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Exercising Your Critical Thinking Skills

In today’s world, where digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google can provide instant answers to nearly any question, the ability to think critically is more important than ever. Teaching students how to think, not just what to think, has become essential to education.

In Episode 270 of our podcast, we dive deeper into this topic with Dr. Emily Fyfe, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Dr. Fyfe and her colleagues have recently published groundbreaking research titled, “A Scalable, Versatile Approach for Improving Critical Thinking Skills,” which offers fresh insights into how we can enhance our critical thinking abilities.

The Study: A Closer Look

Dr. Fyfe explains that this research was inspired by a troubling observation: Many people, regardless of their education level, could be more proficient in critical thinking. “Just because you are educated, or have attended a class or even graduated from college, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a better critical thinker,” says Fyfe. “That’s a problem we wanted to address.”

In their study, all participants began with a pre-test and received basic training on critical thinking principles. Then, they were divided into three groups:

Critical Thinking Practice Group: This group engaged in targeted exercises designed to strengthen critical thinking skills.
Non-Critical Thinking Practice Group: Participants in this group underwent exercises unrelated to critical thinking.
Control Group: This group received no additional practice after the initial training.

Following the exercises, all participants took a post-test. The results showed that those who participated in the critical thinking practice significantly improved from their pre-test scores. In contrast, the other groups showed minimal gains.

Why It Matters

These findings underscore the importance of actively practicing critical thinking rather than assuming it develops passively through general education. To hear more about Dr. Fyfe’s research and why it’s crucial to exercise our critical thinking muscles, tune in to Episode 270 of the Class Dismissed podcast. You can find it on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Food is a fundamental part of our lives, making it a perfect subject for engaging students in not just health class but also science class. By integrating food nutrition and food science into K-12 science classrooms, educators can offer students hands-on, practical lessons that connect directly to their daily lives.

Our guest in episode 269 of Class Dismissed is Dr. Julia Olayanju, a distinguished expert who holds a PhD from Rutgers University and a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is the founder of FoodNiche Inc. and FoodNiche-ED, which are platforms dedicated to advancing food and health education through cutting-edge technology.

Listen to Episode 269 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear more from Dr. Olanyanju.

Here are a few ways to make this food science integration effective and enjoyable.

Food-Based ExperimentsFood offers countless opportunities for experiments that illustrate core scientific principles. For instance, students can explore chemical reactions by baking bread or making yogurt and observing how ingredients like yeast or bacteria interact. Measuring the acidity of different foods can introduce concepts of pH and acids and bases. These activities teach scientific concepts and give students a tangible outcome they can taste and enjoy.
Nutrition EducationIncorporating lessons on nutrition into the science curriculum helps students understand the impact of food on their health. Teachers can discuss the macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) in various foods, explaining how they fuel the body. Activities like analyzing food labels or planning balanced meals can make these concepts more relatable and encourage healthier eating habits.
Farm-to-Table LessonsConnecting the classroom to the broader food system can be a powerful way to teach about sustainability, biology, and agriculture. Lessons can include visits to local farms, growing a school garden, or even simple discussions about where food comes from. These experiences help students understand the science behind food production, the importance of sustainable practices, and the impact of agriculture on the environment.
Food Safety and PreservationTeaching students about food safety and preservation techniques, such as canning, freezing, or drying, can integrate microbiology and chemistry into the classroom. Understanding how bacteria grow and how different preservation methods inhibit this growth provides a practical application of these scientific principles.
Cultural and Historical ContextsFood is deeply tied to culture and history, offering a unique way to integrate social studies with science. Students can explore how different cultures use various foods and cooking methods and how these have evolved over time. Discussions can also include the role of food in historical events, such as the spice trade or the development of agriculture, linking science with broader societal changes.

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The Invisible BarrierChronic absenteeism in K-12 education is an invisible barrier, quietly eroding the future potential of countless students one missed day at a time.

In Episode 268 of Class Dismissed, we explore ideas for districts to tackle chronic absenteeism.

The DL LinkFor instance, several states have implemented measures linking school attendance to the ability to obtain a driver’s license to combat chronic absenteeism. In states like California, Florida, and Tennessee, students under a certain age must meet specific attendance requirements to receive or maintain their driver’s licenses. The logic behind these policies is that the incentive of a driver’s license can motivate students to attend school regularly.

SchoolStatus AttendWe also talked with Dr. Kara Stern. Stern currently serves as the Director of Education and Engagement at SchoolStatus.SchoolStatus offers a suite of products, but one, in particular, has some proven ways to approve attendance.

SchoolStatus Attend is a data-driven attendance management solution that helps educators automate attendance interventions and provide positive reinforcement to improve daily attendance. It reduces administrative workload by automating outreach through letters, postcards, and digital messages.

Listen to Episode 268 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear our full episode dedicated to chronic absenteeism and learn more about SchoolStatus Attend.

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Envision a classroom where transitions between activities are seamless, students are actively engaged, and their cognitive and social-emotional development is consistently nurtured. This vision becomes a reality with the integration of sound-making activities. These activities facilitate smoother transitions and play a crucial role in enhancing executive functioning skills, promoting active listening, and encouraging mindfulness. Their impact in diverse classrooms, supporting children with varying language abilities and behavioral needs, is significant.

In Episode 267 of Class Dismissed, we delve into this transformative teaching method with Hayes Greenfield—an accomplished saxophonist, composer, and educator based in New York City. Greenfield is also the founder of CreativeSoundPlay.com.

His platform offers a play-based learning system for early childhood educators, focusing on sound-making activities to enrich classroom dynamics. Through a comprehensive guide and engaging workshops, Creative Sound Play transforms routine transitions into educational experiences that foster mindfulness, active listening, and cognitive growth.

Listen to Episode 267 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear how Greenfield uses sound as a tool in the classroom.

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Summer break is a chance to keep your school community connected and thriving. By continuing communication, you’ll:

Empower students and families for a smooth transition back to school.
Fuel excitement for the upcoming year with engaging updates.
Solidify your school’s role as a vital center for the community.

In Episode 266 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, we speak with Dr. Kara Stern. Stern currently serves as the Director of Education and Engagement at SchoolStatus.

In the episode, Stern shared SchoolStatus’ To-Do List for summer communications.

Engage FamiliesFrequent communication aimed at families is essential for reducing absenteeism, minimizing dropouts, and creating an environment conducive to learning. Transparency and consistent outreach help build trust, manage expectations, and reinforce your school’s dedication to every student’s growth.

Share end-of-year accomplishments, highlights, and important dates (e.g., graduation, testing schedules)
Provide updates on facility changes, new programs, or initiatives planned for the upcoming school year
Offer contact information for administrators, counselors, and teachers for families who need support during the summer
Promote the benefits of regular school attendance and the importance of showing up on Day 1
Share summer reading lists, educational resources, or local community event recommendations

Empower Faculty & StaffMaintaining open lines of communication with teachers and personnel is key to talent retention, professional development, and cultivating a supportive workplace culture. Leverage summer downtime to provide growth opportunities, share inspirational content, and equip your team with the tools for a successful year ahead.

To-Do List:

Celebrate staff achievements, milestones, and recognition from the previous school year
Communicate staffing changes, new hires, or role transitions for the upcoming year
Provide professional development opportunities, resources, or training during the summer break
Share inspiration, quotes, or messages to keep staff engaged and motivated
Offer updates on facility changes, new technology implementations, or operational procedures

Follow Communication Best PracticesImplementing an all-encompassing summer engagement strategy requires strategic planning, engaging content, and leveraging the right tech tools. Follow these guidelines to ensure your school or district remains top-of-mind, forges meaningful connections, and lays the groundwork for an impactful academic year.

To-Do List:

Maintain a consistent communication cadence (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly)
Use photos, memes, or GIFs to make communications more engaging and fun
Ensure communications are translatable and accessible in multiple languages
Include polls and surveys to invite your readers’ feedback and participation
Leverage analytics to identify disengaged audiences and follow up with personalized outreach
Promote a sense of community, trust, and connection throughout the summer months
Set the tone and establish branding guidelines for district/school-wide communications
Introduce key personnel (e.g., principals, counselors, teachers) before the school year begins
Provide a “welcome back” message as the start of the school year approaches to build excitement

Listen to Episode 266 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear more ideas about school communications and SchoolStatus.

SchoolStatus is used by school districts worldwide. Its integrated, data-driven tools simplify communication and engagement among families, educators, and administrators.

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Integrating reading instruction throughout the school day presents several challenges for teachers:

Time Constraints: With tight schedules and a packed curriculum, finding extra time for reading instruction in non-language arts subjects can be difficult.

Curriculum Demands: Subjects like math, science, and social studies already have extensive curricula. Incorporating reading without sacrificing essential content can be a struggle.

Lack of Training: Not all teachers are trained in effective reading strategies, especially those specializing in other subjects. This can make it challenging to integrate reading into their teaching.

However, embedding reading instruction throughout the day can significantly enhance students’ reading proficiency, engagement, and overall academic success. It creates a rich literacy environment where reading becomes an essential and enjoyable part of everyday learning.

Our guest on Episode 265 of Class Dismissed, Jen Serravallo, is an expert on this topic. Her new book, “Teaching Reading Across the Day,” focuses on integrating reading instruction into various parts of the school day. Known for her practical and effective strategies, Serravallo provides educators with tools and techniques to embed reading skills and practices during designated reading times and across different subjects and activities.

Serravallo’s latest book is designed to help teachers foster a love for reading in their students.

Listen to Episode 265 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear our entire conversation and some tips from Serravallo.

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Many middle and high school teachers avoid discussing controversial topics in class due to their fear of controversy. They may worry about offending students or parents with different viewpoints. However, productive discussions on complex issues are essential to learning. It requires skill, and teachers may need more confidence in navigating disagreements. However, these discussions can be valuable learning experiences with careful planning and clear guidelines.

In episode 264 of Class Dismissed, we interviewed two experts: Dr. Paula McAvoy, an Associate Professor of Social Studies Education at NC State College of Education, and Dr. Greg McAvoy, a professor and department head of political science. The pair offered three structured approaches to help middle and high school students debate current controversies.

Structured Academic Controversy (SAC) is a method that sets up opposing views within a framework that encourages collaboration. By assigning students to research and advocate for different sides of an issue, SAC fosters an environment where students must actively engage with opposing perspectives, aiming to reach a consensus through mutual understanding.

Close-up deliberations, in contrast, focus on exploring a range of policy options related to a given issue. Students are presented with various viewpoints and policy proposals, and through group discussions, they strive to develop a policy recommendation that accommodates diverse opinions within the group. This approach, with its real-world applicability, encourages students to consider the complexity of issues and grapple with the trade-offs involved in decision-making.

Team Debate is a powerful platform for students to articulate and defend their positions on a contentious issue. By organizing students into opposing teams and requiring each participant to contribute to the debate, this format promotes active participation and fosters critical thinking. The competitive element adds a layer of motivation for students to prepare compelling arguments while also fostering resilience in the face of opposing viewpoints.

Through surveys and interviews, the researchers found that these structured formats effectively addressed common concerns about classroom discussions on controversial topics. The structured nature of the activities, coupled with explicit norms promoting respect and civility, helped mitigate the risk of discussions devolving into heated arguments. Moreover, these formats democratized the discourse by ensuring that all students were actively involved, regardless of their prior interest or political expertise.

These findings suggest that structured approaches to debating public policy issues can be valuable tools for educators seeking to promote critical thinking, civic engagement, and respectful dialogue among secondary students. Despite the challenges posed by today’s polarized political climate, these methods offer a hopeful path forward for fostering informed and constructive civic discourse in classrooms.

Listen to Episode 264 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear our entire conversation with Paula and Greg McAvoy.

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Embarking on the teaching journey is an exhilarating and rewarding experience, but it can also be daunting, especially during that crucial first year in the classroom. New teachers face many challenges, from lesson planning to classroom management, engaging students, and balancing work-life demands. However, with the right mindset and strategies, surviving and thriving through that inaugural year is entirely within reach.

In Episode 263 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, we talk with Helena Hains—the creator of The Present Teacher website and resources. Hains offers teachers strategies to leave work on time and avoid working extra on the weekends.

One of the time management hacks she shares with us is “batching.” Batching is a time management technique where you group similar tasks and tackle them all at once rather than addressing them individually throughout the day. It’s like consolidating your efforts into focused blocks of time.

Listen to Episode 263 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to hear our entire conversation with Hains.

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As the upcoming Presidential Election draws near, the importance of media literacy in education has never been more evident. In today’s digital age, where information is readily accessible and often overwhelming, teaching students how to critically analyze and navigate media sources is essential for fostering informed citizenship and safeguarding democratic processes.

Media literacy encompasses a range of skills, including the ability to evaluate the credibility of sources, recognize bias, understand different forms of media, and interpret messages accurately. In the election context, these skills are invaluable for helping students sift through the barrage of news, social media posts, and campaign advertisements to distinguish fact from fiction and make informed decisions.

So, how can teachers effectively navigate the upcoming Presidential Election with their students?First and foremost, it’s essential to create a safe and open environment where students feel comfortable discussing political issues. Encourage respectful dialogue and emphasize the importance of listening to diverse perspectives. By fostering critical thinking and respectful debate, teachers can empower students to engage thoughtfully with political content and form their opinions based on evidence and reasoned analysis.

Additionally, integrating media literacy into the curriculum is crucial. Teach students to critically evaluate sources by examining authorship, bias, accuracy, and relevance. Provide them with tools and strategies for fact-checking information and verifying sources. Encourage students to question the motives behind media messages and consider the potential impact of misinformation on public opinion.

Furthermore, leverage current events, such as the presidential election, as teachable moments. Analyze campaign advertisements, speeches, and debates together as a class. Encourage students to deconstruct the language, imagery, and persuasive techniques used by candidates to sway voters. Explore how different media outlets frame and interpret political events, highlighting the importance of seeking out multiple perspectives.

In Episode 262 of Class Dismissed, we speak with Andrea De La Cerda, the Founder and CEO of Kandula. Kandula is a strategic communications company that helps nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and educational institutions. To hear our entire conversation with De La Cerda, listen to Episode 262 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast.

Show Links

Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere

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In the fast-paced world we inhabit today, intelligence is no longer confined to the realm of IQ scores and academic prowess. An equally important aspect of personal development is emotional intelligence (EI). This term, now ubiquitous in discussions about personal growth and success, was traced back to a seminal 1990 article by Salovey and Mayer, which argued that emotions could be harnessed to enrich one’s life. However, Daniel Goleman truly popularized the concept in his groundbreaking book, “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” published in 1995.

Contrary to traditional beliefs that emotions reside solely in the unconscious mind, Goleman emphasized that emotions are manageable and play a pivotal role in human behavior and decision-making. This paradigm shift led to a widespread recognition of the significance of emotional intelligence, prompting parents to prioritize fostering it in their children. Consequently, the realm of education witnessed the emergence of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs, underscoring the importance of teaching emotional intelligence in classrooms.

Emotional intelligence encompasses a range of skills, including recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions.

In Episode 261 of Class Dismissed, we discuss the origins of Emotional Intelligence and highlight an article by Marc Brackett, from Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence. Brackett advocates for educators to become adept at these skills themselves, serving as role models for young learners.

Brackett and his colleagues developed the RULER acronym to unpack emotional intelligence: Recognizing emotions, Understanding their causes and consequences, Labeling emotions, Expressing emotions appropriately, and Regulating emotions effectively.

Listen to episode 261 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcast to learn more about EI and Brackett’s RULER acronym.

Show LinksGiving Educators Permission to Feel

How We Feel

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In an intriguing twist of technological irony, the Peninsula School District in Washington State has embarked on a pioneering journey by utilizing Generative AI (Gen AI) to develop comprehensive guidelines for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) in educational settings. This innovative approach underscores the district’s commitment to harnessing cutting-edge technologies to shape the future of teaching and learning.

In an interview with Education Week, Kris Hagel, the executive director for digital learning for the Peninsula district, said he highlighted the US Department of Education’s 75-page documents with everything he thought was necessary. He then took all of those highlights and another couple of documents that were out at the time around generative AI in education, and he dumped them all into ChatGPT and said, “Give me a rough draft of a principles and beliefs document.”

After that, he took four pieces of his writing and had ChatGPT analyze them and rewrite them in his voice and tone.

That became the first draft.

By leveraging sophisticated AI tools, the district has meticulously crafted policies that aim to ensure ethical AI usage within classrooms. Despite the apparent paradox of using AI to govern AI, the Peninsula School District’s embrace of Gen AI represents a forward-thinking stance in navigating the complex intersection of technology and education.

The Peninsula School District encourages other educators to read and use their guidelines as needed.

The Peninsula School District’s utilization of Gen AI in formulating its guidelines represents a paradigm shift in educational policy-making, signaling a departure from traditional methodologies toward a more tech-savvy and forward-looking approach. As the district navigates the ever-evolving landscape of AI-integrated education, it sets a precedent for other educational institutions to embrace innovation while remaining steadfast in their commitment to ethical practice and student well-being.

To learn more, listen to episode 260 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or Apple Podcasts.

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On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse is anticipated to be visible from parts of North America, including Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The path of totality, where the Sun is completely obscured by the Moon, will pass through several states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Vermont, and Maine.

Few occurrences in the vast canvas of celestial phenomena captivate human imagination as profoundly as a total solar eclipse. It’s not merely a play of shadows across the sky; it’s a cosmic ballet that unites millions under a single celestial spectacle. As we anticipate the upcoming total solar eclipse in 2024, it’s essential to recognize why this event transcends mere astronomy—it’s an experience that enriches our souls and deepens our connection to the universe.

Firstly, witnessing a total solar eclipse is a humbling reminder of our place in the cosmos. In an age where technology often disconnects us from nature, the eclipse beckons us to look up and behold the grandeur of the universe. The moment when the moon entirely obscures the sun, plunging the world into an eerie twilight, evokes a primal sense of wonder that transcends language and culture.

Secondly, total solar eclipses offer a unique scientific discovery and education opportunity. These events provide researchers with invaluable opportunities to study the sun’s corona, revealing insights into solar physics and contributing to our understanding of the universe. Witnessing a total solar eclipse firsthand for students and enthusiasts alike can ignite a lifelong passion for science and exploration.

In Episode 259 of the Class Dismissed podcast, we chat with astronomer and eclipse chaser, Dr. Glenn Schneider. Schneider has viewed more than 30 total solar eclipses.

“There really is no such thing as an almost eclipse,” says Schneider. “A partial solar eclipse, even if it’s 99.9% covered, is a completely different phenomenon from what you would see if you’re in that zone of totality.”
Schneider urges those who have an opportunity to see the eclipse in totality to take it.
“So if you’re living 5 miles away and you say, well, I’ll see a 99.9% eclipse, it’s almost the same thing. It isn’t!”

To learn more about total solar eclipses and hear how Schneider believes they can trigger student interest in science, listen to episode 259 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or on Apple Podcasts.

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Transform Your Science ClassIn the ever-evolving education landscape, we must reconsider what we prioritize in our science classrooms. Melanie Trecek-King, an advocate for progressive teaching methods and the founder of thinkingispower.com, offers invaluable insights into reshaping science education for the betterment of students and society.

At the heart of Trecek-King’s philosophy is the belief that critical thinking is paramount in science education. Science isn’t just about memorizing facts and formulas; it’s about cultivating a mindset that questions, explores, and seeks understanding. By prioritizing critical thinking skills, students not only grasp scientific concepts but also learn to analyze information, evaluate evidence, and make informed decisions—a skill set indispensable in navigating the complexities of the modern world.

In episode 258 of Class Dismissed, Trecek-King explains how she emphasizes the importance of fostering curiosity and creativity in science classrooms. After all, science isn’t a rigid set of rules but a dynamic process of inquiry and discovery.

To hear Trecek-King in-depth perspective, listen to Episode 258 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or on Apple Podcasts.

Other Show NotesA Desk Layout Alternative to Rows and Circles

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Over two decades, Elena Aguilar, distinguished as the founder and President of Bright Morning, has ardently devoted herself to education, assuming roles as both a teacher and instructional coach. Throughout this extensive period, she has witnessed a prevalent and pervasive sentiment that resonates deeply within the teaching community—the overwhelming burden accompanying the noble pursuit of shaping young minds.

In an earnest endeavor to address this shared challenge, Aguilar has contributed to an ongoing series with the publication titled “How to Coach the Overwhelmed Teacher.” Drawing on her wealth of experience, she extends a helping hand to her fellow educators. She presents a comprehensive framework encapsulated in five invaluable tips for effectively assisting colleagues or employees in navigating overwhelming responsibilities.

Describe It
Recall Previous Experiences
Identify a Next Step
Listen
Plan for Action

Elena Aguilar’s guide transcends the conventional approach to coaching by delving into the emotional and practical intricacies of navigating overwhelming experiences. By intertwining empathy, reflection, and strategic planning, her framework not only equips educators to overcome immediate challenges but also fosters a resilient and empowered mindset for the continuous journey of teaching and learning.

To hear Aguilar go in-depth on her five tips, listen to Episode 257 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Other Show NotesShould Schools Ban Cellphones?

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In the ever-evolving landscape of education, technology plays a pivotal role in shaping how we learn and teach. One groundbreaking development that significantly impacted education in 2022 – 2023 was generative AI applications like ChatGPT. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a language model that has revolutionized the learning experience, offering new possibilities for both educators and students.

As we look back on which stories received the most attention on the Class Dismissed Podcast, it’s clear that readers and listeners desire to learn precisely how generative AI will impact the world of K-12 education.

In fact, the most clicked-on and listened-to episode of Class Dismissed in 2023 was Episode 237, “Are there tools that can determine if a student is using ChatGPT”

As we reflect on the impact of generative AI on education in 2023, it’s clear that this innovative technology has brought about positive changes in the learning landscape. From personalized learning experiences to enhanced collaboration and accessibility, generative AI has demonstrated its potential to transform education and empower learners of all backgrounds. But generative AI also raises many unanswered questions for students and educators alike.

