Episode 107 Description
In this episode, I chat with Robert Barnett, co-founder of The Modern Classrooms Project and author of Meet Every Learner’s Needs: Redesigning Instruction So All Learners Can Succeed. We dive into the power of self-paced learning—even for young students—explore how digitizing direct instruction can free teachers to focus on deeper connections with learners, and address the common concern of maintaining the human element in tech-supported
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AI-Generated Transcript
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Catlin: Well, thank you for joining me. I’m super excited to have this conversation. And I always start by asking my guests kind of the same question, which is, where did you start in education? And kind of what was your journey to get to the work that you’re doing now with the Modern Classroom Project?
Robert: Yeah, well, I’m thrilled to be here and happy to share. I started probably like most of your listeners as a teacher. Actually, I was a classroom aide for a year. I enjoyed that. I wanted to teach. I taught at an independent school. And then I taught in DC public schools at a big Title I high school. Actually not far from where I had grown up in Washington, DC.
I taught high school math. I love working with high schoolers. I love math. I found teaching to be very difficult. And, I think the reason is I just realized that I had a bunch of students in my class, they all needed different things, and I was ill-equipped to meet all of those needs at once. In fact, the training I had received, which was to deliver one lesson to all of your students every day, it just didn’t work when some of my students were ahead of grade level and needed to be challenged. Some were behind and needed support. A lot weren’t there at all. I mean, I really struggled with absenteeism, and I know that’s even more of a problem today.
And yeah, so I taught for several years in DC public schools. I actually ended up moving to Switzerland. My wife got a job there. There I taught at an elite international boarding school, which was very different from my DC public school in terms of the students, but very similar in terms of the students’ needs and teaching and learning. Whenever you have a group of students trying to learn something, they are always gonna have different needs. Some will always move faster, some will always go slower. So even though it was classes of 12 students, you know, in a elite school, I had-
Catlin: Wow, that’s wild.
Robert: Yeah, I mean, I was used to 25, 30 or more, you know, in a big public school. I was at 12, I thought this is gonna be so easy, but in some ways it was easier, but in terms of actually teaching students math, it wasn’t because those students still had different needs. I still had to figure out a way to meet them all. So, the approach that I used, both in public school and in Switzerland, it will be familiar to your listeners because I know it’s similar to the great work you’ve done, but I recorded my own instructional videos. I just took what I wanted students to learn and I made a short, very simple video, nothing fancy, sometimes just recording a video call with myself.
I gave that to my students. They could now learn at their own pace. I could make sure they actually understood lesson one before they got to lesson two and so on. And this approach worked for me in public school and in the boarding school. I had shared it with colleagues in Washington, DC. One of them, my friend and colleague, Kareem Farah, had been very successful using it. He got some recognition in Washington DC public schools. And we decided let’s share what we’re doing with the world.
We created a nonprofit called the Modern Classrooms Project in 2018. That first year we trained eight of our colleagues at Eastern High School in Washington DC. In 2019, we trained 25 teachers across the DC area. We said…hey, we’ve got something that works, let’s put this out there on the internet and see what happens. And then, you know, I see you laughing. Then came COVID, the spring of 2020, and all of a sudden, we had people all over the country, all over the world reaching out to us and saying, please, can you help me? I’m not sure how to meet all my students’ needs in this new world. And even though we had developed this approach for in-person teaching, it helped teachers teaching virtually, and it helped them when they got back to the classroom as well.
So, fast forward to today, we’ve trained about 80,000 teachers all over the world through our free online course. We have a mentorship program where we’ve worked really closely with about 20,000 teachers. And I feel really, I’ve come a long way from that struggling teacher at Eastern High School, you know, feeling like a failure every day. But the challenges I faced, are the challenges teachers still face, and I feel privileged to be in a place where I can try to help teachers address them.
Catlin: So how many years in were you, I’m just curious, before you were like, okay, this clearly is not working. I’m gonna try something different, and I’m gonna start recording my lectures, my explanations of these different math processes. Cause that had to be happening after the conversation about flipped classroom had already been pretty established. Cause I remember when I wrote my first book in 2010, nobody had actually heard of the phrase blended learning, but they had a lot of them had heard of flip classroom because I think of Khan Academy and those things starting to pop up. So at what point, like, did you have a moment of realization or you just decide I’m just gonna try something totally different?
