don’t want to do that, you know, big-scale transformation of their classroom. Another thing we recommend is stop trying to think of there being one ideal model for all students. On the administrator survey, we saw that around 30% of administrators said their school systems plan to keep offering virtual schools post-pandemic. And that’s up from, you know, roughly 10%, 11% before the pandemic.

Thomas Arnett (10:49)
And we see, you know, those virtual schools could turn into really crummy virtual schools where you just prop something up online and then say we filled the gap and move on. But they can also be really interesting laboratories for innovation where you say, well, let’s pair a virtual school with a learning hub or a learning pod and figure out how do we create a really rich blended learning experience where instruction works very differently, but it’s still in person. It’s still with teachers, but, you know, where you’re really shifting the roles of students and teachers to make the experience more personal. We think there’s huge opportunities there. So that’s the other thing we say is don’t shut those options down, but rather, you know, have the vision to see how could we turn this into something that really better serve students’ needs, not something we force everybody to do, but something that we make an option so that those that benefit from it can go have access to. I didn’t mention yet is just for school systems to take stock of where they are and look at their communities and say, if my stakeholders of my families and my teachers have appetite for change, go ahead and try and pursue that change. But recognize it’s going to vary from one context to the next. Some communities, I think, are ready for that and some aren’t. And our real recommendation is just for people to kind of read their situation and figure out, does that strategy make sense? If yes, then go ahead. If no, then consider one of the other two that I mentioned earlier.

Vicki Davis (12:01)
And watch out for hybrid because it may not be all that everybody thought it was.

Thomas Arnett (12:06)
Yeah, especially not the way folks were doing it for the most part last year. Sure.

Vicki Davis (12:10)
I will say that we are, at my school, we’re pretty much in person, but every so often a student ends up in quarantine and we zoom them in. And it’s as much a social connection and forward progress as anything else. But it feels different than hybrid where you have, you know, half the students online and half physically there. So, well, Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute and we will link to the research in the show notes. And thank you for giving us some insight and, you know, things keep changing. So it’s great to have some excellent research out here that we can kind of take a look at what we’re doing so that we can make decisions based on best practices. So thanks, Tom.

Thomas Arnett (12:49)
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Announcer (12:52)
Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

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Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This is #5 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — the countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher. Ranked on total downloads including re-airs, this conversation has been heard 25,508 times.

It originally aired September 29, 2021 under the title “Blended Learning Best Practices During the Pandemic with Thomas Arnett” — episode 765. I have retitled the re-air, because the framing dated fast and the practices did not.

Thomas Arnett researches instructional models at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He came on to share what the Institute had learned from administrators and teachers running blended learning under pressure — which turned out to be the best natural experiment in blended learning anyone has ever run.

This was an extremely popular episode, understandably. There are still some truths to learn and reflect. I think it is important to learn from what happened so we can do better in the future.

Listen to the Show

Resources from This Episode

• Potential unfulfilled: COVID-19, the rapid adoption of online learning, and what could be — the Christensen Institute report behind much of this conversation.
• Carpe Diem: Convert pandemic struggles into student-centered learning — the companion report.
• Thomas Arnett’s research at the Christensen Institute — everything he has published since, which is where to go if you want the current version of this thinking.

About Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on using the Theory of Disruptive Innovation to study innovative instructional models and their potential to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education.

Thomas began his work in education as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City Public Schools through Teach For America and as an Education Pioneers fellow with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee and board president for the Morgan Hill Unified School District in Morgan Hill, California, and currently serves as the chair of the board of Compass Charter Schools in California.

Connect with Thomas: Christensen Institute | @ArnettTom

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Read the full transcript — Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up (e989)

Announcer (00:00)
This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:04)
We’re continuing our countdown of the top 10 episodes of all time for the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast as we approach our thousandth episode. Coming in at number five was a fascinating episode from Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute as he shared what the Institute learned from administrators and teachers about the best practices of teaching that happened during the pandemic. This one was also a little over 25,000 downloads. Today we have my friend Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute, and we are going to discuss some new research, Tom, that you and your organization have done about teaching during COVID-19 pandemic. What are some of the findings of your research, and would you describe it to us a little bit in terms of the audience that you surveyed?

Thomas Arnett (01:00)
Yeah. So back in the beginning of the pandemic, we decided, you know, we really need to get a snapshot of what is going on in schools to get a little bit more nuanced than just kind of the broad brushstrokes that you see in a lot of the media. And so over the last year, we’ve done a series of surveys, two, well, I should say two last year and two in this upcoming year. One to a national representative sample of administrators, school and district administrators, and then another one to a nationally representative sample of teachers. And we’re basically, we’re trying to get at, you know, what does instruction and online learning look like during this time of the pandemic? And there’s a bunch of findings in there. And folks can go to our website and read our reports on this if they’re interested. But a couple of things I’ll highlight. One is that in terms of in-person versus remote versus hybrid, it was actually a mixed bag. When we asked teachers, what was the model that you used the most throughout the year, they divided pretty much evenly into thirds. But a third of teachers had been mostly in person, a third had been mostly hybrid, and a third had been mostly remote. But when we asked those that were mostly hybrid, what did it look like?