To hear how we reflected on our episodes from 2023, listen to Episode 256 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Other Show NotesTop 10 Best AI Tools for Education in 2023

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Leading with laughter in a school setting can positively affect the learning environment and the overall well-being of fellow educators. Here are some reasons why incorporating humor and laughter into leadership can be beneficial:

Creates a Positive Atmosphere: Laughter is a powerful tool for creating a positive and enjoyable atmosphere. When leaders use humor, it helps to build a sense of camaraderie and fosters a more relaxed and welcoming environment.
Builds Connection and Trust: Humor can be a great connector. When leaders use laughter appropriately, it helps to build trust and rapport with staff. It humanizes the leadership figure and makes them more approachable.
Reduces Stress: Laughter has been shown to reduce stress and promote a sense of well-being. In a school setting where stress and pressure can be high, incorporating humor can be a helpful coping mechanism for educators.
Boosts Morale: Laughter is a natural mood lifter. Leaders who incorporate humor into their interactions can boost the morale of the entire school community.
Encourages Open Communication: When leaders use humor, it can break down communication barriers. Staff may feel more comfortable expressing their thoughts and concerns in an environment that values lightheartedness.
Strengthens Team Dynamics: Laughter is a social activity that can strengthen bonds within a group. Shared laughter helps build a sense of community and teamwork.

While leading with laughter can be highly beneficial, leaders must be mindful of the context and ensure that humor is inclusive, respectful, and appropriate for the educational setting.

In Episode 255 of Class Dismissed, we talk to Duncan Lyon and Olaf (Ole) Jorgenson. Each guides independent schools in California, and both know the importance humor can play when leading a team of educators.

“I start every faculty meeting with something humorous,” says Jorgenson. “Usually, these meetings are at the end of the day, and everybody is tired, and not everyone likes meetings. For whatever reason, starting with laughter just lightens everything.”

Lyon and Jorgenson know that most people would not argue with them; humor works in leadership.

But they wanted to dive deeper into the topic of humor and laughter. So, they surveyed other school leaders across California and asked them how humor helps build trust. They also found existing research supporting the impact humor can have.

Listen to Episode 255 of Class Dismissed on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app to learn more about their research.

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In Episode 254 of Class Dismissed, Social psychologist Camilla Griffiths from Stanford University discusses the common practice among educators of quickly correcting students’ mistakes. She argues that this approach, while efficient, may deny students the opportunity to learn, grow, and demonstrate their ability to overcome challenges.

Griffiths and her colleagues studied middle- and high-school teachers’ feedback, focusing on whether students were passive recipients or had agency in responding to comments. In other words, was the feedback agentic or directive?

Agentic feedback and directive feedback represent contrasting approaches to how educators provide input to students. Let’s break down the key differences between the two:

- Agentic Feedback: This approach empowers students to participate in learning actively. Instead of directly correcting errors or providing solutions, agentic feedback encourages students to revise their work independently. It aims to make students partners in the revision process, fostering a sense of control and freedom.
- Directive Feedback: In contrast, directive feedback involves correcting mistakes, prescribing solutions, or rewriting portions of a student’s work. It tends to be more explicit and prescriptive, guiding students on what needs to be corrected or changed without involving them in decision-making.

Griffiths provides examples comparing directive feedback (corrections) to agentic feedback (empowering students to improve):

Directive: Correcting spelling errors.
Agentic: Asking the student to revise an essay with multiple spelling errors.
Directive: Rewriting a student’s topic and transition sentences.
Agentic: Leaving a note asking the student to rework a topic sentence.

In this episode of Class Dismissed, Griffiths explains how students responded to the different types of feedback. She concludes that agentic feedback, though not revolutionary, utilizes existing skills like giving advice, asking questions, and providing guidance. The research highlights its effectiveness in fostering self-sufficiency and instilling belief in individuals’ potential to learn, applicable in educational settings and workplaces.

Listen to Episode 254 of Class Dismissed on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app to hear our entire conversation with Griffiths.

Other Show LinksMilk Carton Shortage

Jimmy Fallon Teacher Visit

Tween girls face unique challenges in a world where social media is an integral part of daily life. The impact of the digital age on their development can be both positive and negative, making it essential to understand and address these challenges.Our guest in Episode 253 of Class Dismissed created a program designed to teach that every girl has specific talents and gifts that make her unique and beautiful to the world.Katie Parker is the founder of Bloomfully and co-creator of I Believe in Me. I Believe In Me is a unique program for tweens that promotes self-confidence, self-esteem, and personal growth. The program empowers pre-adolescents with essential life skills and a positive mindset to navigate the challenges of their transitional years. I Believe In Me uses interactive workshops, mentorship, and fun activities; tweens develop a strong sense of self-worth, resilience, and belief in their abilities. Some of the challenges teens face are listed below. Body Image Pressures: One of the most prominent challenges tween girls face in social media is the constant pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards. Scrolling through filtered and carefully curated images can lead to self-esteem issues and body dissatisfaction. Reminding tweens that natural beauty comes in all shapes and sizes is crucial. Cyberbullying: Social media provides a platform for connectivity but can also be a breeding ground for cyberbullying. Tween girls may encounter hurtful comments, rumors, or exclusionary behavior online. It is crucial to teach them about responsible online behavior and reporting any incidents. Peer Validation: The need for peer validation has always been a part of adolescence, but social media amplifies it. Tweens might feel compelled to constantly seek likes, comments, and followers to measure their self-worth. Please encourage them to focus on authentic friendships and hobbies offline. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): Social media is a never-ending stream of content, and the fear of missing out on what their peers are doing can cause anxiety. Help tween girls balance their online and offline lives, emphasizing the importance of real experiences and in-person connections. Time Management: Spending excessive hours on social media can lead to poor time management and affect schoolwork and other activities. Encourage tweens to set healthy limits on screen time and establish a tech-free zone during family meals and before bedtime. Comparison Trap: Constantly comparing themselves to others on social media can harm a tween's mental health. Teach them the value of self-acceptance and the idea that everyone has their own unique journey.As parents, guardians, or mentors, it's crucial to maintain open communication with tween girls about their online experiences. Educate them about digital literacy, responsible social media usage, and the importance of self-esteem grounded in reality. Provide a safe space for discussing their online encounters, addressing their concerns, and reinforcing their self-worth beyond the virtual world.Listen to Episode 253 of Class Dismissed on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app to hear our entire conversation with Katie Parker from I Believe In Me.

"Transforming an Assignment: Fostering a Love for Reading and Learning"Initially, Amanda Lacy was far from enthusiastic when her principal handed her the task of teaching a group of high school students grappling with reading difficulties. Her new students, consisting of juniors and seniors, had previously failed their state exams as tenth graders.Amanda candidly admitted, "I was hoping there had been a mistake. I even walked into the principal's office and jokingly said, 'You must have written the wrong thing down on this piece of paper.'"Teaching this particular course was undeniably challenging. The students felt self-conscious about being placed in a remedial reading class, and their lack of enthusiasm was palpable. When Amanda assumed responsibility for the course in Gainesville, Florida, it was still called "Read 180," which carried a negative stigma among the students.Amanda recounted, "They would make self-deprecating comments and tease each other relentlessly. I remember a student from my first period who would walk into the sixth period, shouting 'Read 180' as if it were some sort of joke."In response, Amanda adopted a strategy familiar to marketing professionals: she rebranded the course. "Read 180" was reborn as "Critical Thinking and Reading for College Readiness."But Amanda's efforts didn't stop at just changing the name. She wanted her students to feel genuinely engaged with their reading material. To achieve this, she surveyed them with questions like:1. What topics interest you?2. What are your passions?3. List five areas where you excel.4. Complete this sentence: After graduation, I aspire to...Through these surveys, Amanda discovered that some students were passionate about sports, while others were intrigued by military stories or food-related content. With this valuable insight, Amanda began tailoring her teaching materials to align with her students' interests.On Mondays, the students could use the computer lab to search for articles in publications like The Washington Post or The New York Times. Their assignments were directly related to the articles they selected, often focusing on current events that captivated the students' attention. Amanda also introduced "A Few Minutes of Me," a platform resembling an open mic night, where students could share slam poetry, read Bible passages, or even offer beauty tutorials.Amanda readily acknowledges that these transformations didn't happen overnight. However, as the students began to find joy in reading and learning, their academic performance also improved. Notably, a few years ago, every student in her class passed the reading exam.Reflecting on these changes, Amanda remarked, "It altered the entire atmosphere of the class. Success is incredibly motivating. When the students saw their peers achieving it and realized they could do it too, progress became more widespread."For a more in-depth conversation with Amanda Lacy, listen to Episode 252 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, available on iTunes and your preferred podcasting platform.Other Show NotesThe ups and downs of Dallas’s pay-for-performance roller coasterAll Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2023.

Climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of our era, demanding that educators take an active role in educating students about this global issue. Yet, delving into such a multifaceted and occasionally contentious topic can appear daunting. In a recent episode of Class Dismissed (Episode 251), we had the privilege of speaking with Mark Windschitl, a distinguished Professor of Science Teaching and Learning at the University of Washington, who also boasts a background as a former middle school science teacher.Windschitl, who has recently published a compelling book titled "Teaching Climate Change: Fostering Understanding, Resilience, and a Commitment to Justice," shared invaluable insights during our conversation. In particular, he discussed his strategies for addressing parental skepticism about climate change.To effectively navigate potential concerns from parents while teaching about climate change, educators can employ several proven strategies:1. Open and Transparent Communication: At the outset of the school year, initiate a transparent dialogue with parents. Clearly outline your curriculum and educational goals, explicitly mentioning your intention to teach about climate change. Provide parents with an informative overview of the topics you plan to cover.2. Align with Educational Standards: Emphasize that your approach to teaching climate change adheres to established educational standards and guidelines. Demonstrating this alignment can help parents understand the pedagogical value of the subject matter.3. Emphasize Reliable Sources: Share with parents the trusted sources and materials you will utilize for teaching climate change. Stress the importance of relying on reputable scientific sources and evidence-based information in the curriculum. Reassure parents that your commitment lies in presenting an accurate and balanced view of the subject.4. Proactive Engagement: Anticipate potential concerns or objections by considering the possibility of holding parent-teacher meetings or informative sessions dedicated to discussing the content and approach of your climate change curriculum.Furthermore, Windschitl provided a refreshing perspective on the methods we should employ when teaching students about climate change and how we can seamlessly integrate this critical subject into various academic disciplines. His expertise underscores the importance of informed and comprehensive climate change education in our schools today.To delve deeper into Windschitl’s insights and discover strategies for implementing similar approaches in your school, tune in to Episode 251 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, available on your preferred podcast platform or the Apple Podcasts App.Featured Image Photo Credit: https://www.ecolife.zone/All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023

Jennifer Serravallo, a renowned best-selling author in the education world, has left a profound mark with her previous works, "The Writing Strategies Book" and "The Reading Strategies Book," which have provided invaluable guidance to countless educators seeking compelling reading and writing strategies. In Episode 250 of Class Dismissed, Serravallo discusses another of her great works, "Understanding Texts & Readers," aimed at helping teachers unravel the mysteries of reading comprehension.In this book, Serravallo equips educators with the tools to assess a student's grasp of a book, even if the educator is unfamiliar with the specific text the student is immersed in.The Question of "Getting It"Serravallo's mission is to demystify the often perplexing concept of comprehension. The world of comprehension is vast, with various theories, such as the Rosenblatt Reader Response Theory and Proficient Reader Research, perplexing some educators.She poses the critical questions educators grapple with: What am I looking for? What does comprehension indeed entail? What are the telltale signs that a child has truly grasped the essence of a text?With an engaging blend of stories, illuminating charts, and practical examples, "Understanding Texts & Readers" swiftly guides educators in assessing whether their students are truly "getting it."Within the pages of this book, Serravallo introduces remarkable qualities of the response mechanism. This mechanism empowers teachers to examine students' responses and discern if the student requires additional support.For instance, if a "level R" text is known to contain a flashback, teachers can employ this insight when assessing comprehension. Serravallo explains, "If a child reading a 'level R' text is asked to retell the story but narrates events solely in sequence, it may indicate they are missing crucial elements within the text."Ultimately, the goal is to infuse joy into reading and cultivate lifelong readers.Serravallo eloquently sums it up: "If comprehension is lacking, then where is the delight in reading? I believe that a significant portion of disengagement with reading stems from a lack of understanding."To delve deeper into Serravallo's insights and discover strategies for implementing similar approaches in your school, tune in to Episode 250 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, available on your preferred podcast platform or the Apple Podcasts App.All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023

Teaching is a noble profession that shapes future generations but is challenging. One of the most pressing issues faced by educators is burnout. The demands of managing classrooms, catering to diverse learning needs, and juggling administrative tasks can take a toll on teachers' mental and emotional well-being. To ensure the flame of passion keeps burning brightly, educators can adopt several strategies to prevent burnout in the classroom.

Firstly, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is paramount. Setting clear boundaries between work and personal time allows teachers to recharge and engage in activities that bring joy and relaxation. Regular exercise, hobbies, and spending time with loved ones contribute to a well-rounded life.

Secondly, fostering a supportive community among colleagues can create a sense of camaraderie. Sharing experiences, brainstorming solutions, and offering mutual encouragement can help teachers feel less isolated and more connected, reducing the impact of burnout.

Thirdly, incorporating variety into teaching methods can reignite enthusiasm. Trying new techniques, technologies, and teaching approaches keeps the classroom environment fresh and engaging, benefitting teachers and students.

Lastly, regular self-care practices cannot be underestimated. Engaging in mindfulness exercises, meditation, or even seeking professional counseling can equip teachers with coping mechanisms to manage stress and prevent burnout.

In Episode 249 of Class Dismissed, we chat with Jay Schroder. Schroder is the founder of the Teach From Your Best Self Institute. He's also authored a guidebook, "Teach From Your Best Self."

Schroder spent more than two decades experimenting and refining his techniques to manage burnout, and in this episode, he offers us a sneak peek into his methods.

Listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes to hear our complete discussion with Schroder.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023

It's essential to recognize that while Generative Artificial Intelligence offers valuable tools, the role of a teacher as a facilitator, mentor, and guide remains crucial. The key is to balance leveraging AI's capabilities and maintaining the core principles of effective teaching, including fostering critical thinking, creativity, and a love of learning.

In Episode 248 of Class Dismissed, we speak with Dr. Tim Dasey. He has a new book titled "Wisdom Factories: AI, Games, and the Education of a Modern Worker." Dasey has been part of the AI world since the 80s when machine learning was born. At MIT Lincoln Laboratory, he engineered and led AI developments for national defense, homeland security, transportation and logistics, biomedical, public health, and disaster management applications.

"We're going to need the ability to understand if AI is spuing B.S. at us," says Dasey.

In this episode, you'll hear Dasey discuss the future capabilities of AI, and the necessary strategies needed to transform how we educate our students. Dasey also analyzes why this AI wave differs from previous technological advancements in the classroom and why it's so important for educators to adapt.

To hear our complete discussion with Dasey, listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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A home visit from a teacher before the start of the school year can be incredibly beneficial for both the students and the teacher. Here are some ways in which it can help:

Building rapport: A home visit allows the teacher to establish a personal connection with the student and their family in a comfortable and familiar environment. This rapport can build a positive teacher-student relationship throughout the school year. Understanding the student's experience: Visiting their home provides insight into their living conditions, family dynamics, and cultural background. This understanding can help the teacher tailor their approach to teaching and create a more inclusive and supportive classroom environment. Identifying individual needs: During the home visit, the teacher can observe the student's learning space, study habits, and any specific challenges they may face. This information can help the teacher identify individual learning needs and develop strategies to support the student's academic progress. Addressing concerns early: If there are any concerns about the student's academic or emotional well-being, a home visit provides an opportunity to address them proactively. Early intervention can prevent potential issues from escalating and ensure the student starts the school year on the right foot. Discussing academic goals and expectations: The teacher can use the home visit to discuss educational goals and set expectations with the student and their family. This clarity can motivate students to perform well and instill a sense of responsibility for their education. Encouraging parental involvement: Home visits can encourage parents or guardians to participate in their child's education actively. It opens up lines of communication between the teacher and the family, fostering a supportive and collaborative learning environment. Reducing anxiety and easing transitions: For younger students or those entering a new school, a home visit can ease the anxiety associated with unfamiliar settings and new people. Meeting the teacher in a familiar environment can help them feel more at ease when school starts. Personalizing learning experiences: Knowing more about the student's interests and hobbies through a home visit allows the teacher to incorporate relevant and engaging learning materials into their lessons, making the educational experience more enjoyable and effective. Supporting students with special needs: For students with special needs or learning disabilities, a home visit can be especially beneficial. It allows the teacher to understand the student's specific challenges and create an individualized education plan tailored to their requirements.

Our guest in Episode 247 is Valerie Lovato. She teaches elementary school at Eagleton Elementary in Denver, Colorado. In her school district, it’s encouraged to conduct home visits with upcoming students’ families right around the start of the school year.

Lavato knows it’s one of those things that a teacher can procrastinate on, but she says, “Once you start, you don’t want to stop.”

She’s been doing home visits for several years but admits it’s complicated. It’s one thing for educators to talk about doing home visits; it’s another to accomplish the ambitious task. Lavato says that the most challenging part is just getting started each year.

“That very first phone call, and telling families, I want to come to your house and visit you at your home, in your space. Making that first phone call, I always get butterflies, even now,” says Lavato.

Overall, a home visit from a teacher before the start of the school year helps foster a strong teacher-student relationship, encourages parental involvement, and enables a more personalized and supportive learning experience for the students. It is a valuable practice that positively affects a student's educational journey.

Listen to Episode 247 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite p...

In an ideal world, every student would have an equal chance to succeed and thrive in the education system. However, the concepts of equality and equity reveal that achieving this goal requires more than just providing the same resources to all students. Episode 246 of Class Dismissed will explore the differences between school equality and equity and the importance of promoting equity to ensure fairness and inclusion in education. Equality Equality in education refers to treating all students equally, irrespective of their backgrounds, abilities, or circumstances. It emphasizes providing all students equal opportunities, resources, and access to education. While this approach may seem fair, it fails to acknowledge that not all students have the exact needs or face similar barriers to learning. Equity Equity in Education: Equity, on the other hand, recognizes and addresses the diverse needs of students, aiming to level the playing field and provide everyone with the support necessary to succeed. It involves distributing resources and opportunities based on individual requirements, ensuring that students receive what they need to achieve their full potential. In an equitable education system, students from disadvantaged backgrounds are given extra support to overcome systemic barriers and bridge opportunity gaps.

Our expert guest on this Episode is Jeff Duncan-Andrade, PH.D. Andrade is a teacher and professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. He’s also the author of Equality or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education.

Listen to Episode 246 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes to hear our in-depth conversation with Andrade.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023

When we think of science education, the first things that come to mind are textbooks, equations, and experiments. However, there is an often overlooked tool that can captivate students' imaginations and enhance their understanding of scientific concepts: stories. Storytelling has been an integral part of human culture for centuries, and harnessing its power can revolutionize science education. In Episode 245 of Class Dismissed, we will explore how using stories as a teaching tool can engage students, foster curiosity, and unlock a deeper understanding of science.

For advice on how to do this, we catch up with the Physicist and host of the popular YouTube channel Kathy Loves Physics, Kathy Joseph. She is also a former Bay Area science teacher who spent 12 years teaching high school physics. Kathy knows what it takes to keep your students intrigued and involved. She also spent decades researching over 400 years of scientific history in her new book, The Lightning Tamers.

Educators can foster engagement, simplify complex concepts, stimulate curiosity, enhance retention, and promote critical thinking by integrating narratives into science education. Whether through historical accounts, futuristic adventures, or personal anecdotes, stories bring science to life, making it relevant, relatable, and memorable for students.

To learn more about this, listen to Episode 245 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes. Show Notes https://youtu.be/lN3oHY3ekSI

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Play can help you remember things for longerLearning through play is an excellent way for children and adults to develop new skills, but it’s also a great way to alleviate stress and trauma and tap into different parts of the mind.

Our guest on Episode 244 of Class Dismissed is an expert on learning through play. Dr. Bo Stjerne Thomsen is the Vice-President and Chair of Learning through Play in the LEGO Foundation.

The Lego Foundation has partner researchers and labs worldwide that study learning through play. And they have also released a study on children, technology, and play.

Thomsen and the LEGO Foundation have examined the science behind learning through play, and they know that children have wholly emerged in learning when being hands-on with toys and trying things out.

“First, you understand things much deeper when you test it try it out,” says Thomsen. “You basically remember things for longer and understand concepts better.”

In this episode of Class Dismissed, Thomsen dives into the skills learned while playing.

Attention
Limiting Distractions
Retain information while building (Working memory)
Recognizing symbols – Same as language?
Spatial abilities, quantify, sort, and count.
Regulating Emptional Frustration

To hear our complete discussion with Thomsen, listen to Episode 244 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

Other Show Notes5 types of Emails managers should never Send

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With the increasing use of technology in all aspects of our lives, educating young students about the risks and best practices for staying safe online has become more critical than ever.

Here are some reasons why it is essential to teach cybersecurity to K-12 students:

Protecting Personal Information: Children and teenagers often share personal information online without realizing the consequences. Teaching them cybersecurity can help them understand how to protect their sensitive information online.
Developing Responsible Online Behavior: As digital natives, children are already adept at using technology but need guidance on how to use it responsibly. We can help them understand the importance of ethical behavior online by teaching them about cybersecurity.
Understanding the Risks: Students should know the different types of online threats, including viruses, malware, phishing scams, and identity theft. By understanding these risks, students can learn how to recognize and avoid them.
Preparing for Future Careers: Cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly important field, and students with a strong understanding of cybersecurity will be better equipped to pursue careers in this area.