Robert: Yeah, I realized pretty soon after I started teaching. I mean, I had been a classroom aid, I had taught in a private school and there I had been able to kind of get away with teaching in the traditional way because I had smaller classes. But when I started teaching in the public school system, you know, it was a couple months in where I just felt like, gosh, I am really not reaching my students. This is miserable. I need to do something different.
You’re absolutely right. They’re this idea of the flipped classroom was out there. I learned how to record videos from a colleague who had discovered this brand new program called Edpuzzle that helped him sort of, you know, embed questions in videos. I think this was end of 2014, beginning of 2015. So I didn’t invent something new. I took inspiration from him. You were doing this at this time, obviously. And I just sort of kept pulling pieces that I found that others suggested that I came up with until I had a kind of cohesive approach that really worked for me. And now we call that approach the modern classroom model.
Catlin: Yeah, I love that. And I want listeners to understand that the recording of the instruction is just like one piece of the puzzle. And it really allows for student control over pacing. And I remember watching your TEDx talk from a few years ago. And you use this really great analogy with a bike and a bike ride, I feel like. And you were talking about it, comparing it to education. And so I would love for you to kind of just share that analogy and what you were trying to explain. Because for me, I imagine it helps a lot of teachers kind of get their head around the why for this new approach to kind of designing learning that allows for more student control over the pace of their progress through lessons and learning experiences.
Robert: Yeah, be glad to share that. I grew up in Washington, DC, not far from the Capitol Building and the National Mall. And so when people would come visit me, I would always like to take them out on a bike ride, you know, to see the sights of DC. Um, you know, one thing I realized is when people get on bikes, they go at different speeds, right? Some people like they’re fast and they don’t stop for stop signs. You know, they just want to go. Others they’re slow, they take their time, they look around there, you know, they’re a little more cautious.
And it was always frustrating to me to think, well, let’s say I want to show them the highlights of Washington, DC. If I only have two hours to do that, it’s gonna be really difficult if they’re all going at the same pace, right? My pace is gonna be too slow for some, too fast for others. Some might not have been on a bike for 10 years, you know? And I think this example really dramatized for me the fact that different people have different needs. You can’t have everyone bike to the same place at the same rate without some of them feeling, you know, this is too fast and others feeling this is too slow.
And so I think it’s like that for learners. If I explain a new concept to you, you might think, oh, I get it, can we move on to something new? Or you might think, what in the world is this guy talking about? And like, neither of those is a good position to be in. What I said I would want for that bike ride is, you know, maybe I could give people an audio tour. Right, I’ve done this myself. Like bike here and then you listen to the description of what you’re seeing, go somewhere else at your own pace, pick and choose what you’re interested. To me that is such a better experience than being dragged along with everyone else at the tour guide’s pace. And I think you’re right about the video. That’s a small part of the instruction, but really the vision is to give people control over their own learning, so they can learn as much as possible and really understand things.
Catlin: I love that. And I also appreciate this idea of when you have kind of the map of all the places you can go, and then you kind of get there in a pace that works for you. You know, you go as fast or slow as you want, you look around or you don’t. And maybe there’s stops that you actually are like, oh, I’ve already seen that, or I already know about that. I’m going to skip that one. And I know when I’ve talked to you and Kareem in the past, part of what I love too about the design of the learning in modern classroom projects is that approach of like, here’s the must dos, everybody needs to do it. Here’s the may dos, and here’s the aspire to dos. So it’s also recognizing that not everybody needs to stop at every single stop on the tour or the learning pathway, in order to be successful, which I think this analogy also speaks to in a way that’s really interesting.
But I know there’s got to be people listening who are like, OK, are you telling me students can really self-pace in K-12 classrooms? Even young learners are capable of that. So I’m sure you guys hear that kind of concern or that skepticism of teachers who are interested, but they’re like, I don’t know. Can young learners do this? Are they capable of self-pacing? Will they get anything done, or will they just stall out? So how do you respond to teachers who express concerns like that?