Thomas Arnett (02:03)
By far, the dominant approach was what’s often called Zoom-in-room, or what we call in the reports, concurrent instruction, where teachers are working with students that are in the classroom with them and working with students over Zoom at the same time. And from a logistical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense why schools went to that because it was an emergency situation and people had to scramble and figure out what they were doing. And in that kind of a situation, you don’t want to throw out everything you’ve ever done and have to invent everything else, everything from scratch on the fly. The most logical thing was to say, well, let’s try and take the way we usually teach and preserve as much of that as we can and do it over Zoom. But unfortunately, what we found in the free response comments in the survey was teachers just said that was impossible. It was I can teach students online or I can teach them in person, but I really can’t teach them both well at the same time. And this isn’t serving anyone. And it’s exhausting and overwhelming. So one of the things we wanted to say is just like, you know, look, this is, although the logistics for a school administrator may have been easier in this kind of a model, it didn’t work well for teachers and therefore, you know, likely didn’t work well for many of their students. But there was some optimistic side too. I’ll pause there. But there’s some other pieces that were a little more encouraging.

Vicki Davis (03:14)
So just to clarify, you know, some schools had it that if a student was in quarantine or had to go home for a period of time, that they would be handed off to another teacher who had only remote students. And then when they moved back into the physical classroom, they would move back with the other teacher. I guess you had no way to get at that particular approach, but it sounds like that would probably be better than requiring teachers to try to teach both.

Thomas Arnett (03:39)
Yeah, we did see students in our survey. We asked about things that got at that. And there were, in the nationwide survey, there were some teachers that did that. But it was just that concurrent approach was about 79% of teachers that said that they were teaching both at the same time, as opposed to having teachers work with different staff or work with teachers at different times.

Vicki Davis (03:59)
So you said there was some encouragement. I think we probably all needed about now. What were the encouraging findings?

Thomas Arnett (04:05)
Well, again, in that free response part of the survey, it was so telling, kind of the night and day contrast between the two general types of comments. One was the one I’ve mentioned of teachers just saying, this was really hard, hardest year of my career, harder than being a brand new teacher. And I’ve been teaching for 30 years. But on the other hand, you know, there was a small minority of teachers that said that this actually worked really well. But what they did was very different. They weren’t doing concurrent instruction. Typically, what they were doing was something akin to what we’ve called from before the pandemic, the flipped classroom model, where they were taking their lessons and creating them as online resources that students could go through at their own pace.

Thomas Arnett (04:42)
And then class time wasn’t focused on how do I cover my material during my class time with students. It was focused more on, you know, let’s check in. Let me check in with individual students and find out how they’re doing. Let me answer questions that have come up as they’ve been going through those online materials. And teachers that did that kind of an approach had really positive things to say that, you know, I got to know my students better than I usually do. And it was easier to keep track of where they’re all at in their learning and to know how to cater to their needs. And so, you know, kind of as a corollary with that, we asked teachers, you know, what kind of tools do you use for online learning, both before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and what do you maybe plan to use afterwards? And the tools that were used the most were learning management systems like Canvas or Schoology or Google Classroom and video like, you know, Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. But in a smaller subset of teachers, roughly, you know, 30 to 40%, they said they were using tools for creating their own online lesson materials or for video recording their lessons and posting those online. And we saw, when we looked at the comparison between who was using those tools before the pandemic and who planned to use those after the pandemic, we saw the biggest jump in adoption in those areas, which I think corresponds to those teachers, the teachers that had figured out how to flip their classroom, kind of change the instructional model to make it work better in an online setting. And we think those are the teachers that are really, that are driving that jump in adoption.

Vicki Davis (06:09)
Instead of trying to force fit, you know, I’ve seen some teachers who have gone back to in-person and basically dropped most of what they did online. And in my observation, it was the teachers who were having students take pictures of their work on paper and who were uploading handouts for the students to print at home. So there was no change at all in the instructional methodology. So you’re saying those who actually changed their methodology plan to keep…

Thomas Arnett (06:35)
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Vicki Davis (06:37)
Well, isn’t it kind of discouraging to come so far and go backwards? Are we thinking that perhaps maybe although some teachers have gone online, it’s not really been an improvement?

Thomas Arnett (06:48)
Well, I think it’s a mixed bag. I think there are teachers that just found the experience frustrating and they’re eager to just get back to the way things were, the things that they were used to, things that worked for them before the pandemic. But I think we also see, again, it’s a minority of teachers in our survey, but that small minority that figured out, and in some ways, they took advantage of the opportunity too. They said, you know, there’s not as much pressure around test scores right now, or there’s not as much pressure around other forms of accountability. So let me take this moment to say, let me try some things. Let me experiment. Let me see what I can do differently. And it’s that smaller subset of teachers that we see learning things during COVID that in our free responses said, you know, I plan to keep doing XYZ that I learned because I found it really useful. I found it, you know, easier to not have to worry about if a student is absent, how do I catch them up? because I can just point them to—here’s the materials online now and you can go catch up. Or if you need extra review, I don’t have to spend as much time figuring out how do I pull together resources to help you review. It’s all right there, accessible. So we suspect that in the long run, like a lot of things are going to revert back after the pandemic, but there’s going to be some folks that continue to move ahead. And I guess my optimistic hope is that those folks continue to improve what they’re doing and they share it with their colleagues and you start to see wider use that may drop after the pandemic, but grow in the longer haul of time.

Vicki Davis (08:03)
Well, and you say that some teachers are going back what worked for them, but the question is, did it ever work?

Thomas Arnett (08:09)
I think that’s a fair question, yeah.

Vicki Davis (08:11)
So when you look at the teacher survey and then you look at the administrator survey, do you think that administrators had an accurate picture of what was going on in their classrooms? Or were there any discrepancies between the two sets of observations?