Our guest on this episode of Class Dismissed is Tamara Shoemaker. She’s been working in the K-12 space for eight years to increase the availability of cybersecurity education.

She co-authored a book with her husband, Professor Dan Shoemaker. They aim to cut through the usual roadblocks of confusing

technical jargon and give teachers a unified understanding of what students should learn. The book, called Teaching Cybersecurity, has recently topped Amazon’s bestselling list in ‘Home Computer Networks’.

Listen to Episode 243 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to hear our complete discussion with Shoemaker.

Additional Show NotesThese States Have the Most ‘Underqualified’ Teachers Stepping in to Fill Open Positions

Cyberpatriot Website

Confidence is essential in learning math because it can increase motivation, perseverance, risk-taking, and self-efficacy. Sam Rhodes, an Assistant Professor of Elementary Math Education at Georgia Southern University, is our guest on Episode 242 of Class Dismissed. He and his colleagues have researched and narrowed in on Five Key Ideas for Growing Confident Math Learners.

• Everyone is a math person.

• Everyone is on a math journey.

• Mistakes help us learn.

• Everyone has rich knowledge and experiences.

• Good mathematical thinking is more important than the correct answer.

Listen to Episode 242 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to dive in and learn more about Rhode’s five key ideas.

Additional show notesYale, “The Science of Well-Being Course”

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2023

School Districts are struggling to figure out how they should react to ChatGPT. Districts like New York City, Oakland, and Seattle have banned AI technology due to concerns about cheating.

However, in Episode 241 of Class Dismissed, our guest offers some perspective on why we should embrace generative AI software like ChatGPT.

Ben Farrell, assistant head of school at New England Innovation Academy, the nation’s first human-centered design middle and high school?

Farrell says, “If we don’t find a way to utilize this as a tool to be supportive of where we’re going, I think we’re missing the boat.”

Embracing generative AI in schools may give students valuable skills and insights into this rapidly evolving field. In addition, by incorporating AI into their curriculum, schools can help prepare students for a future where AI will play an increasingly important role in many industries.

Schools can embrace generative AI in various ways, depending on their goals and resources. Here are a few suggestions:

Offer courses in AI: Schools can offer courses that introduce students to the concepts of AI, including generative AI. These courses could cover topics such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.
Use generative AI in the classroom: Teachers can use generative AI to create custom learning materials, such as quizzes or study guides, that are tailored to each student’s learning style and level of understanding.
Develop student projects: Schools can encourage students to develop their own AI projects, such as generative art or music, using open-source tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
Collaborate with industry partners: Schools can partner with industry leaders in AI to provide students with real-world experience and mentorship. This could involve internships, hackathons, or other collaborative projects.
Incorporate AI ethics education: As AI becomes more prevalent in society, it is important for schools to educate students about the ethical considerations of AI. This could include discussions around bias, transparency, and privacy in generative AI applications.

Listen to Episode 241 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to hear our entire conversation with Farrell.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2023

Making a case for mathematicsMathematics is one of the world’s most fundamental and essential subjects, with applications that extend across a wide range of disciplines and industries. But sometimes, it isn’t easy to convince high school students of the importance of math. Our guest in Episode 240 of Class Dismissed is here to arm us with some tricks to show students the importance of math.

Jennifer Kinser–Traut is a project director at the University of Arizona College of education. However, Kinser-Traut spent a decade as a high school math and science teacher before working with the university. While in the K-12 system, she discovered that many students would enter her classroom with a negative attitude toward the need for mathematics.

To combat the negative energy, Kinser Traut began each ninth-grade algebra course with a two-day project titled “Why Math?”

She and the students met in the library computer lab, and students would have to find 1-3 reasons why they should care about math.
Students would look for connections with mathematics in their chosen areas, such as nursing, fashion, or skateboarding.

Kinser-Traut says before the “Why Math?” project, she would spend a lot of time trying to sell the students on math. She says her sales pitch was usually unsuccessful.

She says doing the “Why Math?” project with her students turned the tables and required the students to come up with the reasons mathematics is essential.

Why is math relevant to the real world?1. Solving everyday problems: Math is used to solve everyday situations, such as calculating how much to tip at a restaurant, determining the best deal when shopping, or estimating the time needed to complete a task. 2. Science and engineering: Math is essential in fields like science and engineering, where it is used to model and solve complex problems in areas such as physics, chemistry, and computer science. Without math, we wouldn’t be able to design and build the technologies that have transformed our world. 3. Business and finance: Math is essential in business and finance, where it is used to analyze data, create financial models, and make predictions. Understanding math is crucial for making informed financial decisions, managing budgets, and investing wisely. 4. Medicine and healthcare: Math is used extensively in medicine and healthcare, where it is used to model and analyze biological systems, develop medical devices, and design clinical trials. 5. Sports and entertainment: Math is also relevant in sports and entertainment, where it is used to analyze data and make predictions. For example, sports analysts use math to calculate player statistics and predict game outcomes, while animators and game developers use math to create realistic animations and graphics.

To hear our full interview with Kinser-Traut, listen to Episode 240 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

Resources mentioned in the Bright Idea Segment.Here are some helpful links where students can explore the application of math in their area of interest.

http://www.learner.org/exhibits/dailymath/resources.html
https://mathigon.org/applications
https://pumas.jpl.nasa.gov/examples/index.php

Links related to the creativity quizCan You Tell Creativity Fact from Fiction?

Original Creative Myths Study

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The first step to understanding something new is often the most challenging part. Our guest on Episode 239 of Class Dismissed explains why we must rethink how we teach students.

He suggests we reconsider the three Rs – Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and possibly replace those with some new Rs. Such as Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection.

Jose Antonio Bowen is the author of the hit book “Teaching Naked.” Bowen led innovation and change for over 35 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), and he’s just released a new book. “Teaching Change: How to develop independent thinkers using Relationships Resilience, and Reflection.”

Drawing on new research, Bowen explores ways to prepare students better while also focusing less heavily on teachers themselves, instead placing greater emphasis on their process interactions within a learning environment. In “Teaching Change,” Bowen examines student psychology, history, assumptions, anxiety, and bias and advocates for education to focus on the new 3Rs—Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection.

In our interview with Bowen, he said critical thinking has become more crucial than ever.

“We have to teach them [students] process,” says Bowen. These three Rs are more about the process. The old three Rs were about content — Reading, Writing, Arithmetic — stuff you need to know.”

“Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection are more about what you need to know about yourself so that you can manage your own future change. Because my goal as a teacher is to make myself obsolete, so you don’t need me; you can think for yourself.”

To learn how more about the new 3Rs, listen to Episode 239 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023.

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection

Later start times for secondary education can force an earlier start for elementary students.There is evidence to suggest that later start times for secondary education can have a positive impact on students. Studies have shown that teenagers have a natural sleep pattern that leads them to stay up late and wake up later in the morning. This is known as the “sleep phase delay.” As a result, many teenagers may struggle to fall asleep early enough to wake up for a traditional school start time, leading to a lack of sleep and associated problems such as fatigue, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.

By starting school later, students are more likely to get the recommended amount of sleep, which can lead to improved academic performance, mental health, and overall well-being. Studies have also shown that later start times can reduce tardiness, absenteeism, and behavioral problems in the classroom.

However, when school districts shift middle and high school students to start times later, transportation schedules often have to be adjusted, and elementary students end up starting class earlier.

In a recent paper published by the American Educational Research Association, Kevin Bastian and Sarah Fuller (University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill) report on their study of earlier school start times for elementary students in North Carolina. The pair examined the impact of start times on student absences, suspensions, and standardized test scores, using statewide data and the experience of one district that flipped its elementary and secondary start times, with elementary students starting earlier.

To hear more about their study listen to Episode 238 of the Class Dismissed podcast.

Also, a wildlife biologist that wants us to considering a new perspective when teaching biology. Doug Chadwick is a wildlife biologist, author, and frequent National Geographic contributor. During his 35 year affiliation with National Geographic, he’s offered in-depth coverage of wolverines, grizzly bears, and whales, to name a few.

Now Chadwick has a new mission; he wants us to think differently about how humans mesh with nature. And he believes that a new way of thinking may need to start in the K-12 science classroom.

The idea is that if humans had a better understanding of what we’re made of and how alike our DNA is to other living things, we may have a better appreciation of our purpose on Earth.

You can listen to Episode 238 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2023.

A Princeton student created an app to tell whether ChatGPT wrote an essay.Not long after ChatGPT was revealed to the world in late 2022, a computer science major at Princeton University built an app to detect whether AI wrote an essay.

Edward Tian created GPTZero, which he says can “quickly and efficiently” decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay. He’s explicitly soliciting educators to test his new tool.

We decided to have some fun and ask ChatGPT if there’s a tool that can determine if something is written by ChatGPT. This was the response…

“There are several tools that can be used to determine if something is written by a language model like GPT, including Plagiarism detection software, which can be used to detect similarities between a piece of text and a large corpus of text. Some other methods include:

Using a GPT-based language model to generate text and then comparing it to the original text to see if they are similar.
Analyzing the style, grammar, and language use in the text to see if it matches the patterns typically produced by a language model.
comparing the text with the known outputs or samples of the model.
However, these methods are not always foolproof and can be subject to errors. In general, it’s difficult to be certain if a text is written by a language model or not”

To learn more about the ChatGPT and hear which large school district is already making moves to ban the AI software, listen to Episode 237 of Class Dismissed.

Also, a cognitive psychologist shares his secrets for memorable lesson plans.Many students can remember details from their favorite television shows but struggle with remembering things their teachers say in class. Why is this?

Memory is an intriguing subject. You might think that your most recent memory would always be in front of you, but sometimes we find ourselves at a loss when trying to remember something from 15 seconds earlier, such as what I came into the kitchen for or even where my car keys are!

Meanwhile, other seemingly trivial memories can last our entire lives – for example, why do we remember some advertisements?

Our guest in Episode 237 of Class Dismissed is here to help us make some sense of memory. He’ll also give us some teacher tips on how to make a more memorable lesson plan.

Dr. Daniel Willingham is a psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia. He’s also the author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”His book dives into how the mind works and what it means for the classroom.

Willingham wants educators to know that “memory is the residue of thought.” In other words, your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

To learn how educators can use this information to their advantage in their lessons, listen to Episode 237 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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The fantastic new tool, ChatGPT, is taking the tech world by storm, but it also could become a significant headache for English teachers throughout the country.

ChatGPT software is built on the architecture of GPT-3, with some ~175 billion parameters, but what separates ChatGPT relative to other AI breakthroughs is that it’s super easy to use. You type something, and it spits something back to you. “Tell me a joke,” “write a recipe for pecan pie in the style of a pirate,” and “explain long division to a ten-year-old”… ChatGPThas a — pretty convincing — response for all.

However, you can also type in prompts like, “write me a 300 essay about ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird'” or “give me 500 words about Greek Mythology.” And you get meaningful results. So you can probably imagine how students could abuse the power of ChatGPT.

In this Episode of Class Dismissed, we put ChatGPT to the test. Can it churn out results that could fool educators? Or is it just a tool educators need to keep an eye on, like CliffNotes?

To learn more about ChatGPT and hear our test examples listen to Episode 236 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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A good global citizen is someone who is aware of the world and their place in it and who takes an active role in promoting the well-being of the global community. This can involve being informed about global issues and events, supporting causes that benefit people and the planet, and treating people with respect and compassion, regardless of their background. Good global citizens also recognize that their actions can impact the world around them, and they strive to make positive choices that benefit not just themselves but also others.

One way to teach students to be global citizens is to incorporate lessons about global issues and perspectives into the classroom curriculum. This can involve studying different cultures, histories, and current events worldwide and discussing how they are interconnected. Teachers can also create opportunities for students to learn about and engage with people from different backgrounds through pen pals, remote sessions with students from other countries, and service learning projects that benefit global communities.

Our guest on Episode 235 of Class Dismissed offers a unique perspective on educating a global citizen. Brantley Turner is the Dwight Schools Director of East Asian Education. She spent the past 15 years educating in China. Including some time at Shanghai Qibao Dwight High School, the first independently-run Chinese-U.S. cooperative high school in China.

To hear our full discussion with Turner, listen to Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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As educators, we sometimes need a spark. One great place to find that inspiration is in movies. In Episode 234 of Class Dismissed, we highlight some of the most inspirational movie scenes for teachers.

The movie scenes that made our list include…

Stand and Deliver (Rotten Tomatoes Score 82%)Los Angeles high school teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) is being hassled by tough students like Angel Guzman (Lou Diamond Phillips). But Jaime is also pressured by his bosses, who want him to control his raucous classroom. Caught in the middle, he opts to immerse his students in higher math.

In our highlighted scene, Escalante tries to convince his jaded colleagues that they need “ganas,” which translates to desire.

School of Rock (Rotten Tomatoes Score 91%)Overly enthusiastic guitarist Dewey Finn (Jack Black) gets thrown out of his bar band and finds himself in desperate need of work. Posing as a substitute music teacher at an elite private elementary school, he exposes his students to the hard rock gods he idolizes and emulates — much to the consternation of the uptight principal (Joan Cusack).

In our highlighted scene, Finn discovers his students’ potential as musicians and his potential as a teacher.

Mr. Holland’s Opus (Rotten Tomatoes Score 75%)Composer Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) believes that he’ll eventually write a transcendent piece of music, but in the meantime, he’s taken a job at an Oregon high school.

In our highlighted scene, Holland has a breakthrough with one of his struggling students.

Lean on me (Rotten Tomatoes Score 69%)In this fact-based film, a New Jersey superintendent, Dr. Frank Napier (Robert Guillaume), watches helplessly as East Side High becomes the lowest-ranked school in the state. With nowhere else to turn, Dr. Napier enlists maverick ex-teacher Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) to take over as principal of the declining school.

In our highlighted scene, Clark catches some students in the bathroom and challenges them to recite the school song. Their response surprises the hard-nosed principal.

Remember the Titans (Rotten Tomatoes Score 73%)In Virginia, high school football is a way of life, an institution revered, each game celebrated more lavishly than Christmas, each playoff distinguished more grandly than any national holiday. And with such recognition comes powerful emotions. In 1971 high school football was everything to the people of Alexandria. But when the local school board was forced to integrate an all-black school with an all-white school, the very foundation of football’s great tradition was put to the test.

In our highlighted scene, Coach Herman Boone, played by Denzel Washington, takes his players to a hallowed ground to prove a point.

Finding Forrester (Rotten Tomatoes Score 79%)A unique relationship develops between an eccentric, reclusive novelist and a young, amazingly gifted scholar-athlete. After the novelist discovers that the young athlete is also an excellent writer and secretly takes him on as his protégé, they develop an unlikely friendship. As they learn more about each other, they learn more about themselves, and ultimately, with the help of his new mentor, the basketball star must choose the right path.Dead Poets Society (Rotten Tomatoes Score 84%)A new English teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams), is introduced to an all-boys preparatory school known for its ancient traditions and high standards. He uses unorthodox methods to reach out to his students, who face enormous pressures from their parents and the school.

In our highlighted scene, Keating explains to his students the importance of the arts and self-purpose.

You can listen to Episode 234 or any of our episodes of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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For more than 15 years, Johnny Tiersma brought humor into his classroom. He does this, be he feels it builds trust with his students.

"You know when you're all in on the same joke, and you're all laughing together," it creates a bond Tiersma says.

The sixth-grade teacher serves in the Cardiff School District in San Diego, and bringing humor to his classroom has always come naturally. For example, he names objects in his room, the projector's name is Barbara, and he talks sweetly to Barbara when she's not working correctly, and the students love it.

But Tiersma knows that humor is not second nature for everyone, so he wanted to create something to act as an icebreaker for other educators. So he recently wrote a picture book called "If I Were the Teacher." It's about a boy who imagines what he would do if he were the teacher and his ideas are wild, funny, and imaginative.

"It is designed to be something that elementary school teachers would read to their students." Tiersma hopes his book will be a fun activity and catalyst for bonding with the students.

To learn more about "If I Were the Teacher" and tips on using humor and kindness in the classroom, listen to episode 233 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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There’s little doubt that students will learn more when they engage in classroom discussions. So for many teachers, finding ways to motivate students to participate in class makes complete sense.

For years, Jim Lang (Assumption College) did this with a class participation grade. The English professor says he tried to keep track of each student’s class participation to boost a grade (for example, a B to a B+) but not penalize students.

However, Lang is now advocating against the idea of grading participation.

“It just didn’t feel right,” says Lang. “Grades are really supposed to measure something we can document. Like the learning of the student.”

Lang admits that grading participation made him uncomfortable with nudging grades around in an informal way. He also didn’t love the idea that students were rewarded for talking.

“There are other students that might be engaged just as thoughtfully in class, through the way they took their notes, though the way they participated in group work.”

Recently Lang published “Should we stop grading class participation” in the Chronicle for Higher Education. He also joined us on Class Dismissed to explain how he maintained widespread class participation while moving away from grading it.

“Rather than make participation something that is optional and can be graded. What I argue instead is that participation should be the norm,” says Lang.

In Episode 232, listen to how Lang makes this happen. Hear our full interview on the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Educators always want their students to thrive and succeed in life. Often, that path for students runs through college. But for many students, that's not the case.

Our guest in Episode 231 offers tips on how teachers can best support students who choose an alternative post-high-school path.

Stephanie Haynes is a licensed education coach and consultant who works specifically with school administrations, teachers, and the parents of students to reimagine the culture of success in schools.

She's also the author of "College is not Mandatory."

Haynes, says sometimes teachers can feel lost in guiding students. "If these kids are not doing well in school, how do they help them find that success if college is just not part of the picture for them."

During this episode, Haynes explains to educators how we can support students who may not be headed to college.

"First and foremost, stop saying everything needs to be done so you can do well in college," says Hayes

"Second, when we're giving our curriculum, we don't talk about the professional skills that we're helping kids develop."

To hear Haynes go more in-depth on these tips, listen to Episode 231 of Class Dismissed. You can find each episode on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other show notes Empowering educators through team-based staffing models

A well-run, fun classroom is pivotal to the way students learn. But for some educators, meaningful classroom management can be a challenge. Gamifiying a classroom is one strategy educators use to improve this.

In Episode 230 of Class Dismissed, we chatted with Shawn Young, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Classcraft, a platform that helps educators motivate their students using the mechanics of games.

Young says classroom management is core to a teacher's job, but ironically, there are few digital tools to support the cause.

Consequently, Young and his colleagues created Classcraft to make the classroom experience more exciting for students.

Young says that the classroom experience for many kids is meaningless.

"It's just tasks they need to do, and that is work," says Young.

So they created Classcraft to repackage students' engagement rules with the hope of developing intrinsic motivation.

When gamifying with Classcraft, kids strive to gain points and improve their avatars. For instance, Young says they have a thing called "random events," and it's a way to kick start a class.

An example would be that everyone has to speak like a pirate, or students have 20 seconds to build a paper airplane, and whoever goes the furthest gets a hundred points.

To hear more of our interview with Young and find out if it's challenging to gamify your classroom, listen to Episode 230 of Class Dismissed. You can find each episode on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes Red Shirt the Boys

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The state of civics education in the United States The push for impactful STEM education over the past decade has made a positive difference in preparing our youth. But have other areas suffered? Civics, for example?

Our guest in today's bright idea segment is here to offer us some perspective on the state of civics education here in the United States.

Holly Korby is a Journalist, Speaker, and Author of "Building Better Citizens," and when asked to grade the nation on the state of civics education, she gives us a C-.

Citing Horace Mann's writings from the 1800s, Korby notes, "The entire American public education system was created just to deliver civics education." The goal was to have informed citizens that understood how our government worked. But Korby says we're not living up to that.

She says that some states, such as Massachusetts and Illinois, are doing a great job with civics education, but overall it's a "patchwork system."

However, it's not all doom and gloom, there are some things educators can do to better inform students about civics, and that's what we talked to Korby about in Episode 229 of Class Dismissed.

Listen to the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes to hear Korby's thoughts.

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Not long after the start of each school year, an important topic comes up, September 11th. For some teachers, it can be challenging to figure out how to discuss such a tragic day in American history with students.

In Episode 228, we invited Jan Helson to give us some guidance. Helson is the Co-founder and Board Chair of Global Game Changers, a 501(c)3 organization that provides social-emotional learning, character, and leadership development programs.

Furthermore, Global Game Changers offers educators a specific curriculum for teaching about 9/11.

In this episode, Helson discusses...

Teaching 9/11 to children in an age-appropriate fashion is critical. Whether or not it’s OK to interject your memories of that day. How to direct focus on the real-life heroes who emerged.

Listen to Episode 228 of the Class Dismissed Podcast to hear our discussion with Helson. You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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In early 2022 NEFE and AmeriSpeak surveyed U.S. adults on high school financial education graduation requirements. 88% surveyed said their state should require a semester- or year-long financial education course for graduation.

Remarkably, only 14 states require personal finance education before graduation.

Our guest on Episode 227, Jessica Pelletier, is the Executive Director of FitMoney. FitMoney is a philanthropic nonprofit that provides free financial literacy programs to help K-12 students.

Pelletier says that time is the biggest challenge for working in a financial literacy curriculum. She says many other great things to teach, and educators don't have extra hours in the day.

Another hurdle is that some educators don't feel comfortable teaching personal finance.

That's why FitMoney has developed what they describe as a free, unbiased financial literacy curriculum.

Pelletier says they make a note of "unbiased" because FitMoney doesn't allow financial institutions' logos, credit card applications, or data selling within their program

"I think it's really important, especially if you're talking to young very impressionable audiences."

Pelletier also says that their curriculum is developed by educators, for educators.

To hear our full interview and learn more about how you can introduce FitMoney in your classroom, listen to Episode 227 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Does blended learning make teaching easier or harder? Catlin Tucker has been a thought leader in the world of blended learning. But many educators' Tucker would interact with perceived blended learning as more work for teachers.

"I couldn't understand why that was," says Tucker.