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing I would say is that when you’re very young, all learning is self-paced. I have two kids, they’re four and two right now. And one of them started to walk early and the other one started to walk late. It would be ridiculous for me to say, okay, you are 12 months old, you better be walking. You know, you’re 16 months old. You know, you’re 16 months old. I’m going to give you this vocabulary test. Like, you know, we know, and I really see that every day in my own home, that people learn at their own paces, and you can only actually learn at your own pace, right? You can’t really truly learn and achieve mastery at someone else’s pace.
In terms of how this works in schools, yeah, I was a high school teacher. I had no idea whether this approach would work in elementary schools, but when we shared it with teachers in elementary schools, they said, first of all, this works great. Like, you know, I see my, I want to give my students independence and they’re capable of it. And in some ways, actually, this model is easier for elementary teachers to take on because I think elementary teachers already think about things like small group instruction, different learners reading at different paces. It’s often in secondary school when we start to say, okay, now everyone moves at my pace. So in some way elementary schools are better set up for that.
Of course teachers need to make accommodations for the age of their students. You can’t give a kindergartner extensive written directions if they don’t know how to read. But I’ve seen in kindergarten classrooms, first-grade classrooms, students rise to the expectations we set for them. And if we create good structures for young people and it’s clear to them and we’re patient with them, then they can do things that might exceed our initial expectations.
Catlin: Oh, I could not agree more. I think sometimes the biggest limitations students are facing are just the ones we impose on them because I have seen kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade classrooms just function at such a high level. And I think there’s a couple of things going on, which is, you’re right, these teachers often have much more time that they’re working with. And so as a result, they have to kind of re-imagine what this time and space is going to look like. They can’t stand at the front of the room and talk at kids for half a day, an entire day. That would never work. But I think there’s also just this degree to which they’re used to at the elementary level doing such a good job of onboarding kids to routines, right? They know they have to explain it, and they have to model it and we have to practice it. We’ve got to practice it some more and the kids are going to need feedback. And they’re just used to doing that for everything. And so I think when it comes to something, maybe that feels a bit ambitious, like what we’re talking about, they’re set up to do it more successfully because of that foundation of just being, this is how we approach everything in here.
And I’ve also, I don’t know if you’ve run up into this, but I remember I was leading a training with secondary teachers. This was probably a year and a half ago now. And one of the women in the training said to me, well, if I just make a bunch of videos of myself, then I’m basically putting myself out of a job. And I had this moment of like, ooh, if we think that our value is in our ability to just transfer information. Like I think we’re actually missing the magic of teaching, right? And so, you know, first of all, you wrote a book. It’s very exciting. So Meet Every Learner’s Needs is coming out. Do you, what’s the official due date?
Robert: It should be out February 5th.
Catlin: Should be. That’s a really good qualifier. When you publish a book, it sometimes feels like a little bit of a moving target, but that’s super exciting. And when you wrote the book, you talk about the benefits of digitizing direct instruction like we’re talking about. And so when you think about the benefits, not just for self-pacing, but in terms of the teacher-learner experience and the kinds of things teachers could do with their time if they’re not feeling that pressure to be at the front of the room, transferring information for the whole class in a lecture, a mini-lesson, what do you see as the benefits of how we now get to use that time, even at a secondary level where teachers might not be used to some of these kinds of approaches?
Robert: Yeah, great question. I do talk in the book about digitizing direct instruction and it’s the first chapter. But it’s one chapter of many. And I think this gets back to what you said earlier. Like the video is not the class. The video is a tool that facilitates how you want the class to work. So for me, when I was standing at the front of the room trying to deliver a lesson, it was frustrating for me because I could tell my students didn’t get it. It was exhausting because I was trying to control their behavior, right? They were bored or they were lost. So they were not sitting there listening quietly, and I would have to control their behavior and it took forever. I would have a simple concept to explain that I thought would take five minutes, but because I had so much behavior and students walking in midway through class and all it would take me 20 minutes, and it was like a waste of everyone’s time.
If I can take that same explanation, make it in five minutes, put it on a video, well now students can pause and ask questions. They can watch again. They can watch it at home. They can watch it with their families. You know, it’s so much more accessible to them. And I’m not spending my time in class at the front of the room getting frustrated. I would sit down with my students. You know, I sit at the table and I help them answer their questions and I check in. How are you doing today? You know, how’s your week been going? How was the game last night? I really felt like I got to know my students in a much more powerful way than when I was standing at the front of the room, lecturing at them.