Thomas Arnett (08:25)
Well, I think there were some discrepancies. One of the questions we asked to both groups, the teachers we asked, how well have you been able to provide effective instruction? How well have you been able to support social-emotional needs? And to administrators we asked them, how well do you think your school system has met students’ needs? And administrators tended to be pretty optimistic. We gave them kind of a slider they could put anywhere between zero and 100. And most of the responses were kind of toward the end of like 60 to 100. But they were pretty optimistic that, you know, in spite of the challenges, things were going well. With teachers, especially for teachers that were either hybrid or remote for most of the year, we saw a pretty strong split. Where some were more optimistic, not very many at the high, you know, 100 end of the scale. But there were some that were in like the 70, 80 range. And then there was another cluster that were in like the 30 to 40 range. So I think it was a really split experience for teachers, whereas for administrators, it was generally more optimistic. I think administrators were, in many cases, not seeing what teachers were seeing on the ground.

Vicki Davis (09:24)
Where do we go from here, Tom?

Thomas Arnett (09:27)
Well, you know, in the report we put out, we kind of make three areas of recommendation that hopefully, no matter where you are, you can see the one that fits for you. And I will say the recommendations we geared them toward administrators, but I think they’re applicable to teachers too. One is, if you’re one of those teachers that found new tools… Keep using them. Keep trying to figure out how to leverage them to transform your instruction and to better meet your students’ needs and to better differentiate. If you’re an administrator, recognize that there’s some teachers that have that experience and give them the support they need. Don’t cut off the software licenses when the pandemic’s over. And, you know, look into things like there’s a professional development nonprofit that I’ve become a big fan of called the Modern Classrooms Project. And they have free resources online to teach teachers how to shift to a blended, mastery-based, student self-directed model. And so, you know.

Thomas Arnett (10:18)
Help teachers find access to that kind of professional development support. That’s one. Now, that’s not going to work for everybody. Some people don’t want to do that, you know, big-scale transformation of their classroom. Another thing we recommend is stop trying to think of there being one ideal model for all students. On the administrator survey, we saw that around 30% of administrators said their school systems plan to keep offering virtual schools post-pandemic. And that’s up from, you know, roughly 10%, 11% before the pandemic.

Thomas Arnett (10:49)
And we see, you know, those virtual schools could turn into really crummy virtual schools where you just prop something up online and then say we filled the gap and move on. But they can also be really interesting laboratories for innovation where you say, well, let’s pair a virtual school with a learning hub or a learning pod and figure out how do we create a really rich blended learning experience where instruction works very differently, but it’s still in person. It’s still with teachers, but, you know, where you’re really shifting the roles of students and teachers to make the experience more personal. We think there’s huge opportunities there. So that’s the other thing we say is don’t shut those options down, but rather, you know, have the vision to see how could we turn this into something that really better serve students’ needs, not something we force everybody to do, but something that we make an option so that those that benefit from it can go have access to. I didn’t mention yet is just for school systems to take stock of where they are and look at their communities and say, if my stakeholders of my families and my teachers have appetite for change, go ahead and try and pursue that change. But recognize it’s going to vary from one context to the next. Some communities, I think, are ready for that and some aren’t. And our real recommendation is just for people to kind of read their situation and figure out, does that strategy make sense? If yes, then go ahead. If no, then consider one of the other two that I mentioned earlier.

Vicki Davis (12:01)
And watch out for hybrid because it may not be all that everybody thought it was.

Thomas Arnett (12:06)
Yeah, especially not the way folks were doing it for the most part last year. Sure.

Vicki Davis (12:10)
I will say that we are, at my school, we’re pretty much in person, but every so often a student ends up in quarantine and we zoom them in. And it’s as much a social connection and forward progress as anything else. But it feels different than hybrid where you have, you know, half the students online and half physically there. So, well, Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute and we will link to the research in the show notes. And thank you for giving us some insight and, you know, things keep changing. So it’s great to have some excellent research out here that we can kind of take a look at what we’re doing so that we can make decisions based on best practices. So thanks, Tom.

Thomas Arnett (12:49)
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Announcer (12:52)
Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

The Top 10 of the First 1,000

As the 10 Minute Teacher approaches its 1,000th episode, I went back through the download numbers for every show and pulled the ten that teachers listened to most. One airs each weekday through September 18, counting down to number one.

#5 — you are here. Friday: #6, Dr. Sarah Levine on teaching writing. Tomorrow: number four.

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I hope you’re enjoying this trip through some of the top shows! It is obvious that so many people were turning to podcasts during the pandemic and certainly there are many educational podcasts out there. Thank you for choosing to subscribe to mine! I appreciate it so much!

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Teaching Creativity: 4 Ideas Every Subject Can Use

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Creativity can be nurtured and grown and should be in every subject, particularly now when creativity is such a competitive advantage. Today’s guest, Susan M. Riley, shares how we can bring creativity into every classroom and gives specific examples for math, science, and engineering. Susan is the author of the book Creativity’s Edge.

Susan argues that creativity shouldn’t be quarantined to one part of the building. Susan shares four branches of creativity and gives concrete examples subject by subject. Math. Science. Engineering. Then, she gives us teachers encouragement to add some creativity into our own days. (I know it is hard when you’re so busy, but I know when I have done this, it has helped me.) So, let’s talk about building our edge with creativity and get some ideas for pulling it into our own classes.

SPONSORED: Experience AI, a free program co-developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest.

Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons for ages 8 to 16. The lessons are written for teachers of all subjects, including science, math, social studies, English, and art, and some don’t even need a computer to use. Support your students to become critical thinkers and better understand AI technologies today. Explore the free resources at Experience AI.

See Experience AI’s Free Lesson Plans

When AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters.