So, as Tucker started visiting classrooms, she realized teachers were still doing the lion's share of the work in the classrooms even when they were trying a blended classroom. Tucker noticed that workflows were staying traditional, placing a heavy burden on the teachers.

For example, she says the teachers would

set the assignment 150 kids complete it teacher collects those assignments teacher processes the work teacher inputs the data in the grade book the teacher passes the lessons back to the students.

Tucker says she also observed a lot of teachers talking and students listening. But she feels there should be much more balance between the two. Blended Learning Requires a Mind-Shift Tucker goes about blended learning from a different angle. She says it requires a mind-shift around how teachers view their role and their students' role in education.

"What responsibilities do we each own, and which responsibilities do we each share?"

Tucker says teachers should feel more like they are partnering with students. She suggests using models in dynamic ways to try and create time and space in the classroom. Hopefully, this will allow teachers to move some of that work they traditionally would take home back into the school.

"I wasn't in the front of the room. I was sitting side by side with them, giving feedback as they worked."

Tucker also suggests frequent conferencing with students about their goals and pulling them into a side-by-side assessment conversation where the teacher grades the work as the student sits next to them.

Tucker highlights the topics in her new book "Balance With Blended Learning."

In it, she talks about the value of forming a partnership with kids and goes in-depth on metacognitive skill-building and real-time feedback. Tools that allow teachers to have more balance inside and outside the classroom. "I THINK IF WE DON'T START TO REALLY SHINE SOME LIGHT ON HOW WE CAN APPROACH THIS JOB IN A SUSTAINABLE WAY, WE ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TO LOSE EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE FROM THIS PROFESSION," More of a coach, less of a fountain of knowledge Catlin Tucker

Tucker says that if teachers are moving into a blended space, hopefully, they're starting to look at their role as more of a coach and less of a purveyor of information.

She suggests letting go of the traditional roles and not leading the class by talking and transferring information. Instead, Tucker says teachers need to use that time to give feedback and work with students one-on-one. It's all about balance. Tucker is concerned about the number of great teachers that quit because of the toll teaching can take on a person.

"I think if we don't start to really shine some light on how we can approach this job in a sustainable way, we are going to continue to lose exceptional people from this profession," says Tucker.

Her goal is to help educators find ways to use technology in moderation.

"How do we leverage technology to shift students to the center of learning?"

For Tucker, the goal is to have students ask questions and investigate topics. She believes that the more we can shift students to the center of learning, the less pressure there will be on the teacher at the center of learning.

To learn more about Blended Learning with Catlin Tucker, listen to Episode 226 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Many students feel overwhelmed with homework, and it's taking a toll on their mental health. It’s the million billion dollar question. How did we get to a point where some teens are so hyper-competitive that giving them a “B” on a paper or quiz is like giving them an “F”? Why do some teens now overload themselves with advanced placement courses and extracurriculars, just to stay up past midnight cramming in homework? Dr. Cathy Vatterott is an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and she’s been researching and writing about homework for more than 20 years. She believes much of our teens’ excessive workloads and goals of “perfectionism” is caused by a desire to get into Ivy League Universities.

“We as a culture, especially in highly- affluent communities, have bought into an idea that if you don’t get into one of these ten colleges, you’re going to be a failure, says Vatterott. “They’ve made this an incredibly high-stakes game for kids.” What should teens be doing? Vatterott, who published “The Teens are not Alright,” says teens should be

– Experience learning as joyful and exciting.

– Read for pleasure.

– Play a game where winning doesn’t matter.

– Figure out who they are and what they value.

– Fall in love, not with a person, but with a passion.

– Discover not what the world can do for them, but what they can do for the world.

– Reflect, wonder, and dream. What can schools do to help? Vatterott helps coach educators on what they can do to help teens strike a balance, and she says changing up homework assignments can have a considerable impact.

While she is not a proponent of eliminating homework entirely, she does believe schools should reduce homework and make sure that what’s going home is meaningful.

“We don’t prepare kids to do five hours of homework in college by giving them five hours of homework in high school. The way we prepare kids is to teach them the skills that we need to actually be able to handle the work,” says Vatterott. “It’s not about time. Time is not the metric.”

She also suggests that schools should coordinate the workload across classes and switch to a modified block schedule with fewer but longer classes each day.

Listen to Episode 225 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to hear our full interview with Cathy Vatterott.

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Starting on the right foot On the first day or two of school, it can be tempting to want to lay the ground rules. You know, set the expectations about workload, go over the rules, and fill out the required forms. But Rick Wormeli wants to challenge educators to think differently.

Wormeli, one of the first Nationally Board Certified Teachers in America, says that students want to know that you’re going to transcend their current condition and help them aspire to something more than they are.

“And when all they [students] get is more rules and regulations, they realize one more year where there’s nothing here for me.”

Wormeli recommends laying a foundation of meaningful relationships with students by mixing activities that allow you to get to know and understand where the students are coming from.

Wormeli recently listed ways this can be accomplished in a recent article he penned for AMLE, and he elaborates on those ideas in Episode 224 of the Class Dismissed podcast. Wormeli’s beginning of the year ideas “The Best Way for You to Learn” Cards Using index cards, teachers can ask students to describe how they best learn that particular subject.

“Kids are candid,” says Wormeli. “They will say things like, look, if it’s really important, write it on the board.” Or he says some students may ask you not to assign online assignments because their sibling always hogs the computer.

“I’ve got a stack that I rubber band, and I look through that as I try to decide what I’m going to do next,” Wormeli says kids will say some really cool things and give him lots of examples. Letters to the Teacher from Students as their Parents When students write under a pseudonym, they feel freer to speak their mind, says Wormeli.

“When I get what they say about themselves, and then I get what they think their parents would say about themselves, I’m getting a really fleshed version of the child,” says Wormeli. “When someone is fully dimensionalized, you really care a heck of a lot more. Six-Word Memoirs “I love six-word memoirs!” says Wormeli. They really make kids come out of their shells and say profound things.

The brilliance of six-word memoirs is the brevity; teachers can use six-word memoirs as their students examine the content. “It really reveals a lot more about what the student is thinking.”

Wormeli says he often has students continue to send six-word memoirs after class about sports or pop culture.

To hear more from Rick Wormeli, listen to Episode 224 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Do we often pay attention to the conversations we're having with children? Or is it just automatic? Rebecca Rolland, a speech pathologist, affiliated with Children's Hospital Boston, has put together a guide to achieving what she calls "rich talk." It is a deeper conversation that can transform your relationships with children.

The science of conversation has been around for centuries, but in the 21st century, it's more important than ever. A great chat can boost your students' learning and well-being years later.

Courtesy RebeccaRolland.com

Rolland's new book, "The Art of Talking with Children," is an evidence-based guide that will show you how to communicate with kids to feel understood while growing into happy adults who can connect better at home or school.

In Episode 223 of Class Dismissed, Rolland shares some of her strategies for engaging in rich talk. She offers ideas to promote children's empathy, curiosity, and ability to embrace challenges. And she provides us with ideas to feel more effective and confident as a teacher.

To hear our full interview with Rolland, listen to Episode 223 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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How to start with learner-led conferences For many educators, the idea of letting a student lead a parent-teacher conference is unsettling. However, if done correctly, a learner-led conference opens an opportunity for self-evaluation, which can lead to figuring out the next steps in learning.

Our guest in Episode 222 has spent years practicing learner-led conferences. Paul Emerich France is a National Board-certified teacher, consultant, and author of Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms.

He believes that a learner-led dialog provides teachers with a tool for enabling learner-driven personalization, making students partners in reflecting on their learning.

But pump the breaks for a minute. We're not suggesting you dive in head first and start allowing your students to run the parent-teacher conference tomorrow.

There's a process, and Paul explains that in our latest episode and his recent Edutopia post.

"So, just like anything else in our classrooms, we need to be prepared to support all types of learners in a learner-led conference," he says.

Paul's first recommendation is to start a portfolio process from day one. He says that for students to be able to drive their learning, they must have specific artifacts they can refer to while describing their knowledge.

To hear all of Paul's learner-Led conference tips, listen to Episode 222 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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The number of emerging companies in the EdTech space can be overwhelming for school districts. The fast growth of new K-12 software companies is due, in part, to COVID 19 and a subsequent surge in ESSER funds.

Our guest in Episode 221 is an expert in parsing through the EdTech space. Doug Roberts is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Education Innovation. The institute acts as a liaison between EdTech companies and Superintendents to help create the best products for school districts.

In this episode, Roberts dives into the technological changes we experienced in K-12 education during the pandemic. But, according to Roberts, the impact COVID-19 made on the EdTech sector was not necessarily negative.

"You're seeing a complete shift in the thinking about what is possible,” says Roberts. In addition, Roberts notes that we're starting to see a massive influx of telehealth which can bring services to kids that may not otherwise have access.

To hear Robert's advice to superintendents on selecting the best EdTech vendors, listen to Episode 221 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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It's no secret that mental health care can be expensive and difficult to access, especially for young people. This can be a huge problem for students, who often face significant stressors. Bridging the gap in student access to mental health care can alleviate some of these stressors.

Dr. Travis Gayles, a recent recipient of the AMA Award for Outstanding Service for his leadership during the pandemic, is an expert on child health access, especially as it relates to what kids have been up against for the past two years.

In Episode 220 of Class Dismissed, Gayles tells about the stressors students face and how school districts are coming up with innovative new ways to get students access to school-based telehealthcare.

Hazel Health, the company Gayles works with, partners with schools to provide physical health, check-ups, and mental and behavioral health evaluations. They give students access to a network of doctors for speedy diagnoses and care plans, including urgent care, particularly in underserved communities with large populations of Medicaid-insured students.

To learn more about ways to bridge the gap in student access to health care. Listen to Episode 220 of Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Tools for facing adversity When teachers at Robert W. Coleman Elementary in Baltimore are struggling with a student’s behavior, the educators have an alternative to detention. Instead, they can refer the student to meditation.

The Holistic Life Foundation keeps three staff members in a “mindful moment room” ready to help a frustrated student with a 15-minute active listening, breathing exercises, or meditation session.

Andres Gonzalez is the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Holistic Life Foundation. He says that in the elementary schools they work with, the teachers must refer the students, but in the high schools, the students can self-refer.

Over time, their program becomes part of the school's culture, says Gonzalez.

“The kids kind of know what they’re getting into, and they want to be there.”

The Holistic Life Foundation believes that students are sometimes going through something that’s making their behavior a little off. It may be trouble at home or something internal, but either way, the students are screaming for attention, and they’re screaming for help.

“Instead of you punishing a kid for something, you probably don’t even know what he’s going through,” says Gonzalez. “Why don’t we let the kid talk and give him tools that he can use in the future when he’s faced with adversity, stress, or trauma.”

Listen to Episode 219 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes to hear our full interview about replacing detention with meditation.

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In Episode 218 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, we caught up with Minnesota principal and author Jessica Cabeen. Cabeen, who is the author of “Lead with Grace: Leaning into the Soft Skills of Leadership,” shared tips on handling professional confrontations.

Cabeen says one of the biggest mistakes school leaders can make is to “lead with their title.” Not sure if that’s you? Cabeen says that you may be leading with your title if you’re in your office more than you’re in the halls. Or if you’re multi-tasking when someone is having a conversation with you.

Cabeen's tips on having those challenging conversations include

Don’t worry about being hated Keep it professional, and don’t take things personally Focus on what you can control Empathize

To hear our full discussion with Cabeen, you can listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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The HELPER Act In Episode 217 of Class Dismissed, we talk with Sam Royer, the architect of the HELPER Act, a bipartisan bill with broad support in the U.S. House, with a companion bill recently introduced on the other end of Capitol Hill by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) & Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

The legislation would eliminate a down payment requirement and provide 100% up-front financing for teachers, police officers, firefighters, EMTs & other frontline heroes while also eliminating a monthly mortgage insurance premium (MIP) requirement typically required under other FHA programs.

“Teachers have been on the frontlines of the pandemic in Covid-filled classrooms, get minuscule raises, and can’t save enough to afford today’s soaring home prices and all-cash bidding wars,” says Sam Royer, founder of Heroes First Home Loans. “We need a new law that provides these heroes with the same benefits I and countless others have received under the G.I. bill. If everyday teachers can no longer afford to buy a home it’s very possible we could see an outflow of talent from the profession”

The HELPER Act, which is short for Homes for Every Local Protector, Educator, and Responder Act is a grassroots effort and will likely stand a better chance of passage if constituents contact their representatives and senators. To learn more about the HELPER ACT, listen to Episode 217 of Class Dismissed. You can find episodes of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

Other Show Notes How to Talk with Kids About War All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2022

For the past few years, the world has consumed podcasts at blistering speeds. Consequently, a lot of listeners can choose from a variety of content. It's estimated that more than 2 million podcast shows are available. However, most of those shows target adults and teens. Very few podcast creators have taken the time to make shows aimed at 6-10-year-olds.

When Jerry Kolber contemplated making educational podcasts for young kids, he didn't see many existing options.

"It's a very challenging age group to sell advertising against, for logistically and ethical reason," says Kolber.

Kolber is the voice behind the new hit children's educational podcast "Who Smarted?"

You may not recognize the name, but you might recognize some of Kolber's other work. The company he co-founded, Atomic Entertainment, launched hit shows like Brain Games (Disney +) and Brainchild (Netflix).

When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, there was a period where they couldn't film shows, so he and his team at Atomic started looking into producing a podcast.

"Before we started "Who Smarted?," we found lots of research that shows that children are able to comprehend at a grade level as much as two to three grades higher with audio than with text," say Kolber. "Because your conversation skills develop a little faster than your reading skills at that age."

Who Smarted is a creatively produced show that includes many sound effects and actors with fun voices. But the variety of topics are what will keep kids, parents, and their teachers coming back for more.

For example,

How does your microwave oven heat up your Hot Pockets? Why do caterpillars turn into butterflies? Do animals cry?

The "Who Smarted?" list of shows is extensive because a team of really bright writers turns out a ton of high-level content. It's about three shows a week, which is a lot in the world of podcasting.

To hear our full interview with Kolber and learn how it can be utilized as a tool in your classroom, listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed. You can find episodes of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Managing Up In this week's Episode of Class Dismissed, we focused on some tips about managing up. The term "managing up" refers to an employee taking steps to improve their boss's efficiency and efficacy.

For some, steering their supervisor in any direction may bring anxiety, but there is a way to do it without coming across as pushy.

We go over a few pointers to keep managing up from becoming a sticky situation. Professional Development Reimagined Our guest in today's bright idea segment is an education thought leader who has spoken worldwide on the importance of social-emotional learning and the power of music education.

Nadine Levitt is also the Founder and CEO of Wurrly EDU and the PD Reimagined initiative.

PD Reimagined is born out of Nadine Levitt's blog series Mind Your Business Ed!, in which she sat down with some of the best minds in business, sports, and entertainment. There, she realized that the drivers of success in each sector are entirely transferable to education.

Now, with PD Reimagined, she wants to invite those same thought leaders into the world of education to interrupt this momentum through inspiration, celebration, and support for our teachers! Other Show Notes Teachers Are Obsessed With Wordle, Too. See How They’re Using It at School

Combatting Burnout Let's face it. Being an educator can be an incredibly daunting task. There's constantly a demand to "do more" with fewer resources, and COVID has only compounded the stressful work environment in the classroom.

In this episode of Class Dismissed, a former teacher turned burnout coach, Gabby Lubin, discusses mindfulness and exercise techniques that may help prevent or at least mitigate educator burnout.

Lubin believes it's helpful to have mindfulness and exercise sessions with fellow educators. That's why she's spent the last few years building an online community of educators that use her techniques to work through the tough times.

Gabby Lubin, CEO & Founder of Spark by Gabby (Courtesy of Spark by Gabby)

"You don't have to go about it alone. "You're with your peers. You're taking classes from other educators," says Lubin. "And they're helping support and figure out how to apply this work to your daily life."

For example, one mindfulness instructor at SparkByGabby.com lightly calls about something she may have experienced in the class recently. So those involved in the session can apply those mindfulness techniques in their lives as a teacher.

To hear our entire conversation with Gabby, listen to Episode 214 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to learn more about Decision Education.

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It’s about teaching life lessons that prepare our children for the future. We all make thousands of decisions a day. So shouldn’t we begin teaching the psychology of decision-making to our students?

Our guest on Episode 213 of Class Dismissed is a former high school English teacher and the Senior Educational Content Designer for the Alliance for Decision Education. Jillian Hardgrove says that the Alliance for Decision Education is focused on helping students develop skillful processes that are involved in making a decision.

There are a few different decision-making processes for students to learn.

In the moment decisions - For example, if somebody cuts you off in traffic, how might you react to that? Habits - Exercise, eating healthy, regular mindful practices Deliberative decision making - going to college, buying a car, selecting a company to work for.

“We have the attitude that it’s better to learn these things when you’re young, and you have the opportunities to practice them, rather than to wait for something negative to happen,” says Hardgrove. Other Alliance for Decision Education Tools Hardgrove and her colleagues at the Alliance for Decision Education offer a few different programs and resources to educators. HabitWise When students dream about their careers and life goals, they must understand how habits can turn their dreams into reality or get in the way. HabitWise helps middle and high school students achieve their goals by teaching them how to create and track beneficial habits and crush problematic patterns. Mindful Choices Mindful Choices is a Social and Emotional Learning program that helps students manage stress and anxiety, increase self-control, and sustain attention.

Listen to Episode 213 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app to learn more about Decision Education.

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Predictions for 2022 In Episode 212 of Class Dismissed, we chat about what education may look like in 2022?

Could we see a mass exodus of teachers fed up with educating through a pandemic? How might two years of learning in a pandemic impact test scores? Will Universal Pre-K ever become a reality?

We examine Larry Ferlazzo's latest list of predictions, and Kristina weighs in with her perspective. Making employment central to educational offerings Also, in this episode, we often think of higher education as the place that preps us for our future careers. But is this the focus of colleges and universities? Are students finding work related to their degree right after graduation?

Our guest has some ideas on how colleges can better prep students for the workforce.

You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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In Episode 211 of Class Dismissed, we have our 5th Annual "Classy Awards." This annual tradition allows us to reflect on a few of our incredible show guests during 2021.

This year's categories include...

Most Downloaded Episode Most Clicked on Article on our Website Most Useful Episode for Teacher Most Useful Episode for School Leaders Most Thought Provoking Guest Best Ed Tech Pitch

To hear the winners, listen to Episode 211 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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The first step to understanding something new is often the most challenging part. Our guest on Episode 210 of Class Dismissed explains why we need to rethink the way we teach students.

He suggests that we reconsider the three Rs - Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and possibly replace those with some new Rs. Such as Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection.

Jose Antonio Bowen is the author of the hit book "Teaching Naked." Bowen led innovation and change for over 35 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), and he's just released a new book. "Teaching Change: How to develop independent thinkers using Relationships Resilience, and Reflection."

Drawing on new research, Bowen explores ways to better prepare students while also focusing less heavily upon teachers themselves, instead placing greater emphasis on their process interactions within a learning environment. In "Teaching Change," Bowen examines student psychology, history, assumptions, anxiety, and bias and advocates for education to focus on the new 3Rs—Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection.

In our interview with Bowen, he said that critical thinking has become more crucial than ever.

"We have to teach them [students] process," says Bowen These three Rs are more about process. The old three Rs were about content -- Reading, Writing, Arithmetic -- stuff you need to know."

"Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection are more about what you need to know about yourself so that you can manage your own future change. Because my goal as a teacher is to make myself obsolete. So you don't need me, you can think for yourself."

To learn how more about the new 3Rs, listen to Episode 210 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection

Many students can remember details from their favorite television show but struggle with remembering things their teachers say in class. Why is this?

Memory is an intriguing subject. You might think that your most recent memory would always be in front of you, but sometimes we find ourselves at a loss when trying to remember something from 15 seconds earlier, such as what I came into the kitchen for or even where my car keys are!

Meanwhile, other seemingly trivial memories can last our entire lives - for example, why do we remember some advertisements?

Courtesy Dr. Daniel Willingham Facebook

Our guest in Episode 209 of Class Dismissed is here to help us make some sense of memory. He'll also give us some teacher tips on how to make a more memorable lesson plan.

Dr. Daniel Willingham is a psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia. He's also the author of "Why Don't Students Like School?" His book dives into how the mind works and what it means for the classroom.

Willingham wants educators to know that "memory is the residue of thought." In other words, your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it's a product of what you think about.

To learn how educators can use this information to their advantage in their lessons, listen to Episode 209 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

In K-12 education, there’s a strong push for STEM education. It’s for good reason, math and science are important. But where should social-emotional learning rank? Psychiatrist Helen Riess, MD, believes we’re in a society that’s ill-equipped to talk about emotion and feelings. Riess thinks we need more than just information in this world to succeed. She believes we need to be taught how to have difficult conversations. We need to engage with people who are not like us.

For Riess, teaching with empathy in the classroom is crucial. So important, she dedicated a chapter in her book just for teachers. Riess, a psychiatrist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, authored “The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences"

Her book, which is supported by research, answers whether or not empathy is an innate quality. Can it be taught? Or is it just something we’re born with? She also offers tips on how we can develop into a more empathetic person.

“Empathy is not one thing, says Riess. “It’s actually a capacity to perceive and understand and know to some degree what experiences another person is experiencing.” When Riess talks about empathy, she’s speaking about capacity for perception. Empathy in the classroom For a student to be motivated, they need to see that the teacher recognizes them as unique individuals, says Riess. There’s nothing more powerful than making meaningful eye contact with students. To show I see you and that you’re not just looking at a blur of faces, says Riess.

Riess suggests that educators should register each student’s eye color in their mind. Don’t say the eye color out loud, but take time to really look at a person’s eyes’ unique color. She says it will build a connection with the individual.

She also suggests teachers should silently “name the affect” when working with students. Affect is a scientific term for emotion.