And that’s, that’s why I became a teacher. I didn’t become a teacher because I wanted to exercise power over compliance students. I became a teacher because I wanted to get to know them and build relationships and help them grow as mathematicians and more importantly as people. And once I had the time and the ability to do that, I loved it. What created the time and the ability for me was digitizing my direct instruction. And in the book, you know, I spend five to 10 pages talking about how I created videos, and I spend 50 or 100 pages talking about how I built relationships, how I got students working together, how I motivated my students. That’s what this is all about.
Catlin: Yeah. And I think one of the things that I feel is true based on my experience and my work as a teacher, as a coach, working with teachers all over, is there’s almost this, you have to, like so many teachers are at that front of the room and they do the whole group lesson and they’re so scared to give up the control. They’re like, if I give up control, I’m, you know, kids are going to, it’s going to be chaotic. Kids are, you know, they’re going to, there’s going to be all kinds of behavior problems. But when I work with teachers, I really try to highlight that I think a lot of the disengagement, the behavior issues are exactly stemming from what you’re talking about.
Like students aren’t engaged because the material isn’t meeting them where they’re at. It’s not moving at a pace that’s going to work for the majority of the class. So if it’s too slow, I’m bored, I disengage. If it’s too fast, I’m frustrated, I disengage, right? And then you do have all these management issues, the things that make teachers wanna pull their hair out, that also blossom from this kind of one size fits nobody experience and then kids are just like, they hate it and they’re making their own fun and they are not enjoying the class.
And so, it’s almost like you have to be willing to let go in order to realize that through the act of letting go and allowing kids to control the pace, to be kind of more at the center of the experience, that you’re actually going to create more engagement. You’re gonna minimize those class behaviors. But man, getting teachers to kind of take that leap and feel vulnerable and get outside their comfort zones to release that control is one of the hardest things I think I face in my work with teachers.
Robert: That’s really, really well said. I always think that the best behavior management strategy is an engaging lesson. Young people show up at school wanting to learn and wanting to succeed. And I think when they misbehave, it’s because they don’t feel like they can succeed, because they learned it already or it’s over their head. And so if we create conditions where every student is appropriately challenged every day and we can provide appropriate supports, students are going to want to learn. They’re gonna sit down and be focused. And yes, of course, young people get distracted, but it’s also a lot easier to get them back on track when you just walk over and tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, how can I help you? Versus you’re at the front of the room and two students are talking and you have to tell them to be quiet and you get into this awful kind of behavior showdown. That’s what made me want to want to tear my hair out.
You know, you have a really good point about giving up control because the controlling teacher is what people expect. You know, it’s what’s in the movies, this great entertaining teacher. And that’s not me. You know, I’m a regular, regular person. But it’s kind of what I tried to be. And it wasn’t me. I feel much more comfortable in small groups and one-on-one with students.
But yeah, when I first started, you might have had this, when I first started using videos, students would say, well, you’re not teaching me because teaching is being at the front of the room. And parents might say, why aren’t you teaching my kid? And I would say, look, I’m teaching you more because you can watch my video anytime you want, you have me one-on-one, just raise your hand and I’ll be glad to come answer your questions. So more engaging, more personalized, a lot more fun for me. And I think my students had more fun too. They weren’t just expected to sit quietly with their hands on their lap and listen.
Catlin: Yeah, I remember when I started flipping my classroom recording videos, I think our, gosh, our back-to-school night was probably like six to eight weeks, it was kind of a late one that year. And I decided I’m doing all this flipping for my students. And a lot of parents have multiple kids on this campus. They work at nights. They can’t come to back to school night. They might not speak English as a first language. We had a lot of Spanish-speaking families in the community. And so I decided I would flip my back-to-school night.