Susan M. Riley, founder of The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM

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Watch this video on YouTube.Subscribe to the Cool Cat Teacher Channel on YouTube

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Creativity’s Edge: Unleashing Humanity’s Greatest Advantage in the Age of AI by Susan M. Riley — the book behind this conversation. It is where the four branches get worked out with practices and ways to measure growth, K-12 and beyond.
• The Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM — Susan’s organization, and the place to go for lesson plans, certification, and training if this episode gave you an idea you want to actually build.
• Art Works for Teachers — Susan’s podcast. Each episode comes in audio, video, and written form with a downloadable resource, which is unusually generous.
• SusanMRiley.com — her author site.
• The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) — the museum in New York that Susan mentions, dedicated to exactly the art-and-math overlap she describes. If you are ever in the city with a math teacher, go.
• The Desmos Math Art Contest — open each year to students ages 13–18. This is the kind of project I describe on the show, where students build a picture entirely out of the equations of its lines.

Two things to try this week — one for your students, one for you.

Consider “hard fun” creative projects in the projects you give them for their subject. Reflect on what you’re asking students to do and count to ten past when you want to step in and let them have a little bit of struggle so they can create and invent.

And here is one for you, not for your students.

Schedule a 5-minute creativity moment for yourself this week to create something. I have a planner that I put stickers in and print out photos from a small printer and put it in my planner. It is a creative outlet for me. Find a creative outlet for yourself. If you like to sing, sing a favorite song in the car. If you like to draw, take a moment to doodle. Pull something into your day that is creative, even if it is a creative moment in your lesson. See how it makes you feel and see if you want to try it the next day as well. Let me know what you think.

About Susan M. Riley

Susan M. Riley

Susan M. Riley is the Founder of The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM and host of the Art Works for Teachers podcast. A former music educator with more than two decades of leadership in creative curriculum design, she helps schools build innovative, student-centered learning environments. Riley’s work has been featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD, and her resources reach millions of educators each year. Her new book, Creativity’s Edge, explores why creativity is the defining skill of the AI era – and how educators and leaders can cultivate it with purpose. She lives in the mid-Atlantic with her family.

Connect with Susan: The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM | SusanMRiley.com | LinkedIn | Facebook

Other Shows on Creativity and the Arts

• AI Art in the Classroom with Tim Needles — the closest companion to this episode. Tim makes the same argument Susan does, that creativity is a skill you build rather than a trait you have, and he does it from inside an art room that uses AI tools.
• AI as a Creativity Amplifier with Dr. Sarah Thomas — on AI giving teachers back the time to do the work only humans can do, plus the student data guardrails you need first.
• What AI Can’t Do: Being Beautifully Human — my own take on the same question Susan opens with. If today’s episode landed, this is the next one.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Motivational Monday. This is episode 980, and we’re talking about creativity. I hope that today you will create before you consume, make something before you check email, and give your students the same rule. They make something before they open a device. Give them what our guest today calls hard fun, a challenge just past the edge of easy. And then find your own creative access point.

Whether it’s singing in the car, journaling, whatever it is, and take 10 minutes a day. Creativity is especially important in the age of AI.

Vicki Davis (00:44): Today’s show is sponsored by Experience AI, the free AI literacy program from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-founded with Google DeepMind. Stay to the end. I’ll share how you can start teaching AI literacy in your classroom with confidence. No experience required.

Vicki Davis (01:01): Today we’re talking with Susan M. Riley. She is a former music teacher and the founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM, where she has spent more than two decades helping schools move beyond rigid content silos and into innovative student-centered classrooms. She is the host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge.

So in this book, she gives educators practical ways to use creativity as a hidden advantage in an AI driven world. Her work is featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD. And she now reaches millions of teachers looking for fresh doable ideas they can use tomorrow.

So Susan, a sentence or two, how would you explain to a tired classroom teacher why creativity is not just one more thing, but it’s actually our greatest advantage in the age of AI?

Susan Riley (01:55): When AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters. The things that matter most are creativity. The things that we need to teach our students to be able to think and do and be curious and create are the things that AI can’t do. And so in a future that is unknown, I am a true believer that creativity is the thing that’s gonna set us apart.

Vicki Davis (02:15): You know, my students are very often nervous about — are we going tomorrow? Will I have a job? And I say, okay, if you learn how to think, if you learn how to be creative, if you learn to get along with other people, those are things no machine will ever be able to do. And they become even more important in the classroom. But you’re not just talking the art classroom, you’re talking math and science and all these other subjects. So what are some of the ideas you give all these different subjects for integrating creativity into their lessons? Like math — math teachers are [going] to go, really, Susan?

Susan Riley (02:48): I know, but you know what? Math is where some of the best creative ideas come from, especially for students who struggle in math. Those students like me — I’m one of those people that believes that letters should not be with numbers. That’s just not right. So algebra was never my thing.

Susan Riley (03:03): When you encourage creative problem solving, that is creativity being worked through in a math class. And so when we’re looking at creativity, it’s not just skills of creativity. There’s lots of different ways that people can be creative. In fact, I call it the four branches of creativity. We have skills, that we can work on in the art classroom, but then there’s also application. And so looking at how do we pair maybe math and music together to learn fractions — it makes a beautiful pairing, but we have to be intentional about it. That’s application of creativity. Then we’ve got creative thinking. And then the last branch is creative expression. So how do we interpret what we’re feeling, what we’re seeing, who we are in a creative way.

Creativity doesn’t just live [in] isolation. It lives all around us. And so it’s learning how to leverage that [in the] classroom or content that we’re teaching.