There’s a well-known phrase, “if you can name it, you can tame it,” says Riess. “If you can name that somebody looks confused. You’re probably going to be a little more conscious of trying to clear up confusion than if you just look at someone’s face and don’t try to name what emotion you’re seeing.”

Riess also suggests that everyone should learn the ABC of empathy

Acknowledge – when you’re in a difficult situation Breathe – take a deep breath. Gives a pause from the trigger to the response. Curiosity – as soon as we move to judgment there really is no open door left to show empathy. But if we say ‘I’d like to understand why you did that.’ Once the person is listened to and heard, you might get to a deeper level.

To learn more from Riess, listen to Episode 208 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences

Are educators doing enough when it comes to climate change? Purdue University Professors Dr. Daniel Shepardson and Andrew Hirsch believe that right now, climate change is the one topic that isn't adequately covered in classrooms across America - even though this is one of our most pressing environmental issues today.

"It tends to be addressed in a piecemeal fashion," Shepardson says students may touch on it a bit in earth science or biology class, but that's not enough. "There's not really a clearly defined conceptual framework to help teachers to teach about climate change."

That's why Shepardson and his colleague, Hirsch recently co-authored "Teaching Climate Change – What educators should know and can do" in American Educator.

They argue that climate change is the #1 environmental issue. "If we don't address a warming climate, then we are going to find ourselves having to deal with extreme heat, extreme storm events, and food security may become a problem," says Hirsch. Navigating the political storm. There's a fine line between educating students about climate change and making it an opportunity for debate.

A lot of teachers will present both sides. Still, the pair say that allowing this kind of discussion in your classroom could backfire if you're not careful to avoid any heated exchanges among classmates who may be on opposite ends with their beliefs about global warming or how humans contribute to its occurrence.

Hirsch says the debate should be about how we deal with the issue. "That's where teachers can engage students in debating the ways we mitigate and adapt to our changing climate.

To get tips on how to teach about climate change and hear our full interview with Hirsch and Shepardson, listen to Episode 207 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on iTunes here.

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The Operation Varsity Blues investigation is a landmark moment for college admissions. More than 50 wealthy parents have been revealed to be participating in an expensive fraud scheme orchestrated by William "Rick" Singer that nets them their kids' spot at some of America's most elite universities.

One of those universities is Stanford. John Vandemoer is a former Stanford University sailing coach, and he was the first person sentenced in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal.

He is our guest in Episode 206 of Class Dismissed. His interview comes on the heels of the release of his new book, "Rigged Justice."

The book is the candid and true story of how Vandemoer was drawn unwittingly into a web of deceit – it outlines the sophisticated scheme designed to take advantage of college coaches, which plays to the endless appetite for university fundraising.

John Vandemoer, Stanford University's former head sailing coach

Vandemoer admits he took money for the university sailing program, but he maintains he never took money for his personal use. A distinction that separates him from many of the other coaches linked the scandal.

"I was sentenced to a $10,000 fine. Two years of supervised release, and the first six months of that, I had an ankle monitor. I was on house arrest," says Vandemoer.

In Episode 206 of Class Dismissed, Vandemoer walks us through his first encounter with FBI and IRS agents and offers his perspective on how we may be able to get the University admissions process back on track.

He says it's essential for students and parents to realize that there are a lot of great Universities for students.

"We have to stop being obsessed with working on going for the same schools all the time and focusing on the US News and World Reports List," he says. "And also taking financial considerations out of the US News and World Reports List, I think would be really helpful."

To hear our full interview with Vandemoer listen to Episode 206 of the Class Dismissed podcast. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Rigged Justice: How the College Admissions Scandal Ruined an Innocent Man's Life

Exercising your critical thinking muscle We now live in a world where Siri, Alexa, and Google can answer straightforward questions in a matter of seconds.

So when it comes to educating our students, there's almost no doubt that teaching our students how to think critically is an essential skill.

Our guest in Episode 205 has conducted research that takes what we know about teaching critical thinking further.

Emily Fyfe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Dr. Fyfe and her colleagues have released their latest findings in a "Scalable, Versatile Approach for Improving Critical Thinking Skills."

Their findings give us insight into how we can strengthen our critical thinking muscles. What did they do? Fyfe says they were inspired to do the research because people are honestly not very good at critical thinking.

"Just because you are educated, or you attended a class, or you graduated from college doesn't necessarily mean that you're a better critical thinker, and that seemed like a problem," says Fyfe.

In their study, all participants started the experiment by taking a pre-test and receiving basic training about critical thinking.

But afterward, only one group of participants spent time having "critical training practice."

Meanwhile, a second group received "non-critical thinking practice," and a third group received no practice of any kind.

After the practice, all participants participated in a post-test.

As a result, those in the critical thinking practice scored better on the post-test than the pre-test. However, the people in the other conditions experienced minimal improvements.

To learn more about the study and why it's important to exercise our critical thinking muscles listen to Episode 205 of the Class Dismissed podcast. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Somehow the graphing calculator has stayed the same since the ‘90s Mathematics and engineering students worldwide have long been at the mercy of Texas Instruments, a company that has held an exclusive on graphing calculators for more than three decades. But that did not stop former Apple employee Romain Goyet from trying to disrupt the market.

Goyet applied his engineering and design skills to create the NumWorks Graphing Calculator. It has a sleek aesthetic design and an app-based menu to make using complex graphing calculators easy for any student. Throwing out the lengthy manual "When you buy a TI-84, it comes with a user manual that is like 400 pages long. When you buy an iPhone, it comes with a user manual that's like two pages long," says Goyet. "That's a problem in itself."

Goyet says that one could argue that math is complicated and needs instructions, but the disconnect is that the TI-84 manual is not about math. Instead, it's about how to use the tool.

Consequently, NumWorks wanted to fix that.

They did so by not using any abbreviations. Something you see a lot of when using a TI-84. They also drew inspiration from video game consoles. Goyet says the menu works just like a Playstation. You just pick it up and start using it.

One subtle design change was that they moved the arrow key to the left side, making it more natural to teenagers.

The Numworks calculator was initially released in Europe. But about a year ago, it was introduced to the United States.

Teachers say, "I can finally teach and not train my students to memorize weird key sequences," says Goyet.

For Goyet, the end game is for us to break a monopoly and offer everyone an alternative. "The big problem here is that there is really just one option, and that's not acceptable."

To hear our full interview with Goyet, listen to Episode 204 of Class Dismissed.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes Impacts of School Entry Age on Academic Growth through 2nd Grade: A Multi-State Regression Discontinuity Analysis How Toxic Positivity Demoralizes Teachers and Hurts Schools All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

NumWorks Graphing Calculator

Distracted students are not a new problem. It's easy to blame technology as a leading factor in distracting our students. iPhones, video games, and social media are multi-billion dollar industries created to demand attention.

However, our guest in Episode 203 of Class Dismissed argues that being distracted is not a new phenomenon. James Lang is a professor of English at Assumption University, and he's also the author of six education-related books, the most recent of which is "Distracted: Why students can't focus and what you can do about it."

In Lang's latest book, he notes that people have been distracted since the beginning of the historical record.

"Considerations of the problem of distraction date at least back to Greek and Roman antiquity," writes Lang. "In Ethics, Aristotle argued that distraction arises from a clash between activities which are more and less pleasant to us."

Lang argues that it's a primary biological feature of our brain that we are drawn to novelty in our environment. Why not just ban the distractions? One seemingly obvious solution to address distractions in a classroom or any setting for that matter may be to ban the problem. Consequently, educators sometimes prohibit phones and other electronic devices in the classroom.

But Lang says doing so can create an artificial bubble that doesn't prepare students for their future work environment.

Instead, Lang says educators should focus more on cultivating the attention of students.

People tend to think that attention is the norm and distraction is falling away from the standard. But the research supports the opposite.

"Distraction is like the ocean that we're always swimming in. Attention is like the islands that are rising out of that ocean," says Lang.

The job of the teacher is to create those circumstances.

During the years Lang spent preparing to write "Distracted," he studied classrooms outside of his own and observed what made students pay attention. When do people pay attention? In "Distracted," Lang dives into some in-depth solutions to combat distractions. But he also offers us some "low-hanging fruit."

Regular use of student names. Our names how tremendous power to gather attention.

Use your physical presence. Move around the room. Not to menace or loom., but walk over to the student and invite them to the conservation.

In Episode 203 of Class Dismissed, Lang also gives us ideas on how educators can use curiosity and structured attention to prevent distractions. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes This District Built a Better, More Reliable Supply of Substitute Teachers. Here's How

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Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It

Against the odds There are approximately 4000 people that live in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The town, a 40-minute drive south of Jackson, Mississippi, is a quaint community that boasts a Walmart a few restaurants.

So when the Class Dismissed Podcast learned that a science teacher was developing a scuba diving curriculum for her students at Hazlehurst High School, we had to learn more.

A while back, Veronica Wylie got the idea to earn a scuba diving certification to complete research with Diving With A Purpose, a nonprofit that partners with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to protect, document, and interpret African slave trade shipwrecks. The Challenge This idea is ambitious for any teacher, even those that live nearby the sea. But Hazlehurst has one swimming pool and is nearly a three-hour drive to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And it's even further from the more transparent waters the Florida panhandle offers.

Veronica says that her ultimate goal is to "give students a chance to experience science, rather than just memorize it." For most of her students, this curriculum will be the first time they have traveled outside of the state of Mississippi. She'll create coursework inspired by her students' dives, including a lab manual and discovery activities that will guide student-research efforts and encourage them to think critically both inside the classroom and out.

But Veronica says she's also driven by something else.

"I'm always a fan of breaking stereotypes, and there's that big stereotype that black people don't swim. And further, that black woman don't swim," says Veronica. "The more of us that go out and try to break these [stereotypes]. We can kind of change the narrative for the people that come behind us."

So how is Veronica going to pull off this ambitious project? Well, she has some help from Fund For Teachers and a lot of determination. She shares the details in Episode 202 of the Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Other show notes The Best Advice for New Teachers, in 5 Words or Less

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Many schools are already back in session for the Fall of 2021. However, the Delta variant appears to have its own agenda. Thus far, in the south, thousands of students have been forced back into virtual or hybrid learning to navigate flareups of COVID-19.

Each time a student or teacher is diagnosed with COVID, it takes schools time and resources to determine who’s been near the COVID positive patient and who now needs to quarantine.

Administrators can accomplish the task manually by pulling schedules, going to each class, and sorting through who sits next to who. Or they can work through a clunky SIS (Student Information Systems) interface and try to determine who may have been exposed. But SchoolStatus customers have a much more efficient tool. Over the past couple of months, the K-12 software company built-in contact tracing and quarantine reports that can be generated with the click of a button.

“We just want to give them a place to start,” says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. “The key is to get the students out of class as quickly as possible.”

SchoolStatus already works with school districts in more than a dozen states. Their software integrates with existing SIS and harnesses that data in a user-friendly way. They also have robust communications tools that connect millions of teachers to parents each day.

Davis says that adding contact tracing and quarantine tools just felt like the right thing to do. Schools can now click a button and build a report that shows who has a class with a COVID-19 positive student. They can also click another button when a student needs to quarantine, which generates a report on when students should return to school.

“Basically, it’s a central clearinghouse to store this information to store this data. As opposed to keeping sensitive health data in a large Google spreadsheet,” says Davis. “So not only do you have a place to find the students who should be quarantined but have a place to store their quarantine information.”

Davis says the information is also logged and recorded, so you can see who’s looked at it and when.

To hear our entire conversation with Davis and learn more about how SchoolStatus is helping districts navigate COVID-19, listen to Episode 201 of Class Dismissed.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

You can also learn more about the SchoolStatus contact tracing toolkit here.

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Our 200th Episode! It's Episode 200 of the Class Dismissed Podcast! Over the past four years, we've shared stories of inspiring educators around the country, and today we're reflecting on some of our favorites. Using Restorative Practices in the Classroom Back in episode 109, we spoke with Nathan Maynard. Maynard is the co-author of “Hacking School Discipline, and he talked to us about using restorative practices.

Maynard gives a digestible look at the benefits of restorative practices and how we can start implementing them in our classroom. Power to the “Late Bloomer” I know I’ve been guilty of being in awe and applauding kids that can do things way ahead of their age. You know, the kids that amaze us with their music abilities on America’s Got Talent. Or those amazing students at the national "Spelling B."

In Episode 129, Rich Karlgaard explains why it’s essential to recognize that some people’s prime comes a little later than others.

For example, Karlgaard highlights a 53-year-old woman named Joanne. When Joanne was in school, she was described as a “high-mediocre” student. Many professors do not remember Joanne, but one professor described her as a student that would often stare off into space while in class.

After attending school, Joanne got into a bad marriage, worked as a receptionist for a bit, and went into a spiral of depression after her divorce. For a time, she was even on public assistance.

But Karlgaard says Joanne is an excellent example of a late bloomer.

“At age 35, while taking a train, Joanne, otherwise known as J.K. Rowling, dreamed up Harry Potter,” says Karlgaard.

It’s a great perspective that we should all consider. Leading with love – The secret weapon of this tattooed principal In Episodes 54 and 55, Hammish teaches us how he turns around struggling schools. But most importantly, how he leads with love.

On the morning announcements, Brewer says over the loudspeaker, “If somebody today didn’t tell you they love you. Mr. Brewer’s telling you today that he loves you.”

“We forgot to tell kids that we love them,” says Brewer. “So many of our kids don’t hear that word enough.”

Brewer says if students are in “hot water” with him, he tells them that he doesn’t like what they did, but he still loves them.

“If you build a culture and expectation around love, hard conversations can be had.”

Brewer says he tells his kids that he loves them every day, and they have his back. Taking the fuzziness out of reading comprehension Jennifer Serravallo is the author of the Writing Strategies book and the Reading strategies book. In episode 72, she gives us tips about working with students on reading comprehension.

Serravallo says her goal is to make sense of something that is sometimes hard to make sense of. There are many different viewpoints on what it even means to understand comprehension. Ranging from the Rosenblatt Reader-Response Theory to a Proficient Reader Research, it can get murky for educators.

Serravallo says, “Sometimes the classroom teacher is left thinking, what am I really looking for? What does comprehension look like? What does it look like when a kid really gets it?”

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Over the past few weeks, U.S.A. swimmer Caleb Dressel proved to be a dominant force at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As it turns out, he credits much of his mental success to his former math teacher.

If you've paid close attention you may have noticed the seven-time gold medalist often holding on to a blue bandana. In fact, he's even pictured holding it while standing on the medal podium.

That bandana once belonged to Claire McCool, one of Dressel’s math teachers at Clay High School in Green Cove Springs, Florida.

McCool taught Dressel his freshman year of high school, but her impact on him was far more than academic.

Dressel was a rising star in the world of swimming throughout high school, but when he was 17 years old, he took a break from the pool.

“I don’t regret taking time off at all. It was really hard getting back into shape, back into the groove,” he told Yahoo Sports a few months back.

“I needed the mental break … I was a 17-year-old kid, a top recruit coming out of high school, a lot of talk around me about expectation. I wasn’t used to that. I was like any high schooler, trying to figure out my life … Who knows where I’d be if I didn’t take that break?”

During that difficult time, Dressel leaned heavily on McCool for advice.

Dressel called McCool his “life teacher.”

McCool was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. She watched as Dressel established his dominance, winning two golds in Rio and then an astounding seven golds in the 2017 worlds in Budapest. Soon after that, though, she succumbed to cancer.

Her husband Mike presented Caeleb with one of her workout bandannas, and he’s kept it with him ever since.

“The bandanna is very significant,” he says. “It’s a piece of her that I’m always going to have, one physical piece that I have left of her.”

In Episode 199 of Class Dismissed, we discuss how teachers like McCool can have major impacts on students' lives.

We also speak with Prakash Nair, the Founding President and CEO of Education Design International and author of “Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create”. Nair explains how and why spent years designing schools the wrong way.

To hear some of Nair’s solutions for a better-designed school, listen to Episode 199 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create

If there's one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear for educators, it's that Social-Emotional Learning needs to play a critical role in the education of our children. But transitioning to an SEL classroom takes time.

Our guest in today's bright idea segment, Lorea Martinez completed her doctoral dissertation on SEL, and she found that “lack of time” was the single most important reason why teachers wouldn’t adopt new practices in their classrooms, even when they knew those practices would greatly benefit their students.

Martinez also knows that many of us were not taught about emotions growing up.

"In our families or in our schools. We learned a lot of this by trial and error. And in many cases, there was a lot of error."

Further, Martinez says that most of us were trained to ignore or suppress our emotions because we thought they were interfering with our cognitive process. But what we know today from research is that the cognitive and emotional systems work together in order to make decisions, learn and retain information.

Now she's released a new book, titled HEART in Mind. Its goal is to be a roadmap for creating an SEL classroom.

To learn more about how to create an SEL classroom, listen to Episode 198 of Class Dismissed. You'll learn Martinez's key skills that are represented by the acronym HEART and more.

You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

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Teaching with the HEART in Mind: A Complete Educator's Guide to Social Emotional Learning

Can you measure what matters? When companies look for employees, they look for candidates that are curious, creative, and persistent. So logically, these are the skills we should be teaching and measuring in our school system. But how do you measure curiosity or creativity?

When YJ Kim was a project director at the MIT Office of Open Learning, she dedicated years to answer the question. Yoon Jeon “YJ” Kim “When we started talking to teachers more about it, we quickly realized that teachers do want to measure, they do want to assess those skills,” says Kim “But they often feel like at the end of the day we just have to do standardized testing.”

Currently, schools assess students on content retention. Using a standardized test, it’s relatively easy to do. But there really is no standardized test for curiosity. In response to that, Kim and her colleague, Lousia Rosenheck have been designing what they call “playful assessments.”

Rosenheck, who is a designer and researcher at MIT, says a lot of the construct behind playful assessments is helping learners recognize what they’re good at, how they can improve, and how the individual can tell if they’re getting better at those things.

“Communication is an important skill. But what does that mean? What are the different kinds of communication?”

Rosenheck says these are the types of questions they hope their tools can answer. Shadowspect One of the tools the researchers are designing is called “Shadowspect.” It’s a game-based assessment that looks like a fun puzzle. Kim says you rotate shapes and figures in the environment, and it measures not just students' mathematics strengths but also assesses the students' spatial reasoning, creativity, and persistence. Shadowspect Screenshot Credit: MIT Teaching Systems Lab “How those things are measured is because we are using a lot of process data that is logged through the gameplay,” says Kim.

Shawdowspect monitors the things the user moves, clicks, and rotates, and then it uses those features to make inferences based on how the user solves the puzzles. Why is it called “playful assessments”? Kim says the notion of playfulness is essential because their goal is to reimagine what assessment really means. The researchers want assessment to go beyond something that students are just passively doing.

“If you think about a playground, everybody who comes to a playground are equal players. They share they have fun, and everybody participates in the process of play,” says Kim. “When we think about assessment, it’s something that’s given to students, and they don’t really have any say in how they’re assessed.” What does success look like? Rosenheck knows that if a school can’t measure something, it probably won’t be a priority for the school. Louisa Rosenheck is a designer and researcher of educational technologies in the MIT Education “Our school system is so focused on assessments that the way it is, things are not going be taught, they are not going to be given priority if we can’t assess them,” says Rosenheck

That’s why finding a way to measure skills like curiosity, creativity and persistence are so important.

“So if we can find tools and mindsets that show everybody how we can value these skills, then teachers can finally focus more on those, and validate what students are doing, and celebrate the wonderful projects that students are doing that are meaningful to them,” says Rosenheck

Kim says they can develop great assessment systems that have psychometric qualities, but if teachers are not using the assessments it’s not really a win for her.

“I have two kids and they talk about how anxious they are when they take quizzes and tests,” says Kim. “And I really hope that in 20 years or so, kids won’t need to feel that way about assessments.”

To learn more about the incredible work Kim and Rosenheck are doing at MIT, listen to Episode 197 of the Class Dismissed podcast.

There's little doubt that when students engage in classroom discussions, they're going to learn more. So for many teachers, it makes complete sense to find ways to motivate students to participate in class.

For years, Jim Lang (Assumption College) did this with a class participation grade. The English professor says he tried to keep track of each student's class participation to boost a grade (for example, a B to a B+) but not penalize students.

However, Lang is now advocating against the idea of grading participation.

"It just didn't feel right," says Lang. "Grades are really supposed to measure something we can document. Like the learning of the student."

Lang admits that grading participation made him uncomfortable with the idea of nudging grades around in an informal way. He also didn't love the idea that students were rewarded for talking.

"There are other students that might be engaged just as thoughtfully in class, through the way they took their notes, though the way they participated in group work."

Recently Lang published "Should we stop grading class participation" in the Chronicle for Higher Education. He also joined us on Class Dismissed to explain how he maintained widespread class participation while moving away from grading it.

"Rather than make participation something that is optional and can be graded. What I argue instead is that participation should be the norm," says Lang.

In Episode 196, listen to how Lang makes this happen. Hear our full interview on the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Constructive Conflict Most school leaders get into education because they want to teach. They want to enrich the lives of their students and create a stronger community. However, those in administrative roles have to tackle an entirely different beast. Much of the role of a principal or district administrator involves managing conflict. Not just conflict amongst students, but friction between teachers, and parent complaints about grades and discipline.

The daily struggle of addressing conflict can be exhausting for many school leaders. Robert Feirsen (New York Institute of Technology) and Seth Weitzman (a retired New York principal) say that principals spend 20-40 percent of the school day juggling these types of challenges.

In Episode 195 of Class Dismissed, Feirsen and Weitzman offer us real-world strategies on how to depersonalize conflict and tackle the issues at hand.

"We call it 'Conflict Agility'," says Feirsen. "Conflict agile schools are able to process these difficult issues without getting crazy about it, without getting to a point where barriers are erected."

Feirsen says that conflict agile leaders are able to take a step back from situations and understand how to move people in a direction that helps them resolve a situation constructively.