And so when I sent out the email that I sent out every year that was like, hey, hope I get to see you back to school night. Here’s the date, the time, here’s my room number. I also had the link to the video, the YouTube video, that was my flipped back to school night where I introduced myself and talked about the class and I kind of took them on a screencast tour of the places their kids were gonna be hanging out online and where they could find resources. And I even ended with a QR code for a parent survey. And I even had a version that had kind of the subtitles in Spanish. So, it was so fascinating because I had parents come to back-to-school night who are like, thank you so much for the video. Like these nights are a blur, but that was so helpful. I’m so glad I can rewatch it. Parents who couldn’t come or said, hey, I had a conflict with two of my kids classes at the same time. This was wonderful.
And it was so it was so interesting because then a dad came up to me. He goes, I hear your voice in my house a lot. And I was like, what? And he was like your videos. And I was like, oh, yeah, videos home with you. That’s true. And he goes, pretty helpful. Thanks. And he just like walked away and I was like, okay, cool. I think that one flip video for back to school night was probably the thing that for most of my parents was like, oh, I kind of get it because I made the connection. Hey, this is what I’m doing for your students and why. But I do know that I’ve worked with a lot of teachers who have had kids kind of say the same thing of like, oh, you’re not teaching because we’ve all been programmed to picture the teacher as this person at the front of the room, just, you know, want, want, want talk in the entire class period. So it is a little bit of like retraining or unlearning what we think teaching and learning actually looks like when we talk about these different models.
Robert: Absolutely. I’ve found that once people understand it, they love it. I mean, it’s, this is so great for a parent that you have access to the instruction, you know, my son comes home from pre-K and I, I want to know what are you learning about today? You know, and it’s kind of a black box to me. If there were videos that I could watch and support his learning and make sure that he’s understanding things, I would be eager to do that.
I think there’s a lot of fear around technology and education. Like that teacher you mentioned who said, technology is gonna replace us. People think that a classroom with videos is going to be impersonal and students will be sitting on screens the whole time. And in my classroom and in modern classrooms I visit, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I mean, students watch videos for a couple minutes so that they can work with their classmates, so that they can work with the teacher, so that they can bring instruction home and continue it with their families, or they can catch up when they miss a day. So we sort of have to get past that misconception about technology replacing teachers or being dull.
There may well be some programs in which students stare at the screen all day and it is dull and the teachers are unnecessary. That’s not my belief nor modern classrooms belief. The teacher is at the heart of everything, the most important person in the room. And the goal of modern classrooms project, the goal of the book is to give the teacher strategies to really enhance the teacher’s ability and authenticity.
Catlin: Yeah. You’ve been a teacher, you’ve done this work with modern classrooms. What inspired you to write the book? Like, why were you like, okay, I’m gonna do it. This is, you know, cause writing a book, you and I have talked about this. It is like the professional equivalent of having like a baby, in my opinion. It just takes so long and so much time and energy. So what was the inspiration behind Meet Every Learner’s Needs?
Robert: Yeah, it’s a question I ask myself often, usually late at night or early in the morning when I was motivating myself to keep going. I think a couple reasons. First of all, I wanted to tell a story. I think if you look at the modern classroom model, we present an approach that a teacher can use and I hope that we explain it in a clear way. But I think the best way to understand it is really to see where did it come from in my classroom? You know, what did I do? What were the actual challenges I was facing and how did I address them step by step.
I didn’t show up on my first day of videos and have everything perfectly figured out. It took me a long time, a lot of trial and error. First I made a video, then my students said, what do we do after the video? I didn’t have a great answer, so I had to find something. And then I said, okay, well, they’re watching the video, they’re doing practice. How do I know that they’re actually understanding? I came up with mastery checks from there. I wanted to tell the story of how I developed it in hopes that that makes it easy for teachers to realize, look, Rob was a teacher. He did this step by step. I want to get to a different form of teaching. Here’s how I can do it step by step. I think as humans, we just relate to stories and I wanted to tell the story.
It was also, as I’m sure you feel, it’s a great exercise for a writer to sit down and think. What is really the clearest way to explain something? What is the message I really wanna send? And so I enjoyed that opportunity to reflect. And then I think the final thing, Modern Classrooms offers online courses. Our courses are great. I love learning in online courses. I’ve taken your online courses and I learn a lot from them. At the same time, when you’re on a computer taking a class, there’s a lot of distraction. There’s email and there’s YouTube and there’s Netflix and all these other things.