Vicki Davis (03:54): I know our school, for calculus, one of their favorite projects they do in Desmos where they create art and they have all of the equations of all the lines that comes out of Desmos. And that’s a creativity project. And most people would say, hey, if you want to meet those standards, you don’t have time for art. But art is really part of everything because it’s part of human expression, isn’t it?

Susan Riley (04:15): Absolutely. There’s a whole museum dedicated to art and math called Museum of Math up in New York. [If] you’ve never been, go. It has all kinds of projects just like what you described. And its whole goal is to showcase — there’s creativity embedded within our human experience. And so how that comes out can be expressed in a lot of different ways.

Vicki Davis (04:35): Okay, so how about art and engineering? Do you have anything there?

Susan Riley (04:38): Absolutely. So when we’re thinking about engineering, I often think about Alexander Calder as an artist who created kinetic sculptures. How do you create something that moves and is also a piece of art, and what qualifies as art, and taking a look at those pieces and trying to pull them together? Engineering is also about the problem solving, that process, the engineering process that’s embedded into STEAM significantly. [You can] leverage not just visual art, but we could look at music or theater or dance.

Dance is a great way to connect with engineering, looking at how different choreography components pull together. It’s just a matter of shifting our lens just slightly to take a look at our content in maybe a different way than we’ve thought of before.

Vicki Davis (05:18): So let’s shift — science and creativity?

Susan Riley (05:21): Science has a lot of natural pairings, particularly when we’re looking at both movement, if we’re looking at dance, as well as visual art. Think about when you’re looking at developing colors and color theory — there’s a lot that has to go into exactly how many of each color would work together to create a purple or a violet, and documenting that process. I’ve done that with students before when we’ve looked at making their own fragrances.

We actually brought the experience of making a fragrance from Italy. We had a partner from Italy come in and share, like, here’s how perfumery factories actually look at the science of smell and what it is that attracts people one way or the other to one scent or another. And then how do you create that kind of a scent? It is an art and a science of being able to pull them together.

Vicki Davis (06:10): So Susan, in Creativity’s Edge, you talk about creative abilities that AI can’t touch, like finding problems worth solving and linking ideas in new ways. So how can we as educators intentionally design activities that build those muscles inside our students’ thinking process?

Susan Riley (06:29): Yeah, I think it goes back to looking at those four branches of creativity. [I] would love every school to have access to just dedicated arts programs so that they can teach those dedicated art skills. That’s not possible always, but it’s certainly one branch of it. In classrooms, what I’d love to see is when we’re focusing on creative thinking, particularly around developing skills, around lateral, convergent, and divergent thinking —

being able to provide opportunities for students to have what I call hard fun. Give them a challenge that is right on that edge of not quite too hard, right? You don’t want them to be too far ahead, that’s frustrating, but that raises the bar, that encourages them to push beyond what they thought they might be capable of — and then step back.

Vicki Davis (07:14): You talk a lot about filling your own creative cup. For me, I write. What are some sustainable ways teachers can reclaim their own creativity without feeling like it’s just more homework?

Susan Riley (07:25): That’s the key. Everybody has what I call a creative access point. You might not be the best singer in the world. You might not be on a stage, but you can rock it out in the shower or in the car, right? That’s your jam.

Susan Riley (07:35): Or maybe when you go to a museum, it’s like magic just starts to appear and you feel like at home in that place. When you want to fill your creative cup, you got to recognize — what is it that lights you up?

Figure out what that is. And once you know what that is, don’t let it be a burden. Allow it to be this kind of place that you go in order to feel like you’re coming home. Once you find what it is, ensuring that you carve out a little bit of time for yourself every day to practice it. Creativity is a practice. It’s not something that just [stays] stagnant. We can’t encourage creativity if we’re not practicing [it] in ourselves, and being willing to be open to the process, being willing to fail at the things that we’re trying

and learning from them, and being open to leaning into that. And so it doesn’t have to be, you know, a class every week that you have to go to, or this one particular thinking routine that you always have to do. Find the thing that lights you up. Give yourself permission to play with it

a little bit every day if you can. If not, set aside some time during your week — something that you commit to that fills you and allows you to see the world in a different way, or see the world the way that you want to see it. Express yourself. Join a choir. Go do something that builds that. Take a walk and listen to something that you really enjoy and then maybe journal about it when you get home. Something that allows you to participate in the process.

Vicki Davis (08:59): There’s so many ideas I’ve gotten into. Writing the notes — I like to write people in calligraphy and sealing it with a wax seal. That’s so much fun. My mom, in one season of her life, she always liked to walk at the farm and create a feather collection and was always looking for new feathers. And I know people who have done pressed flowers and play the piano or just tinker with an instrument. There’s so many ways to be

just creative and keep that part of our brain, because it does spill over into other areas — as well as just recognizing beauty. I believe [it] makes us happier, because we’re kind of wired to notice beauty. And sometimes there’s just beauty in this little wildflower that jumped up.

I love your message about creativity and humanity and the place it has in our classrooms, because here’s the thing — don’t you think that STEAM powered projects, science, technology, engineering, arts and math, that really pull the arts in, give kids a real meaning and a purpose to want to come to school? I mean, who talks about a test as a great memory of school? It’s always the projects.

Susan Riley (10:15): One of the hallmarks of the research that we know about arts integration and STEAM is that when it’s embraced and brought in intentionally and we’re being thoughtful about it, we see attendance increase. Discipline issues decrease significantly — we’re talking five, ten percent. That’s a big decrease in disruptions. We’re seeing increased student achievement. Like, there’s so many benefits to all of this

that we know can truly turn things around for our students and make them want to come and also invest in their own learning, right? Because it’s really hard to compete when they see influencers on YouTube making millions of dollars and tell them, hey, you got to come to school today so that we can teach you how to be successful in our career. And they’re like, why? Right? Let’s make it relevant for them.