To hear all of Feirsen and Weitzman's strategies listen to our full interview in Episode 195 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2021

Cybersecurity Incidents Strike Often If the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack had a silver lining, it was that it brought worldwide awareness to the fact that ransomware attacks are a costly epidemic. For years, school districts have been a target of such attacks creating costly headaches for those trying to educate our children.

A report highlighted on EdSurge says a new cybersecurity incident strikes K-12 schools nearly every three days.

For most districts, the challenge of protecting data is a chief responsibility of the director of technology. The person charged with guarding that data has to prepare for attacks in several forms, which include but are not limited to.

Denial of Service Attacks Phishing Scams Ransomware

How to “mitigate” the problem? “The key is not complete containment. That is not possible,” says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. “The gold standard is mitigation.”

Davis has been working with school districts for over a decade and he says there are steps districts can take to reduce risk to a reasonable amount. Davis believes that districts need to have policies and plans in place to prevent extreme damage from cyberattacks.

“What happens when there is a breach? What do we do?” Davis says these are the types of conversations districts should be having. Don’t store student’s social security information Dane Conrad, who is the technical onboarding specialist at SchoolStatus spent the past few decades serving as the Director of Technology for large school districts. Conrad says they quit storing student’s social security numbers in their SIS (Student Information Systems).

Conrad says criminals would love to have students' social security numbers because those socials often go unchecked for foul play.

“If somebody steals my identity and they use my social security number. Typically I’ll fumble upon it. So I’ll see information being accessed on my credit card or my debit card,” says Conrad. “But for a student, they are not necessarily in that environment.”

Conrad says criminals could use that number for years before anyone realizes the damage.

Superintendents should ask their director of technology if they’re storing student socials anywhere on their servers. If so, find out why? Is it a necessity? Educate about Phishing One of the most common ways districts are compromised comes from phishing attempts. This is typically when a fraudulent email tricks employees into handing over sensitive information. Often employees may be tricked into handing over their login credentials.

Conrad says it’s critical for districts to educate their staff about what a phishing attempt may look like.

He also recommends using a resource like knowbe4.com. He says they offer literature you can share with employees and they’ll even run phishing attempts to test the system and see where you may have vulnerabilities. How to combat Denial Of Service Attacks A Denial of Service AKA DDOS attack occurs when multiple systems flood bandwidth or web servers. As a result, your school's network could be temporarily shut down.

Davis says having a quality ISP (Internet Service Provider) can help prevent this. He says that good ISPs offer intrusion prevention and detection systems. He also suggests that districts should tighten up their firewall. Frequent Backups to protect against Ransomware A district unprepared for a ransomware attack can be devastating. Ransomware can infect a computer system or server and block access to crucial data and files. The ransomware may quietly go through and encrypt a server until a ransom is paid.

So what do you do if one of your servers is encrypted with ransomware?

Davis says fixing it may make it worse. “First of all, mitigate the risk by disconnecting that device from the network.”

It’s important to isolate the risk and contain it before it infects the entire network.

Davis says one of the challenges is that most people don’t have any kind of de...

Only 1% of the things in our body make us human. Doug Chadwick is a wildlife biologist, author, and frequent National Geographic contributor. During his 35 year affiliation with National Geographic, he's offered in-depth coverage of wolverines, grizzly bears, and whales, to name a few.

Now Chadwick has a new mission; he wants us to think differently about how humans mesh with nature. And he believes that a new way of thinking may need to start in the K-12 science classroom.

The idea is that if humans had a better understanding of what we're made of and how alike our DNA is to other living things, we may have a better appreciation of our purpose on Earth. "You are 23% a wine grape." One important fact that may help digest this thought is that only 1% of the things in our body make us human. This means that remarkably, 99% of our genetic make-up is no different than a chimpanzee or a bonobo.

Another thing that many people don't realize is that we share 80-85% of our genes with most mammals?

But the mind-numbing science doesn't stop there.

"You are 23% a wine grape." says Chadwick, "You're also 7% a bacteria,"

"Every critter out there above the level of a bacterium is a joint partnership," says Chadwick.

It's an enlightening perspective that could cause us to look at the Earth and our [human] impact on the Earth differently. Four Fifths a Grizzly Chadwick breaks down the science of this thinking in his new book, "Four Fifths a Grizzly: A New Perspective on Nature that Just Might Save Us All"

The wildlife writer who has churned out over a dozen books says this latest release is the hardest thing he ever wrote, but he believes he got it right. And it's a critical perspective that he hopes science teachers worldwide will take into consideration.

"I feel like a bit of a fraud telling science teachers how to teach," he says. Chadwick is admittedly not an educator. At least not in the traditional sense.

But for him, this way of thinking started when he looked through a microscope when he was about 7 or 8 years old. "The overwhelming majority of life on earth is invisible." "I realized that there is wonder everywhere, and the harder you look, the more you find," he says. "The overwhelming majority of life on earth is invisible."

"You shouldn't be able to get through a high school biology class without understanding a heck of a lot more about who you are," says Chadwick.

"I think a great majority of people out there think that when I say microbes, bacteria, they think that's germs. There's a negative connotation to it."

Chadwick says that we need to embrace what science has been telling us about these connections since the 1970s, which is that we're all the same.

To hear more of Chadwick's interview and find out what question he would begin science class with, listen to Episode 193 of Class Dismissed.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Four Fifths a Grizzly: A New Perspective on Nature that Just Might Save Us All

Dr. Dave Neumann is an Assistant Professor of History Education at Cal Poly Pomona and he was recently published in “Social Education” with his article titled “A feeling for the Past: The Role of Emotion in History Education.”

In it, Neumann highlights some of his students (future educators) who were presenting their culminating model lessons in his history methods class and he noticed a crucial missing element to their presentation.

“The students had presented this model lesson in a pretty exemplary way, in terms of the content,” said Neumann. “But as I was sitting observing it, I noticed the rest of the students participating in it just really didn’t click with it, and I felt like something was missing.”

What became apparent to Neumann is that the students were missing the emotion in the lesson. His students had presented the topic in a very cold analytical way.

In Episode 192 of Class Dismissed, Neumann tells us what his students could have done better at that moment and he gives us some tips on how educators can bring more emotion into their lessons.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes This is a map of America's Broadband Problem Is your student data safe? All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Nathan Levenson, a former school superintendent, has consulted with hundreds of districts about ways to improve special education. But in March of 2020, COVID 19 magnified the challenges surrounding special education.

“Despite heroic efforts, by teachers and districts, kids with disabilities really did not thrive in any way shape, or form and the gaps got bigger,” says Levenson.

Pre or post-pandemic, Levenson believes that if educators are going to serve kids with disabilities well, general education has to be lead.

“When we’re in person, the goal is to have general ed teachers providing the vast majority of high-quality instruction to students.”

Admittedly, Levenson says that doesn’t always happen, but when the pandemic came the split became even greater.

“Everyone turned to the special education department and said what are you going to do for kids with special needs? And many of the things they do, don’t translate at all to a remote setting.”

Levenson recently released a book, “Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions”

In it, Levenson explains why the vast majority of students in special education need to be in the general education classroom most of the day.

“The research is really clear,” says Levenson. “The quality of the teacher is central, and if you’re going to teach grade-level material, kids have to be in the classroom to be taught that material.”

Levenson says studies show that students who struggle often get less instruction from a classroom teacher than if they didn’t struggle.

“I want to be really clear on this,” says Levenson. “Imagine a second grader who struggles to read. They get less reading instruction from a certified reading teacher or a classroom teacher than a student who doesn’t struggle.”

Levenson says we can’t be shocked if the student falls behind.

To learn more about Levenson’s six shifts to improve special education, listen to Episode 191 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions: A Commonsense Approach for School Leaders

Learning through play is a great way for children and adults to develop new skills, but it’s also a great way to alleviate stress and trauma and even tap into some different parts of the mind.

Our guest on Episode 190 of Class Dismissed is an expert on learning through play. Dr. Bo Stjerne Thomsen is the Vice-President and Chair of Learning through Play in the LEGO Foundation.

The Lego Foundation has partner researchers and labs throughout the world that study learning through play. And they have also recently released a new study out on children, technology, and play.

Thomsen and the LEGO Foundation have examined the science behind learning through play and they know that children have wholly emerged in learning when being hands-on with toys and trying things out.

"First, you understand things much deeper when you test it try it out," says Thomsen. "You basically remember things for longer and understand concepts better."

In this episode of Class Dismissed, Thomsen dives into the skills learned while playing

Attention Limiting Distractions Retain information while building (Working memory) Recognizing symbols - Same as language? Spacial abilities, quantify, sort and count. Regulating Emptional Frustration

To hear our full discussion with Thomsen, listen to Episode 189 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

How schools can help overcome the disadvantage of poverty. When illustrating the need for systems of support in our schools’, Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Reville uses an example close to his heart; his daughter.

He’s open about the list of advantages his daughter had when she showed up for her first day of kindergarten at an urban public school.

a stable two-parent family adequate income healthcare stable housing full nutrition read to every night well-traveled

Reville says many of the children she sat next to in kindergarten had none of the advantages above. Plus, some of those children had already experienced various trauma on top of it. We’ve always thought that schools would be the great equalizer, but that hasn’t turned out to be true. “If you think of it as a hundred-yard dash, she’s [Reville’s daughter] already on the 50-yard line,” says Reville.

The student she’s sitting next to, who has all the disadvantages, is a hundred yards behind the starting line.

“And we fire the starting gun and when they don’t finish at the same time 13 years later at graduation, we act surprised,” says Reville. Making change outside the school Our current system is not enough to make up for the profound differences outside of school. Reville says that we’ve always thought that schools would be the great equalizer, but that hasn’t turned out to be true.

This is because children learn a lot outside of school. So if you only fix the school and you treat everybody equally when they’re in school. You’re not going to get a closing of the gaps.

“The access to opportunity outside of school is controlled by your financial and social capital,” says Reville. “We live in a society now, that has been recently demonstrated quite vividly, that there are huge disparities in wealth, income, and opportunity.”

Reville is optimistic that many solutions can be created at the local level. He says he witnessed great progress with community programs like City Connects in Salem, Massachusetts.

“The teacher connects with the student and the family. They develop a plan and they track progress against that plan,” Reville says.

Reville and his co-author Elaine Weiss, recently release a new book on the topic. Broader, Bolder, Better offers solutions on how schools and communities can work together to help students overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

To hear our full discussion with Reville, listen to Episode 189 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes. Other Show Notes "A New Way to Inoculate People Against Misinformation"

Bad News Harmony Square Go Viral

Will FEMA Reimburse Schools for COVID-Related Costs? Here’s What We Know

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Jerald L. Hoover is an award-winning Young Adult fiction author and has garnered success and multiple accolades over the years. He was awarded Best New Male Writer of the Year by the Literary Society in Virginia in 1993 for his novella My Friend, My Hero. He was also listed as a bestselling author among black writers from 1994 – 1996 in various African American publications and was awarded the WritersCorp Award by President Bill Clinton in 1995.

Hoover's series of YA fiction, known as "The Hero Book Series" is a group of Young Adult Fiction geared toward young black men ages 12 and up.

His first title in the series “My Friend My Hero” has become recommended reading in many classrooms throughout the world.

However, Hoover's success did not come easy. In Episode 188 of Class Dismissed Hoover tells us about the challenges he had to overcome to first get published in the 1990s. He says he was rejected by publishers over 40 times.

To hear our full interview with Hoover listen to Episode 188. You can also hear any of our episodes of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes. About "My Friend My Hero" Bennett Wilson has the world at his fingertips. One of the top basketball players in New York State, he is destined to lead Mount Vernon High to the state championship for the first time. Many of the nation’s top colleges are already reaching out, eager to sign him to their roster. Scholarships are guaranteed. Still young, Bennett is seduced by the promise of fame and fortune.

Yet all is not as it appears. Bennett’s life is plagued with strife and conflict. The oldest of three, he has grown up with his single mother in the tough inner-city projects of Mount Vernon. Life is hard but Bennett refuses to choose the fast life of the streets. He knows his only ticket to freedom is through basketball and academics.

Bennett’s dreams come to a screeching halt when he learns his sick mother has fallen far behind on her rent and is threatened with eviction. He knows he can get easy money on the streets, but at the cost of ruining his future. Will Bennett finally succumb to a life he’s avoided and if he does, what will it cost?

You can learn more about The Hero Book Series at this link.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

My Friend, My Hero (Hero Book)

Here on Class Dismissed, we've published over 180 episodes. However, as we reflect on all the great topics we've covered, we must admit that we haven't focused enough on the subject of rural education. What are schools like in rural America? What are the myths and stereotypes about rural education?

If you keep up with education news, you may also notice the coverage of students educated in rural communities often feels like an afterthought. Why is this the case? After all, the number of students educated in rural America is greater than the number of students educated in the top one hundred urban school districts combined.

Geoff and Sky Marietta join us in Episode 187 to shine some light on the topic. The husband and wife duo are co-authors of "Rural Education in America: What works for our students, teachers, and communities."

The Marietta's have a unique perspective. They both grew up in rural towns, and they have both taught in rural communities. But they've also spent several years living in urban communities in the northeast while obtaining degrees from Yale and Harvard.

Now the couple lives in Harlan, Kentucky. The city of Harlan has a population of about 2000 and sits along the Appalachian mountains. Part of Marietta's reasoning for writing "Rural Education in America" was to correct the caricature of what it means to be rural.

Sky says that they see rural America get misrepresented all the time. "We have a lot of very talented teachers in rural America," she says. "We don't want to pretend like rural America is utopia. We're not saying it's perfect. But we lived in Boston for 11 years and moved from Cambridge to Harlan County, Kentucky. People are not that different."

In Episode 187 of Class Dismissed, the Mariettas explains how programs like Title 1 often use a formula that can lead to funding discrepancies for rural students. They also list the topics they'd like to see lawmakers address. For instance, they say the need for universal broadband internet is a national emergency and should be a top priority.

You can listen to Episode 187 or any of our episodes of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

As educators, we sometimes need a spark. One great place to find that inspiration is from movies. In Episode 186 of Class Dismissed, we highlight some of the most inspirational movie scenes for teachers.

The movie scenes that made our list include... Stand and Deliver (Rotten Tomatoes Score 82%) Los Angeles high school teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) is being hassled by tough students like Angel Guzman (Lou Diamond Phillips). But Jaime is also pressured by his bosses, who want him to control his raucous classroom. Caught in the middle, he opts to immerse his students in higher math.

In our highlighted scene Escalante tries to convince his jaded colleagues that they just need "ganas," which translates to desire. School of Rock (Rotten Tomatoes Score 91%) Overly enthusiastic guitarist Dewey Finn (Jack Black) gets thrown out of his bar band and finds himself in desperate need of work. Posing as a substitute music teacher at an elite private elementary school, he exposes his students to the hard rock gods he idolizes and emulates -- much to the consternation of the uptight principal (Joan Cusack).

In our highlighted scene Finn discovers his students' potential as musicians and his own potential as a teacher. Mr. Holland’s Opus (Rotten Tomatoes Score 75%) Composer Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) believes that he'll eventually write a transcendent piece of music, but in the meantime, he's taken a job at an Oregon high school.

In our highlighted scene, Holland has a breakthrough with one of his struggling students. Lean on me (Rotten Tomatoes Score 69%) In this fact-based film, a New Jersey superintendent, Dr. Frank Napier (Robert Guillaume), watches helplessly as East Side High becomes the lowest-ranked school in the state. With nowhere else to turn, Dr. Napier enlists maverick ex-teacher Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) to take over as principal of the declining school.

In our highlighted scene Clark catches some students in the bathroom and challenges them to recite the school song. Their response surprises the hard-nosed principal. Remember the Titans (Rotten Tomatoes Score 73%) In Virginia, high school football is a way of life, an institution revered, each game celebrated more lavishly than Christmas, each playoff distinguished more grandly than any national holiday. And with such recognition, comes powerful emotions. In 1971 high school football was everything to the people of Alexandria. But when the local school board was forced to integrate an all-black school with an all-white school, the very foundation of football's great tradition was put to the test.

In our highlighted scene, Coach Herman Boone, played by Denzel Washington, takes his players to a hallowed ground to prove a point. Dead Poets Society (Rotten Tomatoes Score 84%) A new English teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams), is introduced to an all-boys preparatory school that is known for its ancient traditions and high standards. He uses unorthodox methods to reach out to his students, who face enormous pressures from their parents and the school.

In our highlighted scene Keating explains to his students the importance of the arts and self-purpose.

You can listen to Episode 186 or any of our episodes of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

You may know "Survivorman" from the hit Discovery Channel TV show (2000-2018), Les Stroud's passion for the outdoors has driven him to some of the planet’s most remote locations.

Now Stroud is reaching out to kids about the lessons that can be learned through outdoor adventures.

Stroud says he worked with kids in camps for years, so the idea of a book directed at 8-12-year-olds just made sense. The result was Wild Outside: Around the World with Survivorman.

In the book, he retells 12 true Survivorman stories, sharing nature facts and practical advice along the way. It's like sitting around a campfire with Survivorman himself, plus kid-friendly tutorials on using a compass, signaling for help, building a wildlife blind, tracking weather patterns, and packing a survival kit.

In Episode 185 of Class Dismissed, Survivorman tells us that he actually grew up in a city.

"I would go to a creek behind a hospital in the middle of Toronto," says Stroud. Adventure with nature exists even in an urban environment he says.

In our interview with Survivorman, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask about all of the amazing things he's seen in his travels. Specifically, he tells us the scariest moment he's ever been in. The most awe-inspiring places he's ever stood, and which place he's visited that he'd like to move to.

Stroud also has two new TV programs airing nationally, "Surviving Disasters" and "Les Stroud's Wild Harvest." They can also be viewed on his YouTube channel.

You can listen to Episode 185 or any of our episodes of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

When it comes to video storytelling, the times have changed. Most students are already equipped with an Android device or an iPhone. The advanced cameras on phones can be a powerful tool to tell a story via video. At least when appropriately used.

However, as an educator, you can still bring several tricks to the table to up your students' video filming game.

In Episode 184 of Class Dismissed, we spoke with former broadcaster Clement Townsend. Townsend works with youth to master storytelling with videos.

Townsend says they should learn to stay away from shooting vertical video for students just beginning to working with video. You know, a video that is shot with a phone upright. While that works for Instagram and TikTok, it's not the proper format for sharing videos on TV.

In our latest episode, Townsend offers layout tips for editing stories, and he tells his best advice for conducting an interview.

To hear our full interview with Townsend, listen to Episode 184 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Highline Promise In 2012, Highline school Superintendent, Susan Enfield, made a promise to students. It's a promise that's now core to the Highline School District strategic plan. The "Highline Promise" states that each student is known by name, strength, and need.

Most educators come to the job with this spirit. With the intent of knowing each student in this way. But accomplishing this with thousands of students can be a challenge. Sometimes students fall between the cracks.

Enfield challenges Highline's educators' to seek out the students that don't have natural connections with teachers on campus.

Enfield says, "We've done an exercise where principals have taken photos of every single student and laid them out in the cafeteria for a staff meeting. And had staff members go and put a sticker next to a student that they knew really well."

The teachers then step back and see which of those photos don't have any stickers next to them.

"Those are the kids that we have to assign someone to," says Enfield. Power of one Enfield is a big believer in the power of one.

"We want to make sure that every student can say that they have an adult at their school who they trust, who knows them, who cares about them, and whom they can go to if they need help or support."

She says that by identifying the gifts and the talents that each students brings, allows their teachers to build student confidence and resiliency.

To learn more and hear how Highline school districts works to live up to the Highline Promise, listen to Episode 183 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

What is Inquiry-Based Learning? In Episode 181 we talk with Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) expert Trevor MacKenzie. MacKenzie has authored two books on the topic.

For MacKenzie, IBL is all about getting the students to have a more active roll in the class and exploring students questions and curiosities as entry points into the curriculum.

“Sometimes that teacher is in the front of the room and leading the way so to speak,” says MacKenzie. “Sometimes that teacher is that guide along the ride. Someone who facilitating and supporting learnings.”

Makenzie, who trains educators around the globe on how to implement IBL says they’re trying to do is give the classroom experience over to the students. He says students should be able to take ownership of what they’re learning. Where does an educator begin? Makenzie pushes for a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the student.

“I always start my unit design with a big overarching ‘Un-Googleable’ question and I make that question front and center in my classroom,” says MacKenzie.

He’s even built an info graphic where he models IBL like a swim coach teaching someone to swim. He even hangs the picture in the classroom for his students to see and he encourages teachers to download and print the picture for their own classrooms.

MacKenzie is also really big on provocation. He shows students a lot of videos tied to their curriculum to spark interest and curiosity, but he’s ultimately determining wha questions his students have around the curriculum. Want to learn more? Mackenzie has authored two books on the topic. He says if you teach middle school or high school “Dive into Inquiry” is for you. If you teach younger students you may want to read “Inquiry Mindset.”

To hear our full conversation about Inquiry-Based Learning with Trevor MacKenzie, listen to Episode 182 on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice

Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders, and Curiosities of Our Youngest Learners

Over the past eight years Kahoot! has taken classrooms by storm. The learning software allows educators to create, share, and play learning games that drive effective engagement. The company debuted at SXSW in 2012, and in just five short years, they watched their platform grow to a billion players. By the start of 2021 they were up to a staggering 5 billion players.

In Episode 181 of Class Dismissed, we caught up with Sean D'Arcy, VP of Kahoot! school and work, and ask him about how the Norway based company has been navigating COVID-19.

Coincidently, in early February of 2020, Kahoot! launched a new asynchronous gameplay called Kahoot! challenges. For many teachers, it was the right fit when educators were forced into remote learning.