I think when you are reading a book, it’s possible to focus and engage in a different way. You might highlight passages, you might dog ear pages. And so I wanted to create that opportunity, especially for people who don’t love online courses, to have this book and be on summer break and decide to open it up and sit in a comfortable chair and, you know, read and mark the pages and just engage in that way. I, I love reading. And so I know a lot of other teachers do too. And so I hope I’ve written a book that will be enjoyable for teachers to read and that they’ll, they’ll find engaging in a way that only books can be.
Catlin: Right. Well, and you’re really acknowledging that different people like to learn in different ways. Like honestly, that’s a big part of why I even have a podcast today, because I am so much more comfortable writing my blog, right? Like sitting at the computer and thinking about what I want to say and kind of sketching it out and then writing my drafts. That’s that’s really easy. I remember when I switched over to like, OK, maybe I will do a podcast because there are some people who they’re not going to sit down and read a blog, but they might listen to a podcast on a walk or on the way home from school. And so it’s really making the learning accessible, different pathways, which I think is really wonderful.
So if you had to kind of give readers, potential future readers, an overview of the book and kind of like maybe the big impact you were hoping it would have when you’re like, okay, I’m gonna do this, what would you say?
Robert: Yeah, what I wanna do is make it clear that any teacher can get to this blended, self-paced, mastery-based classroom just by taking some simple steps. And so the book goes through those steps and the book is in three parts.
So the first part is just about redesigning a single lesson. How do you create one blended self-paced mastery-based lesson? You have to record a video. You’ve got to give students some things to work on after the video, ideally together to develop their understanding. You gotta figure out what support you’ll provide students, and then you have to have some check for mastery to make sure that students are ready to advance. So part one is just how do you create that first lesson? And the first step is always the hardest to take. You know, once you create that first lesson, I think teachers will be excited to do more.
The next part of the book is about redesigning your courses. So once you have three or four lessons like this, you might wanna put them together in a coherent way so that students move smoothly at their own paces from lesson one into lesson two, lesson three, lesson four. That requires good systems and good organization, right? If you have 20 students in your class and they’re spread across four or five different lessons, you gotta have a good way to track their progress. You have to make it clear to each student step comes next. And so I talk about going from lessons to entire courses that are self-paced, and not self-paced for the whole year, by the way, self-paced for a few days at a time or a week at a time, self-paced in small chunks so that students are always sort of working on the same topics and that students always have the chance to start fresh on the new topic.
And then the final part of the book, part three, is about redesigning instruction, which is, once you have good lessons, once you have a self-paced course, how do you take this out into the world and get other people to buy in? How do you convince that skeptical parent or that skeptical administrator? How do you share this with your colleagues, even though your colleagues are as busy as you are and as overwhelmed? How do you make it easy for your colleagues to do this? How do you perhaps share your experience in the way that you and I share our experiences through articles and blogs, just trying to inspire teachers to think beyond the walls of their classroom as well. So I really wanted to tell a story that begins with a single lesson, expands to a few lessons at a time or a course, and then show people that a single teacher can share ideas that have a larger impact as well.
Catlin: Yeah, I love that. And I will just say, so in that first part, for the teachers who are creating that first self-paced lesson, I hope you guys, anybody listening who decides to tackle this, remember your videos don’t need to be perfect. When I am working with teachers, and I’m sure you guys encounter this all the time at Modern Classroom Project, is there’s this, I don’t like my voice, or I don’t want to be on camera, or it’s going to take me forever to make a good video.
And it’s kind of like, nobody likes their voice, right? Like, I don’t want to listen to my voice on my own podcast, right? That’s just natural. It definitely like, you know, some teachers are in that little like box in the corner of the screen, but I’m always like, if that’s the big barrier for you, you don’t have, it could be a screencast of what’s on your screen. It could be a recording of what you’re doing underneath your dot cam. It could be lots of different forms.
And then when it comes to kind of the perfection piece, I totally struggled with that at first. I was just like, every time I made a mistake or I just stumbled on a word, I was like, well, we’re re-recording. But like live instruction’s not perfect. So remove that feeling that we have to be perfect on video. I just think sometimes, cause you said that first step is the hardest. And I think that making of the video for some teachers, even though there were a lot of teachers who did it in survival mode during COVID, it’s not really part of their everyday practice and it feels like a big hurdle for a lot of them.