Also, I’m a big believer that if we look at the history of the world, humans were creating before they learned how to feed themselves. It is innately part of who we have been created to be. There’s no other choice. We want to express it. We want to participate in it, and it is the natural hook that’s going to bring us in.

Vicki Davis (11:18): So we’ve been talking to Susan M. Riley, founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM. She’s host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge. Susan, thanks for coming on today’s show.

Vicki Davis (11:33): Experience AI, co-founded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored today’s show. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program downloaded more than a million times worldwide. It provides teachers with ready-to-teach lessons, with slides, lesson plans, worksheets, and an excellent free AI glossary that I highly recommend downloading first.

Within the resources, there are unplugged activities for you to explore with your learners that don’t require a computer at all. Experience AI supports all teachers, regardless of subject area, and doesn’t require any computer science or background knowledge. Get Experience AI free at coolcatteacher.com/experienceai. That’s coolcatteacher.com/experienceai.

I’m recommending Experience AI because these lessons help you teach AI literacy with confidence and teach students how these systems actually work. Thank you, Experience AI, for sponsoring today’s show.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. Experience AI has compensated me to share information about the Experience AI curriculum. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. This post also includes affiliate links to books, which means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission at no additional cost to you. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.

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Neuroscience Research: 5 Ways to Superior Teaching

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This is #7 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — the countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher. Across its first airing and one prior encore, this conversation has been heard 24,517 times.

It originally aired in spring 2019 as episode 465.

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath studies what brain research actually says about learning — and, just as usefully, what it does not say. He gives five findings from recent neuroscience that change how you teach, in language you can use in a staff meeting.

Jared Cooney Horvath has made recent news in his stand against devices in schools, however, this episode was just about how students learn. There are many debates about the decline in test scores, but it is challenging as in the old research adage “correlation doesn’t equal causation” if we were debating that, we would really have to go deeper. Controversy aside, this is a fantastic episode on learning.

Listen to the Show

Resources from This Episode

• Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick by Jared Cooney Horvath — the book behind this conversation.
• LME Global — Jared’s team, which translates brain and behavioral research for teachers, students, and parents.

About Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

Jared Cooney Horvath (Ph.D., MEd) is an expert in the field of Educational Neuroscience. He has conducted research and lectured at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, the University of Melbourne, and over 150 schools internationally.

Jared’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, and NOVA. He currently serves as Director of LME Global: a team dedicated to bringing the latest brain and behavioral research to teachers, students, and parents.

Connect with Jared: LME Global | @jchorvath

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Announcer (00:00): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:05): We are counting down the top 10 episodes of all time of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. And coming in at number seven is Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath on Neuroscience Research: 5 Ways to Superior Teaching. This is a 2019 episode and received 24,517 downloads.

Vicki Davis (00:29): Today we’re going to talk about neuroscience. Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, author of Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick. And Jared, you have five ideas to make our teaching actually stick according to neuroscience. And isn’t this something that teachers want anyway? You know, we’re talking all the time. How can we get that message to remain in our students’ minds?

Jared Cooney Horvath (00:58): With this book, we go into 12 principles of how human beings learn, with the idea that, cool, as teachers, how can I then adapt my practices to best fit with those rules? And so I figured today if we’re gonna do five things, I kind of pulled out five different chapters. Is that cool? Should we just tuck in?

Vicki Davis (01:14): Let’s do it. What’s our first?

Jared Cooney Horvath (01:16): Number one has to do with memory, and we call it recall. So for the longest time we’ve been studying memory, and we were so interested in how do I put information in to make a memory stick. Like it needs to be emotional, needs to be repetitive, all this stuff. And it turns out we were looking in the wrong place. If you want memory to stick, it’s all about accessing the memory, recalling that memory, pulling it back up. Think about something like the periodic table, which I’ve studied dozens of times in my life. I’ve put that information in dozens of times. I couldn’t tell you anything about it now, because I just never accessed it. Whereas something like Game of Thrones, which I’ve only watched once — because I talk about it every day, because I read about it, because I debate about it, my memory for that show is so deep. And it’s because every time I access the memory, that memory gets better, deeper, stronger. So rule number one, we always say then, is recall. You want deep memories. It’s how are you getting your students to access and actively bring that information up? Forget about how you’re putting it in. It’s how are they bringing it out.

Vicki Davis (02:19): So I’ve seen charts that show that a student studies it in one day and then they study it halfway through the next day and then they repeat study it. So this whole cramming thing, we know it doesn’t work. We have to repeat.

Jared Cooney Horvath (02:31): And I’d say too, with the studying, beyond simple repetition — if all they’re doing is rereading notes or rereading a chapter, that’s just putting the information back in. That ain’t helping. So as they repeat over time, it’s gotta be more and more access, less and less putting it back in. So rewrite your notes. Try and teach somebody else, have a debate, have a quiz. Not simply reread.

Vicki Davis (02:53): And if we really want to understand it, I guess that’s why the teachers who taught us that were truly tested cumulatively — we actually remembered it.

Jared Cooney Horvath (03:00): Bingo. That’s when you start to realize that something like testing can actually be an incredible learning tool when used correctly.

Vicki Davis (03:07): But it’s just so hard. And do you think some teachers think because some kids memorize that that means all of them should be able to?