"Teachers can basically assign a Kahoot to students to play on their own," says D'Arcy. The new tool was essential to their growth in the first part of COVID. Bringing communities together D'Arcy says some of the best examples of people using Kahoot! during the COVID-19 pandemic come from the educators that use it to connect their communities. He highlights one educator in the Manitoba Province of Canada that streams his Kahoots! and turns them into substantial online digital events.

He says another educator in Indiana plays Kahoot with his community on Friday nights. "So he's just doing community-level games 1000 participants playing a game of Kahoot," says D'Arcy

To hear our full discussion with D'Arcy, you can listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

In Episode 180 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, we caught up with Minnesota principal and author Jessica Cabeen. Cabeen, who is the author of "Lead with Grace: Leaning into the Soft Skills of Leadership," shared tips on handling professional confrontations.

Cabeen says one of the biggest mistakes school leaders can make is to "lead with their title." Not sure if that's you? Cabeen says that you may be leading with your title if you're in your office more than you're in the halls. Or if you're multi-tasking when someone is having a conversation with you.

Cabeen tips on having those challenging conversations include

Don't worry about being hated Keep it professional, and don't take things personally Focus on what you can control Empathize

To hear our full discussion with Cabeen, you can listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

It's no secret that the stress of being an educator can take a toll on any teacher's mental health. But High School Humanities teacher, Henry Seton, is on a mission to let his fellow educators know the importance of talking openly about it.

"It is OK to talk about the other ways you cope—your CrossFit and spin classes, your yoga and meditation sessions, even how hard you hit the caffeine or alcohol," says Seton. "But mentioning a therapy session is usually seen as a sign of weakness, an awkward overshare, keeping it too real."

Seton believes we need to normalize discussions about mental health in the education workspace.

In two recent Educational Leadership articles, Seton kept it very real. He shared his own experience of how a personal tragedy sent him into a depression, and he also wrote about challenges he faced after moving from Boston to Ohio and was forced to navigate a new school district.

Seton is a superstar teacher. When teaching near Boston, he would have people from across the city come and observe his class and his students preformed exemplary on state tests. But "behind the scenes," Seton admits that he was barely making it and dealing with burnout.

In Episode 179 of Class Dismissed, Seton tells us how at one point in his career, he almost entered into what he describes as a "doom loop," a negative and vicious cycle. He even consider quitting. But he shares how he broke free of his doom loop and he gives us tips on how school leaders can identify and break the negative cycle within their team.

To hear our full discussion, listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Softening the blow for new teachers In Episode 178 of Class Dismissed we talk with Chase Mielke about ways new teachers can keep their flame for educating ignited. After a decade of reflection Mielke compiled a list of what he calls his five “Passion Stokers” for educators.

Find a positive tribe Curate the good, don’t hoard the bad Forgive Own your present and future Craft your calling

Mielke, who has been teaching for over a decade in Michigan is quick to acknowledge that many teachers will fight burnout at some point and he believes much of that burnout will come from something other than students.

“The main cause I think stems from a lot of conflicts and perceptions that a are adult-driven rather than student-driven,” says Milke.

Mielke says a lack of autonomy or respect, colleague conflict, and struggles connecting with parents are leading causes of teacher burnout. Practice what you preach Mielke, who authored “The Burnout Cure: Learning to Love Teaching Again”, says there was a time in his life that he considered quitting teaching himself.

He had been teaching for 8 years but he says he felt so bogged down by extra stuff. Ironically, he was teaching a positive psychology class and he decided to double down on what he was teaching. In a way, he was counseling himself when he was writing “The Burnout Cure.”

“It was like, what were that things that have help me? What were the things that I’ve talked about a lot. And how do I put those in language that any teacher could use to help them reestablish their love.”

Much of Mielke’s notoriety in the education community stems from a blog and video he produced back in 2014.

The high school teacher and instructional coach found himself unable to sleep one night and wrote: “What students really need to hear.” The post has been read around 4 million times and the corresponding video (below) has been watched almost a million times.

To hear Mielke talk in-depth about each of his five “passion stokers”, listen to Episode 178 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

The Burnout Cure: Learning to Love Teaching Again

The best of 2020! In Episode 177 of Class Dismissed we reflect on the best things that 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic thrust upon the education ecosystem.

For example, 2020 helped normalize connectivity, renewed a focus on family, and has school districts examining the efficiency and effectiveness of their school calendar.

During this episode, we also reflected on some of our favorite interviews of the year.

Can schools help overcome the disadvantage of poverty?

How one educator tackled three natural disasters

Why it’s crucial to make an “emotional deposit” with students

Harvard Professor: Here’s how to bring empathy and SEL into your classroom

Listen to Episode 177 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021.

Each year public schools spend millions of dollars on copyright-protected textbooks. Districts do this even though we now live in a digitally dominated world full of open-sourced books. But there's an alternative.

The movement of using Open Educational Resources (OER) has been growing over the past five years.

In 2017 Class Dismissed interviewed Cable Green, the director of Open Education with Creative Commons. Green made a compelling argument for OER, but we wanted to learn more. For instance, what is it like to be on the front lines of a school-wide OER roll out?

How much more work does it take? Are Open Education Resources better than traditional textbooks? Have there been advantages to using OER during the COVID-19 pandemic?

In Episode 176, we caught up with Dan McDowell, the director of learning and innovation of the Grossmont Union High school district in San Diego County, Califonia.

McDowell and his colleagues have been gradually transferring their curriculum to OER over the past five years.

The journey to an OER district

McDowell will admit that transitioning to OER has been challenging, but there are also many benefits. "It takes a lot of time and work to develop these resources," McDowell says.

The Grossmont Union High Schoo District pays teachers extra to help gather and vet the OER materials and then develop the instructional materials around them. They set up committees and which in turn discover what's out there.

McDowell references a great website called CK12 that has opened licensed textbooks on it. He says they then modify and add supplemental resources like videos and additional readings to those existing resources.

McDowell says all of their science course are now using this OER format, so they no longer provide textbooks for their main science classes. They're also making good progress on Social Science and ninth and tenth grade English.

"This isn't like a change everything sort of thing," says McDowell. "It's a see where it fits and see where we get the most bang for our buck."

In our full conversation with Dan McDowell, you'll learn...

What OER looks like for the student. If OER is a useful resource during virtual learning. If McDowell has any regrets about making the transition. Why buy-in from the teachers is critical.

You can also see all of the Grossmont Union High Schoo District OER projects on their website.

In Episode 176 of Class Dismissed we talk in-depth with Whiting about how to help students become media literate by identifying native advertising, influencers, and media bias. To learn more listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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How educators can navigate media literacy in a politically charged environment? Let’s face it. We've been living in a politically divided country. On Twitter, President Donald Trump listed the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN as the “enemy of the people,” and he’s on record saying that 80% of media is fake news.

So what responsibility do teachers have to reconcile these comments with students? And how do educators wade into the political turmoil without getting complaints from politically charged parents? Tackle fake news without being political “Lots of educators are afraid of having that talk,” says Jaquelyn Whiting. “And I understand why they’re afraid of having that talk.” “I BEGIN EVERY CONVERSATION ABOUT MEDIA LITERACY BY SAYING, WHILE WE ARE IN THE ROOM TOGETHER, WE ARE NOT GOING TO USE THE TERM ‘FAKE NEWS’,” Whiting is the co-author of News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News. She’s also a library media specialist at Wilton High School in Connecticut. Whiting has made it her mission to inform students and in some cases colleagues on how to identify media bias

“I begin every conversation about media literacy by saying, while we are in the room together, we are not going to use the term ‘fake news’,” Whiting says she’ll feel successful as an educator if she can remove the term from the students’ vocabulary.

“When that term is invoked. It tends to be invoked with the intention of shutting down dialogue.”

Whiting asks her students to think about three things when evaluating news.

Information – What’s happening Misinformation – When someone tries to convey to you what’s happening and they make an unintentional mistake. You know the mistake was unintentional when they come back and write a retraction or clarification to correct the error. Disinformation – When someone tries to convey incorrect information to you for their own personal gain.

Whiting says dividing news into these three categories allows her and her students to have a quality conversation about how we understand the world.

“We can start to differently about the choices that journalists are making when they choose to print or not print something,’ says Whiting.

Whiting says that the political climate is what it is and we have to learn to operate in it productively.

In Episode 175 of Class Dismissed we talk in-depth with Whiting about how to help students become media literate by identifying native advertising, influencers, and media bias. To learn more listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. Other Show Notes Will teachers get priority for COVID 19 vaccines? New York City Will Reopen Elementary Schools and Reduce Hybrid Learning All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News

Typically, authors write books with the hope that their words will live in perpetuity. Texts that will be read and analyzed for decades to come. But in July of 2020, best-selling author Jennifer Serravallo began writing a book that she hoped would have a short shelf life. Her new book would be packed full of strategies for learning virtually.

In one intense month, Serravallo and a small team at Heinemann wrote and published "Connecting Students Online." The objective was to create a tool for teachers working through the COVID-19 pandemic.

If all goes according to plan, Serravallo's book will act as a bridge to get educators through this school year. Scientists will then deliver a vaccine, and we all return to the classroom sooner rather than later.

Serravallo is no stranger to teachers. She's guided thousands of educators with "The Reading Strategies Book," "The Writing Strategies Book," and "Understanding Texts and Readers."

"Connecting Students Online" was sparked by Serravallo churning out ideas on her Facebook Group in the Spring of 2020.

"Here's an idea for scheduling, here's an idea for keeping your lessons brief, here's an idea for conferring with kids," Serravallo would post in the group. "I was also getting a lot of feedback from teachers in that group."

At the time, it didn't occur to her to put all these ideas in a book, but in late July, she polled her Facebook group about how she could help. In just a few hours, thousands of educators responded. They needed more strategies for teaching remotely -- "Connecting Students Online, Strategies for Remote Teaching and Learning" was born.

In Episode 174 of Class Dismissed, Serravallo shares with us some of her favorite strategies for remote learning and opens up about how we're doing as a society of educators. Listen to episode 174 of the Class Dismissed Podcast episodes on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

Connecting with Students Online: Strategies for Remote Teaching & Learning

The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers

"It's so important to realize that when you're working with kids, almost nothing they do is about you. It's about them because their job is to grow up and it's hard and it's heavy." - Carol Ann Tomlinson

Carol Tomlinson is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. She's worked with undergraduates, master's students, and doctoral students, predominantly in the areas of curriculum design and differentiated instruction. Tomlinson also spent two decades in a K-12 classroom and it was there where she learned how to work with kids dealing with abuse, bullying, or other forms of trauma.

In Episode 173 of Class Dismissed, Tomlinson shares three different moments she learned how to work with kids who hurt. Her takeaways from these moments include...

There’s wide variation in how young people respond to trauma, “from almost complete withdrawal to an atomic explosion.” Students need to know that their worth as humans is not tied up in academic skills and grades. No academic goal is worth the soul of a child.

"It's so important to realize that when you're working with kids, almost nothing they do is about you, says Tomlinson. "It's about them because their job is to grow up and it's hard and it's heavy."

To hear Tomlinson's stories, listen to episode 173 of the Class Dismissed Podcast episodes on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

One day to take a deep breath and play

For six years now, the first Wednesday in February has been designated as Global School Play Day. On February 3rd, 2021, schools worldwide will pledge to allow students to spend an entire day playing with their classmates. However, COVID-19 may give this annual tradition a different feel. After months of students learning with masks on, a day of play may be needed now more than ever.

In this episode of Class Dismissed, GSPD co-founders, Scott Bedley and Eric Saibel explain why it's so important to give kids an opportunity to take a break from the screens and lessons and just have unstructured play.

"So at the beginning of all the quarantining I got a chance to see play in action with my own son," said Bedley. "I saw him pull out his legos and I saw him pull out his action figures. And I saw talking through some of the fears that he has with everything that is going on."

Global School Play Day is not a free for all. In fact, the grassroots organization offers some guardrails.

Don’t organize anything for the studentsSupervise students, but don’t tell them how to playCall for toys – board games, Legos, blocks, balls, cards, puzzlesDon’t suggest how to use toys or gamesNo screens or battery-powered devices

Why play is essential to social and emotional learning

The catalyst for Global School Play Day was a Tedx Talk given by Dr. Peter Gray. During the 16 minute talk, Gray presents a compelling argument that today’s kids do not grow up playing and this could have a negative impact. He backs his case with the science of how animals develop.

“Young mammals of essentially all species play. In play, they develop fit bodies they practice physical skills that are crucial to their survival and they also practice social and emotional skills,” says Gray. “By playing together they learn to cooperate with one another. They learn to be in close vicinity to one another without losing their tempers, very important for social animals to develop.

Gray also points out that “risky play” teaches animals how to take risks and experience fear without losing their minds.

The Start of GSPD

Gray’s lecture so influenced a group of educators; they decided to do something about it. Global School Play Day was their answer. The movement in 2015 had over 65,000 participants, and by 2019, GSPD had over half a million involved.

GSPD Co-Founders would love to see a million participants in 2021. Co-founder, Eric Saibel, says it’s incredible to see images of students in New Zealand doing slip and slide while the kids in Minnesota are building a snowman.

“There’s this idea that has kind of crept into American society and education over the last 50-60 years that things need to be directed by adults for them to have importance for kids. And that is simply not true,” says Saibel.

Saibel says GSPD is about building awareness. He knows that one day out of the year will not build a new paradigm, but he hopes it will build a new culture at a school and maybe across a community.

A culture where people interact says Saibel, “Where there is a greater value placed on connecting face-to-face, person to person.”

To hear our full conversation with Saibel and Bedley and learn how you can participate in GSPD, listen to episode 172 of Class Dismissed.

You can listen to all the Class Dismissed Podcast episodes on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

Click here to learn more or register for Global School Play Day.

Other Show Notes

Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say

Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

We’ve seen wellness and mindfulness rooms for students, but this public school decided to create one for their teachers.

The challenges educators are tackling during the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary. Juggling teaching in person with a mask while simultaneously educating other students in a virtual format is a remarkable task. But these achievements can take a toll on even our best educators, and schools can take small steps that can make a big difference for our teacher's mental health.

For example, just last year, a school in New York designed a wellness room for teachers to decompress.

Why make a wellness room for teachers?

For more than 30 years Debbi Rakowsky attended to the health and happiness of students. She served as the district social worker of the Three Village School District on Long Island, New York. However, over the past ten years, Rakowsky started to notice a shift amongst the staff. Teachers and faculty would frequently come to her and vent about the stresses that are involved in education.

“A lot that has to do with the complex parent and family needs and the high stake job demands,” says Rakowsky. “For me, when I started in the district school was a very safe place for people to go. And one of the things that happens a lot with teachers these days is they go through this rehearsed trauma. Where the first day of school we’re learning about what you do if an armed shooter comes into your school and how do you protect your students.”

Rokowsky had dedicated her life to helping kids, but she wanted to do something for the adults that keep the school running. She began piloting a “Winter Wellness Series.” Rokowsky says the cold winter months in New York are difficult because you leave for school in the dark and you come home in the dark. So she took a faculty room and repurposed it by making it more “Zen” and she brought in practitioners every Wednesday.

“And the staff just went wild for it,” says Rakowsky.

After that, she began to think big. What if she could make a permanent place just for teachers and school staff to decompress? A place that was off-limits to students. Not a teacher’s lounge, but a place where staff could come in think and breath without distractions.

“I’VE HAD PEOPLE WALK IN THEY LITERALLY CRY. THEY SAY I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THIS IS IN OUR SCHOOL,” SAYS RAKOWSKY.

Rakowsky wrote a proposal and handed off to administrators and she says they didn’t even blink. “They said let’s do this!”

The district moved Rakowsky to the high school and they gave her a classroom that wasn’t in use. She applied for grants and they began to furnish the room.

“When you walk into that room, you do not feel like you’re in a school,” says Rakowsky.

There is a faux wood floor, window treatments, and the lights are different than the normal school lights. Rokowsky also added a water feature, massage chairs, and a meditation area.

“I’ve had people walk in they literally cry. They say I can’t believe that this is in our school,” says Rakowsky.

For Rakowsky and the staff, it’s more than a room. She also offers several programs for teachers, she offers workshops on managing anxiety, she has lunch and learns with practitioners, and they offer free short term counseling.

To learn more about program listen to Episode 171 of the Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have questions for Rakowsky, she can be contacted at drakowsk@3villagecsd.org

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

In K-12 education, there's a strong push for STEM education. It's for good reason, math and science are important. But where should social-emotional learning rank? Psychiatrist Helen Riess, MD, believes we're in a society that's ill-equipped to talk about emotion and feelings. Riess thinks we need more than just information in this world to succeed. She believes we need to be taught how to have difficult conversations. We need to engage with people who are not like us.

For Riess, teaching with empathy in the classroom is crucial. So important, she dedicated a chapter in her book just for teachers. Riess, a psychiatrist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, authored "The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences."

Her book, which is supported by research, answers whether or not empathy is an innate quality. Can it be taught? Or is it just something we're born with? She also offers tips on how we can develop into a more empathetic person.

"Empathy is not one thing, says Riess. "It's actually a capacity to perceive and understand and know to some degree what experiences another person is experiencing." When Riess talks about empathy, she's speaking about capacity for perception.

Empathy in the classroom

For a student to be motivated, they need to see that the teacher recognizes them as unique individuals, says Riess. There's nothing more powerful than making meaningful eye contact with students. To show I see you and that you're not just looking at a blur of faces, says Riess.

Riess suggests that educators should register each student's eye color in their mind. Don't say the eye color out loud, but take time to really look at a person's eyes' unique color. She says it will build a connection with the individual.

She also suggests teachers should silently "name the affect" when working with students. Affect is a scientific term for emotion.

There's a well-known phrase, "if you can name it, you can tame it," says Riess. "If you can name that somebody looks confused. You're probably going to be a little more conscious of trying to clear up confusion than if you just look at someone's face and don't try to name what emotion you're seeing."

Riess also suggests that everyone should learn the ABC of empathy

Acknowledge - when you're in a difficult situationBreathe - take a deep breath. Gives a pause from the trigger to the response.Curiosity - as soon as we move to judgment there really is no open door left to show empathy. But if we say 'I'd like to understand why you did that.' Once the person is listened to and heard, you might get to a deeper level.

To learn more from Riess, listen to Episode 170 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020.

The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences

In mid-September President, Donald Trump gave a speech blasting what he called "Left-Wing Indoctrination" in history classes. During the event at the National Archives, the president said "We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and our classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country." President Trump also highlighted the teaching of the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, saying that it is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.

The president's speech left social studies teachers with a lot to digest. So we at Class Dismissed asked educator and YouTube star Mr. Beat to help us unpack the president's vision for social studies education in the United States. Matt Beat uses his Youtube channel to make history and geography more engaging. He now how has over 240 thousand subscribers on YouTube all while continuing to teach high school social studies in Kansas.

The presidents comments definantly caught Beat's attention and left him even a little bit confused. "I've been in the classroom now, this my twelfth year teaching, and most of what we still teach are just all the positive things the United States has contributed to the world," said Beat. "Students are not being taught to hate the United States."

Beat points out that you can see some of the ironies of the president's comments when you look up the word "indoctrination." It's defined as the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. "That last word is key," says Beat.

The whole purpose of common core standards is to push critical thinking. Teaching students to not just believe everything they're told is ultimately the goal of all educators. Pushing students to analyze sources and going to primary sources more and not relying on secondary sources, says Beat.

To hear our full discussion with Mr. Beat, listen to Episode 169 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020.

Adam Lavallee says a lot of math teachers are unsure as to how to start virtual learning. So the Pennsylvania teacher/learning design coach put together six ideas that can help educators get started.

Lavallee's checklist has been featured in the Marshall Memo and in Episode 168 of Class Dismissed, Lavallee walks us through each of his ideas.

Before we dive into his ideas, it's important to know that Lavallee says there is no "one size fits all" in the world of virtual learning. He considers his ideas a "strategy," which can zig and zag for each individual educators. "Teachers know their classrooms the best," he says. "They know their students, they know themselves, and to say here is the only solution wouldn't be honoring the experiences of each individual teacher."

Lavallee's Six Shifts for Math Teachers Online

Content: Identify the essentials.Delivery: Make strategic use of asynchronous and synchronous instruction. Reframe HomeWork: Call it "Practice". Feedback: Make feedback immediate, metacognitive, and collaborative. Interaction: Organize strategic check-ins. Assessment: A three-fold approach to summative assessment in math

To hear a breakdown of each of Lavallee's shifts listen to Episode 168 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Or you can read more on Lavallee's website.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020.

Liberal Arts in Crisis?

You don’t have to look hard to find news stories and books questioning the value of higher education. Bryan Caplan recently published “The Case Against Education – Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.”

And on Fox News, Jon Stossel recently wrote: “What everyone’s afraid to say about college and jobs.”

Often, the liberal arts are a prime target of such criticism. Naysayers question the potential job opportunities a liberal arts degree offers. And in all honesty, we’ve even made similar comments on the Class Dismissed Podcast.

Making the case

Our guest on Episode 167 of the Class Dismissed Podcast sees value in the liberal arts and humanities. Dr. Andrew (AJ) Ogilvie wrote New Frames for New Futures: Translators as Metaphor for the Value of a 21st Century Liberal Arts Education, a research paper that makes a strong case for a liberal arts degree.

Ogilvie argues that the current job market is in need of more liberal arts majors.

“Some of the challenges that places like Google and Facebook are facing are human-centered challenges,” says Ogilvie. “On how people think about privacy, on how different groups of people think about what is moral, what is right and wrong.”

Ogilvie says the kinds of knowledge many companies need right now is not necessarily the kind of education you’ll find in a textbook. He says that you need to be translating what your company does for your customers, clients, and stakeholders.

Translators

Ogilvie likes to look as those holding a liberal arts degree as “translators.” He says translators have a real feel for how language works. They understand how arranging words and concepts can be persuasive.

For example, Ogilvie notes that taking history courses is not to just remember dates and places of significant events. He says that studying history is about understanding competing stories from the past.