Robert: Yeah, I mean, I experienced the same thing myself and there were a lot of times where I made one mistake, and I started again and now when I make videos, I don’t do that. You know, I keep going and I just say, oops, that was a mistake. That’s part of learning. You know, one other thing I try to say in the book is you don’t need to be some tech expert to record a video. If you can get on a video call, you can record a video. You know, start a Zoom with yourself, hit record, explain something you know, hit end recording, and share the link. Now, all of a sudde,n you don’t need to repeat that a hundred times in class. You don’t need to repeat that next year because you have it. Your students can watch it anytime, anywhere. Like it’s really powerful. You just have to try.
I also think by the way that it’s good to use other people’s videos too. You can mix these in sometimes or if you feel like you just can’t make the video yourself but there’s a great video on YouTube that works for your students, use that. The goal here is not to turn you into a creator. The goal here is for you to have time to interact closely with your students and to keep them appropriately challenged. So I often find that students like their teachers videos and once teachers start videos they sort of think huh, this is cool I’m proud of myself. I learned something new. I want to keep going. So I encourage you to try but remember the goal here The goal is really how can you create a classroom where you are spending a lot of quality time with your students? And where their learning is not dependent on you, you know controlling 20 kids behavior from the front of the room that that’s not going to be fun for anyone
Catlin: No, yeah. And there are some subjects, math and science in particular, there are some phenomenal and even history, some phenomenal videos out there that you can kind of grab and pull and curate to mix in with what you’re already doing. I always felt like, and this is probably just because I’m a total type A control freak, that I couldn’t find what I really wanted for English. So I ended up recording almost everything that I did. And yeah, once I got over that initial hurdle, it was like not that big of a deal.
Another piece that I really want to highlight because I think it’s really important when we talk about self-pacing, and you’ve mentioned kids watching the video so that they can engage with their peers. And I think a lot of times teachers kind of struggle with that concept of like, okay, so if they’re self-pacing through a sequence of lessons that maybe span a week, how is it that they’re going to work together?
And I know in Modern Classroom’s project, you talk a lot about tracking systems, but I think those tracking systems are really pivotal when it comes to helping students find somebody who’s at a similar point in the lesson sequence in order to do some of these kind of collaborative or peer-to-peer learning opportunities. And I really place a lot of emphasis on those because whenever we talk about self-paced learning where they’re watching videos and they’re doing things online, offline, I think the idea is that they’re going to be super isolated working by themselves the whole time. So I’d love for you to speak to that a little bit for people who are trying to wrap their heads around this.
Robert: Of course, and I’ll start by putting in a little pitch for you, Catlin, because you created a great course for us that we have on our website about small group instruction and how that works in a self-paced setting. So if you want more, and I’ll make sure you put this in the show notes, but there’s a great course all about this made by an expert who I’m happy to be speaking with now. You know, my take is that a lot of times in a one size fits no one class, collaboration feels kind of forced. You tell students work together, but some are so bored because they already know it. Some can’t really contribute because they missed class the past two days. It’s not actually all that productive.
When students are moving at their own paces and you know where everyone is, you can facilitate much more authentic collaboration, which is two students at the same level working on the same activity or task to develop understanding together. So I would look at my class every day and I would assign seating based on where students were. If you’re on lesson one, you’re at this table. If you’re on lesson two, you’re at this table. And then I knew, okay, those students at lesson one, at the lesson one table, they can support one another. Same at the lesson two table.
And if a lot of students have the same question, because there’s a problem in lesson two that always trips people up. I don’t have to answer it six times all around the room. I just go to that table, I answer it, and now they’re all together and they can keep working together. So actually that data on progress allows you to foster a much more authentic kind of collaboration.
Catlin: I love that, I love that. And I think we need to pull in this conversation about absenteeism because this is like huge issue all over right now that kids are missing school and it’s hard for teachers because kids, I think it might’ve been Kareem who was kind of using the analogy of, I wanna say it was like a train, where the train of direct instruction just keeps chugging along every day, but if you’re absent, it’s like you’re jumping back, but you’ve missed all of these key pieces and then you feel totally lost. And so I could see this approach being a really wonderful way to combat so many of the challenges around absenteeism because when students reenter, they can reenter at the lesson where they left off instead of being thrown into a lesson that might be two, three, four lessons ahead of where they actually are.