Jared Cooney Horvath (03:14): Anyone should be able to memorize anything. It’s just we don’t know what kids are thinking about in between. So when you’ve got one kid that just shows up and is magically great at all this stuff, we think, that was a natural skill. When in truth they might have just been thinking about it all night. And every time they’re bringing up facts and ideas while they’re laying there in bed, that’s helping them memorize it. So we miss some of the key bits and so we start to assign that to natural skill — well, this kid’s good at memorizing. When in truth, no, it could just be that that kid knows how to play that game really well.

Vicki Davis (03:42): Wow. Okay, so what’s your second?

Jared Cooney Horvath (03:44): Number two: spoken words and written text do not mix. So it turns out that when you’re reading words, your brain processes that in the same exact way as though you were speaking the words out loud, listening to them. So just like you don’t have enough brain space to listen to two people speaking simultaneously — you can hear two people speaking, but you can’t understand them at the same time — same exact thing. You can’t read and listen to somebody speak simultaneously and understand both. So why does this matter? K through five, really probably don’t think too deeply about this, but once you start getting up in high school and things like PowerPoints and handouts, those start to enter the fray. Now we’ve got this issue that if you’re trying to teach with a bunch of bullet points behind you on a board, or a handout with a bunch of words, you’re essentially asking them to do the impossible — to both hear you and read those words at the same time. They can’t do it. And to make matters worse, when they try and jump back and forth between them, which they’ll try to do, they lose information from both. They’d be much better off either just putting the words away and listening, or reading the words without you trying to speak over them.

Vicki Davis (04:49): [One of my] children is dyslexic. So he actually listened to the book being read as he read it, you know, with his finger following across the page. So would you say that that dual encoding in learning reading is different from — you’re trying to deliver content, don’t have the text and the words?

Jared Cooney Horvath (05:05): Yep, yeah. And that’s a wonderful caveat. Learning how to read, it’s still the best thing you can do is exactly that — is read while listening to somebody speak. But once you have reading essentially on autopilot, so when the words are there you’re just translating them into speech, that’s where we start to get this kind of discrepancy. And if you want to get really interesting, you get that same bottleneck when you’re writing. So we have a third thing to think about, and there’s no real answers here, it all depends on your purpose — but note taking. Turns out you cannot write and take notes while listening to somebody speak at the same time. Something starts to get lost in that translation. But you—

Vicki Davis (05:39): A lot of teachers won’t let kids record on, you know, Evernote or OneNote — and you can record the audio and the video and go back and look later. But there are teachers who literally won’t let kids record, and it just makes me cringe, you know, as a mom of kids who have learning differences.

Jared Cooney Horvath (05:53): And that’s when ideally you start to go, okay, well if you’re not gonna record, or if there’s not gonna be access to say slides or notes afterwards, then you have to start thinking about — cool, how are we gonna embed note taking into the session itself? Rather than saying just take notes as we’re going, is there a way to every 10 minutes say, sweet, now we’re gonna take three minutes, do a free recall? Or every 15 minutes we stop and we do group notes together? Some way to embed that process into the lesson itself so you don’t clash, and you make it a learning tool — something that actually boosts their understanding of the material as well.

Vicki Davis (06:25): Okay, so what’s our third?

Jared Cooney Horvath (06:26): I think I want to go with threshold for this one. So it turns out as you get used to an environment, your attention threshold starts to shift. Now, what this means is the world has a bunch of noise — it’s got sights, sounds, tastes, and all these things are coming into our senses. So to process all of that, our attention has this thing called a threshold, which says, okay, anything below this threshold we’re simply not going to process. Something has to be powerful enough to break my threshold. Now, the longer I’m in one environment getting used to that, my threshold starts to move up. It’s almost as if my brain says, okay, everything here is cool and safe. Fine, let’s make it harder for you to pay attention to things. That way, if anything wonky comes out, you’ll easily pay attention to it. But most of the rest of the stuff is just gonna fall under the threshold and you won’t have to worry about it. And this resonates more than during, say, a lecture or a direct content aspect of a lesson. But once you reach about 10 to 15 minutes of direct content, the kids are used to the room, they’re used to the lights hitting their eyes, they’re used to the hum of the air con — their threshold will start to creep up. And you need to find a way every 10 to 15 seconds to reset their threshold and buy yourself more time. Otherwise it’s gonna be harder and harder and harder for them to pay attention.

Vicki Davis (07:37): How do you reset your threshold? Tap dance?

Jared Cooney Horvath (07:39): Essentially all you have to do is break the kids’ prediction. So if the threshold’s going up because they’re used to the environment, you need to do something that’s unpredictable or changes the environment in some way. So it’s as simple as, if you’re talking, you show a video clip, or you tell a joke, or you get them to answer a question or chat to someone next to them. Anything to break that repetitive pattern should reset their threshold and buy you another 10 minutes before it starts to creep up again. And you’ll see the best lectures and lessons always have these little moments every 10 to 15 minutes where they ask you to do something or think about something. And they’re doing that to buy more time afterwards to get more ideas over to you.

Vicki Davis (08:17): Okay, what’s our fourth?