Robert: Yeah, I mean, think about yourself. If you miss Monday and Tuesday of a class and you come back on Wednesday, what do you wanna learn? If you’re thrown into Wednesday’s lesson, it’s gonna be really difficult because you’re missing that important context and skills from Monday and Tuesday. If that’s me, I wanna start on Monday’s lesson, right? I wanna pick up there and work my way back to the place where everyone else is. And so that student who comes in on Wednesday, having missed the past two days, can get right to work in an appropriately challenging and engaging place.
I also think that in a modern classroom where your direct instruction is digital, that student can catch up at home as well. You know, before I started teaching like this, I said, well, if you missed class, stay after school or get the notes from a friend. Well, first of all, students who often miss class might not be able to stay after school. They might be missing class because they have to take care of a sibling or they have to work or something. So I don’t think that’s fair. And if you could learn just by getting notes from a friend, you never have to go to school, right? It’s not enough to give students notes and makeup work and say, good luck, good luck on Wednesday’s lesson.
You really, we really need to give students the chance to build understanding step by step. And I think Sal Khan has an analogy about building a house. You need to build the foundation first. So you can’t have the student come in on the first floor if they haven’t built that foundation first. I think a self-paced, mastery-based environment is really good for those absent students. And It’s good for everyone else too.
Catlin: Yeah, I totally agree. So I always end the episode by asking my guests if there is a tip, a strategy, a routine that you have kind of adopted or that you use to create more of a health-ish work-life balance. Obviously, you have a house with little kids, you have this kind of modern class and project that must consume a ton of time, you’ve just written a book that takes time. So what do you do that works for you that maybe might work for somebody listening?
Robert: Well, I’m a little embarrassed to share this, but I’m also proud because it works for me. I think I probably have the record for number of times downloading and deleting the Gmail app on my phone. During the day, I have the app, so that I can check my email. But when I leave to go pick up my kids, I delete the app from my phone.
Catlin: You fully delete it?
Robert: Fully delete it, yeah.
Catlin: Wow.
Robert: And I’m not proud of it because it’s just like, I think, how pathetic am I that I can’t just keep my phone in my pocket? But if the app is on my phone, I might be tempted to check it when I have a down moment in playing with my kids and then I see an email come in I don’t want. So, usually, you know, if I wake up early, I might download the app in the morning, check my email, then my kids wake up. I delete it, then I download it again, then I delete it. Then I might download it again. So, um, it is a really kind of ridiculous work life hack, but it works for me. And it’s nice that, you know, when I’m, when I’m not working, work email can’t reach me.
Catlin: Yeah, no, I know the email boomerang game is like exhausting. And I could imagine I sometimes when I’m trying to be heads down focus, I will literally do what I used to ask my high school students to do, which is like screen down, do not touch this phone until you are done with this task, Catlin. Otherwise it’s so easy to like get sucked into that, you know, communication vortex and just lose so much time and focus for me because I get so distracted thinking about the things that are coming up in the email. So definitely that is a good one. I mean, if it works for you to delete it, then you keep doing that. That’s what I would say.
Robert: I would much prefer to have the discipline and willpower just to put it down next to me, but unfortunately I don’t. So I need to go, you know, step further. Sometimes I didn’t get my first smartphone until, you know, 2014, which was pretty late. So sometimes I think I should go back to the flip phone, but I haven’t gone that far yet.
Catlin: You would really have to search to find one of those, I feel like. I don’t know that those are widely available anymore.
Robert: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they should make a comeback. Maybe we’d all be happier. I’m not sure. That’s a topic for another conversation.
Catlin: Exactly. Well, I will include a link to the book, Meet Every Learner’s Needs in the show notes. We can include a link to the free course and then the small group stuff that I created for you guys. And if you want to connect and ask questions, I’ll put your contact information in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for joining me. Congratulations on your book. That’s very exciting. And I so appreciate this conversation.
Robert: Thank you. It’s been really fun. And thanks to everyone listening.
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