Jared Cooney Horvath (08:19): Fourth, why don’t we go with story for this one? So the way the brain processes information is it essentially assumes that whatever just happened must link to and somehow drive what is about to happen. So essentially the brain thinks in cause and effect — even when there isn’t any cause and effect, it will drive that. If you think about dreaming: when we’re awake and we think about the dreams we had last night, they’re usually chaotic. Like one minute you’re on a mountain, the next minute you’re on an ocean, then you’re taking a test. It’s just nonsense. But when you’re asleep and in the dream, it makes perfect sense, because the brain is saying, well, if you’re on a mountain and then the ocean, must be connected — and it makes you feel as though that’s a continuous story. So simply put, the brain thinks in narrative, in cause and effect, story. So this means the more you can find the story behind the facts, you can start to mimic the way the brain naturally works. And it becomes easier for students to understand and remember the material you’re talking about. And when I say find the story, it can be anything. Every fact has a moment when it was invented, or discovered, or occurred. And if you can find that right framing and turn that into a cause and effect narrative — so it’s not just the Pythagorean theorem, it’s the Pythagorean theorem because a bunch of mathematicians were trying to discover the face of God and determined this was the best ratio to use. Now people start to think differently and they can remember ideas a lot better and a lot longer.

Vicki Davis (09:46): Totally. And when you talk about history and you tell the stories — and I mean, so many times students will say, I remember that story you told me, and it could have been five or six years ago and they remember the stories. That’s absolutely true. Okay, so what’s our fifth?

Jared Cooney Horvath (09:59): Last one, and this one tends to get some people angry, so we saved it for last here. But it’s: facts always precede skills. And this one can get a little tricky at times, but in human beings, we like to think about competencies or skills as dissociable — as once you have that ability, you can apply that ability anywhere. But it turns out in human beings, we can only apply our skills when we understand the facts we need to apply them to. And this is why all learning trajectories will start with surface learning. You have to start with facts, or else all your skills are essentially inaccessible. So to demonstrate, I thought I’d tell a quick story. This will only work for your listeners. So we’ve gone through this podcast. Chances are you’ve heard everything and understood everything, which means you, as a listener, have the skill of listening comprehension. You’ve been using it all along. So use that skill now to understand the story I’m about to tell you. So this would have been two weeks ago. It was the T20 Big Bash, and we’re in the final over. My team up nine runs and there was only two balls to go in the last over. So essentially the other team’s playing tip and go. We throw a Jaffa, lose a point, next one goes through, slips for four, then drives offline for four. We go into a super over, drop 22 off of an off spinner, and lose a game that we should have easily won. Now, unless you understand cricket very well, I’m guessing you weren’t able to understand a word that just came out of my mouth. And that’s because you don’t have the facts. It doesn’t matter that your skill of listening comprehension is good — once I shift facts into a realm you don’t understand, you can no longer apply that skill. So we have this issue with the brain where facts, and embedding facts, is what allows skills to emerge and be applicable. So bring this back to the classroom now. This is why a lot of people say before you go into project-based learning, or before you go into exploratory learning, it’s worth spending a couple days laying the foundational groundwork — because that’s what’s gonna allow them to actually go deep and start to apply their skills to those new facts.

Vicki Davis (12:01): Absolutely. I’ve been through some courses where we call it front loading the words, or front loading the content. And I rarely teach with textbooks, but I have one class with textbooks. You know, I’ll ask kids, how often do we look at what’s coming up? Because it helps us learn.

Jared Cooney Horvath (12:15): Absolutely. When we start to frame facts, then we can actually move forward with our skills.

Vicki Davis (12:21): One last question. What is something that you think a lot of teachers do that they think is teaching, but goes completely against what neuroscience says works?

Jared Cooney Horvath (12:32): Okay, this is gonna sound slightly weird, but I think one common practice that goes against the neuroscience of learning is stress avoidance. I think there’s a big movement in education now to make kids feel as calm, as comfortable, as peaceful as possible. And although that’s a wonderful goal for outcomes like well-being and self-control, it turns out if you want to learn, you need to feel a small bit of stress. Stress is what triggers the chemical cascade that allows you to start building memories. And this is why whenever you’re learning something new and you’re slightly uncomfortable, that discomfort is the sensation of learning. That mini stress — that is the sign that your brain is starting to update and change. So when we try and protect students from feeling any kind of stress or discomfort, and we always jump in and try and save them, that’s not how learning happens. You want the brain to change, to understand, to take in memories — you’ve gotta let it feel slightly uncomfortable and you’ve gotta let it sit in that. Not too long. I mean, I’m not talking days of stress, but I’m talking 15 minutes of struggle and stress is probably a good thing.

Vicki Davis (13:38): Well, in the video games that they love — I mean, if you look at some of the video game research, you know, a 50 percent failure rate is okay.

Jared Cooney Horvath (13:46): And they love it. It’s ’cause they’ve depersonalized it. It’s highly stressful. I used to play video games growing up and I’ve broken a lot of controllers because you get stressed — but you’ve depersonalized it. You understand that’s part of the gaming process and you don’t see it as a reflection of yourself. So how do we get kids to recognize that same stress is okay in learning? That’s just part of the process and it’s not a personal reflection. When you feel stressed, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means you’re doing learning.

Vicki Davis (14:10): Okay, so teachers, here’s the book: Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick. Go out and get it, and let’s apply neuroscience. And I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about this stress avoidance. But we’ve talked about memory and recall and accessing and practicing. The second one we talked about — spoken words and written text don’t always mix, and to give time for that note taking, and please, teachers, let your kids record. Have the threshold in our environment. So we change things up every 10 to 15 minutes, tell stories. And remember that facts precede skills — there are things that we need to front load and get in their environment. Thanks, Jared.

Jared Cooney Horvath (14:49): Thank you so much.

Announcer (14:50): Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

The Top 10 of the First 1,000

As the 10 Minute Teacher approaches its 1,000th episode, I went back through the download numbers for every show and pulled the ten that teachers listened to most. One airs each weekday through September 18, counting down to number one.

#7 — you are here. Yesterday: #8, Jon Bergmann on mastery learning. Tomorrow: number six.

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