“The way we tell the story about the past serves a particular purpose in the future,” says Ogilvie.

To hear our full interview with Ogilvie Listen to Episode 167 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020.

In much of the South, public school has been back in session for weeks. School admins are already implementing in-person, hybrid, and virtual learning while simultaneously navigating flareups of COVID-19 in their classrooms.

When a student or faculty member tests positive for COVID everything pauses. It takes time and resources to determine who's been near the COVID positive patient and who now needs to quarantined for the next one to two weeks.

Administrators can accomplish the task manually, by pulling schedules and going to each class and sorting through who sits next to who. Or they can work through a clunky SIS (Student Information Systems) interface and try to determine who may have been exposed. But SchoolStatus customers have a much more efficient tool. Over the past couple of months the K-12 software company built-in contact tracing and quarantine reports that can be generated with the click of a button.

"We just want to give them a place to start," says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. "The key is to get the students out of class as quickly as possible."

SchoolStatus already works with school districts in a dozen states. Their software integrates with existing SIS and harnesses that data in a user-friendly way. They also have a robust communications tools that connect millions of teachers to parents each day.

Davis says that adding a contact tracing and quarantine tools just felt like the right thing to do. Schools can now click a button and build a report that shows who has a class with a COVID-19 positive student. They can also click another button when a student needs to quarantine and that generates a report on when students should return to school.

"Basically, it's a central clearinghouse to store this information to store this data. As opposed to keeping sensitive health data in a large Google spreadsheet," says Davis. "So not only do you have a place to find the students who should be quarantined but have a place to store their quarantine information."

Davis says the information is also logged and recorded, so you can see who's looked at it and when.

To hear our full conversation with Davis and learn more about how SchoolStatus is helping districts navigate COVID-19, listen to Episode 166 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

You can also learn more about the SchoolStatus contact tracing toolkit here.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

In Episode 165 of Class Dismissed we want to give you a preview of how in-person class is going here in Mississippi.

Co-host, Kristina Pollard has been working with students for over a week and she'll share whether or not her return to the classroom was harder or easier than expected. We'll also discuss numbers from the Mississippi Department of Health, that give us an idea on how many teachers and students are contracting COVID-19. Silent Sustained Reading Also in this episode, we take a deep dive into Silent Sustained Reading.

Steve Gardiner’s first assignment as an educator was a challenge. He was responsible for teaching five sections of a class called basic communications.

“It was exactly what it sounds like. The students in there had failed all of our other English classes,” said Gardiner. He was their last chance for them to earn the credits that they needed to graduate.

Unfortunately, that first year had a rough start. Gardiner says the students were not enthused and he admits that he was struggling to find stimulating curriculum material. But then a colleague suggested Sustained Silent Reading, also known as SSR.

Gardiner thought why not? I need to try something different. So they headed to the library and each student got to pick out their own book, and then every day the read for about 15 minutes. It was the consistency that seemed to make a difference.

“It wasn’t that long, a week at the most, I was getting an occasional complaint when I asked them to put down their books and go to their packets,” said Gardiner.

He thought wow! I’m getting somewhere with them.

Gardiner says he had success with the students the first year, but he wanted to learn more about SSR. He began researching and fine-tuning his program.

Over the next 27 years, Gardiner had success with SSR in his high school classroom while also becoming one of the leading champions for Silent Sustained Reading in the country. He authored a book on the subject and gave workshops.

In Episode 165 of Class Dismissed, Gardiner teaches us how educators can roll out SSR in their own classrooms. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

To keep up with Steve Gardiner you can visit his website at https://www.quietwaterpublishing.com

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

Building Student Literacy Through Sustained Silent Reading

One of the greatest challenges to teaching is not knowing if you're making a difference in a child's life at the time. More than likely, you are, but it can sometimes be difficult to see the impacts in realtime.

Rebecca Potter has over fifteen years in the classroom teaching English, AP Language and Composition, Philosophy, and Public Speaking. The Kentucky high school teacher recently released Both Sides "The Classroom From Where I Stand". The book is a collection of narratives that weaves tales of teaching together with her own stories of being a student. "Both Sides," focuses on the connected humanity between teacher and student and the implications of that connection; the writer extends the character and stories of her students beyond what we might observe in a classroom; she goes into their lives, and into her own life as well.

Potter explores questions that matter to educators: how do we help the ones who are presumably doomed to fail, what does it mean to care about someone else, why do people stay in jobs with so much against them.

In Episode 164 of Class Dismissed, Potter gives us an intimate preview of her new book. You can listen to Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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When it comes to education in the Fall of 2020, it's clear that little will be uniform. Some schools are trying to open in person, some elected for the hybrid model, and others will be 100% remote.

Last spring, in record time, teachers all over the world quickly put together distance learning curriculums to much success. However, there's always room for improvement. and this fall, educators have a little extra time to prepare.

One major challenge in teaching remotely is building connections with your students. How do you get a student to trust and believe in you as a teacher? Michigan teacher and author, Dave Stuart Jr., has been focused on just that.

In Episode 163 of Class Dismissed, Stuart offers some best practices to:

Cultivate our human presence Identify high opportunity students Be warm demanders

To hear about these ideas, listen to Episode 163 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Stuart also offers a Rough Draft Example of a Humanizing Intro Video for an Online Course, which can be viewed below.

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Better and Safer The world is racing for a vaccine to COVID-19. If we're lucky, we'll have one in late 2020 or early 2021. But what if we're not? What if living with COVID-19 is something we have to adjust to longterm? How could we redesign our schools to make them safer in a pandemic?

Prakash Nair

We posed that question to Prakash Nair, the Founding President and CEO of Education Design International and author of "Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create".

Nair says that in a properly designed school, COVID - 19 would have a much smaller impact. Children would have more elbow room, and you would have "designed learning communities" rather then trapping students in classrooms. Nair says these learning communities would also utilize a lot of outdoor space. Learning the expensive way In the 1990s Nair was the director of operations for construction of New York City Schools.

"We were spending an average of a billion dollars every year during my ten years that I was in that position," says Nair. "We built schools that were obsolete on the day they were opened."

In fact, Nair says 95% of the schools built around the world are built the same way.

"Of course I didn't realize it when we were building those schools. But when I realized it, I decided that I have to move on and leave that job behind."

So Nair started his own company structured around one major principle --

What would happen if you designed school buildings based on the actual research about how children learn?

Nair says the majority of schools today are designed like a factory.

Photo Credit: Education Design International

"If you think about the idea of sorting kids by age. Not based upon aptitude or interest, and stick them in a room with an adult. You can't personalize obviously."

We know that children are not parts in a factory, and you can't churn out identical widgets, says Nair. Nor would you want to.

To hear some of Nair's solutions for a better and safer designed school, listen to Episode 162 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create

“What does it mean if you never see yourself in a story?” – Jennifer Buehler “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a beautiful story, and it is one of the most commonly taught books in the secondary curriculum. But educator, Jennifer Buehler, can’t help but wonder how many students relate to the characters.

“At the end of the day, that book represents white America’s vision of racial progress and injustice,” says Buehler. “It’s a really different thing to get a story that asks questions about racial justice that’s not coming from the white perspective.”

Buehler, a former high school teacher and current associate professor of English education at Saint Louis University raises a question that all educators should consider. What does it mean if you never see yourself in a story?

She says it’s a common problem in schools nationwide because it’s a hard shift for teachers to make.

“Our curriculum remains pretty traditional nationwide. It requires teachers to be reading out of their comfort zones and exploring new authors and new texts. And it involves a parent and administrative support.” says Buehler.

Money is a factor as well. “To bring different books into the classroom you have to be able to pay for those books,” Buehler says. Is it hard to find diverse books? According to the School Library Journal’s 2018 Diverse Collections Survey of 22,000 school and public librarians, 15 percent said they find it “very difficult” or “difficult” to find appropriate titles to round out a diverse library collection. The librarians surveyed cited finding portrayals of “characters with disabilities, Native or Indigenous peoples, and English language learners” as the most difficult.

What can teachers do? Buehler knows teachers have a desire to make a change. She also knows that a lot of the “classics” already in the classroom are not bad books.

“They [the books] just can’t meet all the readers’ needs, they can’t do all the work that literature should do,” says Buehler.

Buehler suggests that teachers need first to make sure administrators are aware of the challenge. She advises teachers need to do their homework and know the books that they want to champion.

“You have to have your own argument, that’s appropriate to your own educational context, for what change is needed and why,” says Buehler.

Another major challenge is money for new books. Buehler suggests organizing small fundraisers. Teachers may also want to consider using PledgeCents or DonorsChoose.

She also cites a foundation named “The Book Love Foundation,” which dedicates their time to putting books in the hands of teenagers.

To hear more from our conversation with Buehler listen to Episode 161 of Class Dismissed. You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

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Is there a student anywhere in the world that doesn't love a school assembly? You know, that moment, your principal fires up the intercom and announces that we're all headed to the auditorium to be entertained and inspired.

Unfortunately, these epic school congregations are another casualty of COVID 19. In fact, even if students return to the classroom, in the Fall of 2020, they will probably not experience in-person assemblies before a vaccine is created and distributed.

The halt of in-person assemblies hit Tyler Christensen pretty hard. The Utah elementary teacher didn't just love them for the students, he's actually headlined a few assemblies.

Pre-COVID, Christensen's incredible weight loss journey, was highlighted at neighboring schools, and he was also scheduled to give a TED Talk just as the lockdown was being implemented.

However, rather than dwell on how his life was impacted, he shifted his focus to his students. Christensen created a new YouTube channel called Virtual School Assembly. During the past few months of the pandemic, he's interview nearly 150 people. The goal is to give educators access to messages of encouragement and inspiration.

To learn more about Virtual School Assembly, listen to Episode 160 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Nathan Levenson, a former school superintendent, has consulted with hundreds of districts about ways to improve special education. But in March of 2020, the challenges surrounding special education became magnified by COVID-19.

"Despite heroic efforts, by teachers and districts, kids with disabilities really did not thrive in any way shape or form and the gaps got bigger," says Levenson.

Pandemic or not, Levenson believes that if educators are going to serve kids with disabilities well, general education has to be lead.

"When we're in person, the goal is to have general ed teachers providing the vast majority of high-quality instruction to students."

Admittedly, Levenson says that doesn't always happen, but when the pandemic came the split became even greater.

"Everyone turned to the special education department and said what are you going to do for kids with special needs? And many of the things they do, don't translate at all to a remote setting."

Levenson recently released a new book, "Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions"

In it, Levenson explains why the vast majority of students in special education needs to be in the general education classroom most of the day.

"The research is really clear," says Levenson. "The quality of the teacher is central, and if you're going to teach grade level material, kids have to be in the classroom to be taught that material."

Levenson says studies show that students who struggle often get less instruction from a classroom teacher then if they didn't struggle.

"I want to be really clear on this," says Levenson. "Imagine a second grader who struggles to read. They get less reading instruction from a certified reading teacher or a classroom teacher than a student who doesn't struggle."

Levenson says we can't be shocked if the student falls behind.

To learn more about Levenson's six shifts to improve special education, listen to Episode 159 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions: A Commonsense Approach for School Leaders

Starting on the right foot

On the first day or two of school, it can be tempting to want to lay the ground rules. You know, set the expectations about workload, go over the rules, and fill out the required forms. But Rick Wormeli wants to challenge educators to think differently.

Wormeli, who is one of the first Nationally Board Certified Teachers in America, says that students want to know that you’re going to transcend their current condition and help them aspire to something more than they are.

“And when all they [students] get is more rules and regulations they realize one more year where there’s nothing here for me.”

Wormeli recommends laying a foundation of meaningful relationships with students by mixing in activities that allow you to get to know and understand where the students are coming from.

Wormeli recently listed ways this can be accomplished in a recent article he penned for AMLE, and he elaborates on those ideas in Episode 158 of the Class Dismissed podcast.

Wormeli’s beginning of the year ideas

“The Best Way for You to Learn” Cards

Using index cards, teachers can ask students to describe how they best learn that particular subject.

“Kids are candid,” says Wormeli. “They will say things like, look if it’s really important, write it on the board.” Or he says some students may ask you not to assign online assignments because their sibling always hogs the computer.

“I’ve got a stack that I rubber band and I look through that as I try to decide what I’m going to do next,” Wormeli says kids will say some really cool things and give him lots of examples.

Letters to the Teacher from Students as their Parents

When students write under a pseudonym, they feel much more free to speak their mind, says Wormeli.

“When I get what they say about themselves, and then I get what they think their parents would say about themselves, I’m getting a really fleshed version of the child,” says Wormeli. “When someone is fully dimensionalized, you really care a heck of a lot more.

Six-Word Memoirs

“I love six-word memoirs!” says Wormeli. They really make kids come out of their shell and say profound things.

The brilliance of six-word memoirs is the brevity, teachers can use six-word memoirs as their students examine the content. “It really reveals a lot more about what the student is thinking.”

Wormeli says he often has students continue to send six-word memoirs after class about sports or pop culture.

To hear more from Rick Wormeli, listen to Episode 158 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Other Show Notes

Why a pediatric group is pushing to reopen schools this fall

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Well before COVID-19, school districts were facing a substitute teacher shortage. In fact, EdWeek Research Center recently teamed up with Kelly Education and found that districts can fill just 54% of the 250,000 absences each day.

Now, coronavirus is set to exacerbate the challenge. In the Fall of 2020, educators will need to call in at the first sign of minor symptoms and they may need to quarantine for weeks at a time.

So are there enough substitutes to fill the anticipated holes?

Kelly Education Senior Vice President Nikki Soares says that a downturn in the economy typically leads to an uptick in available substitutes, but this time, things are different.

"Usually in a recessionary period we have a lot of people gravitate towards being a substitute teacher, but obviously this is a bit of an anomaly," says Soares.

So what are the solutions?

Kelly Education says their research identified the top three solutions to grow the pipeline of substitutes:

higher substitute pay professional development for substitutes hiring/assigning substitutes with expertise in the field of the absent teacher.

"Places like maybe in the state of Alabama a lot of our districts pay $65 a day," says Soares. So an eight hour day works out to just $8.12/hour.

To hear our full interview with Soares, listen to Episode 157 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes. Other show notes Education Dept. Rule Limits How Schools Can Spend Vital Aid Money It looks like the beginning of the end of America’s obsession with student standardized tests All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

Inequitable from the starting line When illustrating the need for systems of support in our schools', Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Reville uses an example close to his heart; his daughter.

He's open about the list of advantages his daughter had when she showed up for her first day of kindergarten at an urban public school.

a stable two-parent family adequate income healthcare stable housing full nutrition read to every night well-traveled

Reville says many of the children she sat next to in kindergarten had none of the advantages above. Plus, some of those children had already experienced various trauma on top of it.

"If you think of it as a hundred-yard dash, she's [Reville's daughter] already on the 50-yard line," says Reville.

The student she's sitting next to, who has all the disadvantages, is a hundred yards behind the starting line.

"And we fire the starting gun and when they don't finish at the same time 13 years later at graduation, we act surprised," says Reville. Making change outside the school Our current system is not enough to make up for the profound differences outside of school. Reville says that we've always thought that schools would be the great equalizer, but that hasn't turned out to be true.

This is because children learn a lot outside of school. So if you only fix the school and you treat everybody equally when they're in school. You're not going to get a closing of the gaps.

"The access to opportunity outside of school is controlled by your financial and social capital," says Reville. "We live in a society now, that has been recently demonstrated quite vividly, that there are huge disparities in wealth, income, and opportunity."

Reville is optimistic that many solutions can be created at the local level. He says he witnessed great progress with community programs like City Connects in Salem, Massachusetts.

"The teacher connects with the student and the family. They develop a plan and they track progress against that plan," Reville says.

Reville and his co-author Elaine Weiss, recently release a new book on the topic. Broader, Bolder, Better offers solutions on how schools and communities can work together to help students overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

To hear our full discussion with Reville, listen to Episode 156 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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Higher Education's Return on Investment? We often think of higher education as being the place that preps us for our future career. But is this the focus of colleges and universities? Are students finding work related to their degree right after graduation?

Nancy Hoffman, the vice president at Jobs for the Future, says that at many elite colleges, professors are generally preparing their students to be what they are, historians, literary critics, and biologists, just to name a few.

"I have a Ph.D. in comparative literature," says Hoffman. "I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about what I might do for work."

Hoffman doesn't think professors wish students ill, but she says that most professors believe their goal is to teach their discipline. What the students do with that knowledge afterward is for students to figure out.

For students lacking real-world connections to their desired career, this is a problem. We see over and over again many students are sold the notion, just get a college degree, take a loan if you need to and everything will be fine. And of course, it isn't. Especially if you can't get a well-paying job.

It's part of the reason Hoffman recently co-authored Teaching Students About the World of Work - A Challenge to Postsecondary Educators. The advantage of social capital Hoffman argues that colleges, especially community colleges, should be focused on teaching students how social capital works and how students can build it.

Hoffman says that there's a specific kind of social capital that is important in entering the labor market and that kind of social capital is very hard to come by in low-income communities.

"There's research that shows that low-income communities have networks but those networks are quite closed. And you need to be able to access a network of higher status than your own."

In Episode 155 of Class Dismissed, Hoffman offers guidance on how community colleges and universities can restructure to better prep students to gain employment. Spoiler alert, there's a lot more to it than having a career services office on campus.

You can listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

Connecting with your students CJ Reynolds admits that there are a lot of things that he has to focus on to be a better teacher. Some tasks are a struggle for him, like creating content, quickly responding to emails, and doing paperwork.

But there is one thing that has always come naturally to him-- connecting with young people.

As a teacher in West Philadelphia, Reynolds dials in on creating a meaningful relationship with his students. In fact, at the start of each school year, he delays handing out a syllabus and spends time telegraphing to students that he's interested in them.

"On that first day, there's no talk of rules or policies or procedures," says Reynolds. "It is me trying to connect with students, and get them excited about the year."

Reynolds really drills down with his students, "Where do you come from? What are you interested in? What kind of music do you like? What kind of movies do you like?"

Reynolds believes that making an emotional deposit with students learning who you're teaching at the start of the year changes everything.

If students start showing up in your class just to say goodbye at the end of the day or ask how your day was, then you're probably having some success. Inspiring colleagues Over the past few years, Reynolds has developed quite a following on YouTube. Over 45,000 subscribers tune in to see how he handles some challenging situations, like classroom management, trauma, and race.

Now Reynolds is putting a lot of his thoughts in writing. In his new book, Teach Your Class Off, The Real Rap Guide to Teaching, Reynolds offers educators a way to hit the reset button and reconnect with what energizes them about teaching. Having difficult discussions In Episode 154 of the Class Dismissed Podcast, we ask Reynolds how educators should talk to students about George Floyd's homicide and the subsequent protest.

Reynolds argues that these conversations should not be hard conversations to have.

"When you create a community, within your classroom or within your school or amongst your faculty of having honest conversations no matter what. That when things come up you've already made the deposit into those students. They [students] already know that you care, they already that you're real," says Reynolds.

To hear our full discussion with Reynolds listen to the latest Episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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Teach Your Class Off: The Real Rap Guide to Teaching

How can educators feel safe? Educators in Palo Alto, California, have created a list of demands to be met before they return to the classroom. I have to admit, when I first read the headline, "Palo Alto teachers list COVID-19 Safety Demands before returning to classrooms," I braced for a list of unreasonable requests.

However, as I started reading through the specifics, it all makes sense. It's well thought out and should be at least discussed in all school districts throughout the country.

This list which was proposed by the Palo Alto Educators Association includes but is not limited to

plexiglass face shields disposable gloves smocks handwashing stations COVID 19 testing or antibody testing increased nursing staff deep cleaning of classrooms protocols on how students will line up, enter and exit classrooms sick time remain untouched if educators must quarantine

Motivating High School Students to Take Action and Create Change In our bright idea segment of Episode 153, we speak with Kyle Willkom. The youth speaker has connected with schools in 47 states, and he joined us to give us tips on how to empower High School Students to Think Positive, Take Action, and Create Change.

Willkom says educators want to inspire and motivate an entire school. But a lot of times what we're hearing is that they can inspire and motivate the top 10 percent of students who already active in the school.

"How do we really from the bottom up, from inside out, change the way young people think about becoming leaders or impacting their school culture or environment and then taking action on it," says Willkom.

This is part of the inspiration for Willkom's upcoming book, Action-Packed Leadership - Empowering High School Students to Think Positive, Take Action, and Create Change.

To hear more about how Willkom motivates high school students, listen to Episode 153 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

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What's the right move? A few school districts around the country are giving us a glimpse of what school may look like come August and September of 2020.

West Bloomfield school district in Michigan announced its plans to have a mix of in-person and remote learning. Students would be split into two groups and each group would attend school in-person just two days a week. One group would physically show up for learning on Monday and Tuesday while the other group would learn remotely. The groups would swap roles on Thursday and Friday.

All students would work remotely on Wednesdays and the schools would be disinfected on Wednesdays and the Weekends.

Meanwhile, in Lousiana, Tangipahoa Parish announced their intentions to allow parents to choose if their children will learn remotely or attend in person.

“I began to think about it and we’re going to have some families, no question, who are going to be fearful of sending their children to school in August for fear they could catch something and bring it home,” Superintendent Melissa Stilley told the Advocate. “Maybe a student has asthma or diabetes or an immune system issue and I think there will be a small population (of parents) who may be working at home and can have their children there doing full virtual learning.”

No matter which decision school districts make going into the fall, it's becoming clear that there are no great options.

In Episode 152 of Class Dismissed, we discuss the choices and reflect on the CDC's guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Inquiry-Based Learning We also talk with Inquiry-Based Learning expert Trevor MacKenzie. MacKenzie has authored two books on the topic and just returned from an Australian Tour in which he was spreading the word about Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL).

For MacKenzie, IBL is all about getting the students to have a more active roll in the class and exploring students' questions and curiosities as entry points into the curriculum.

“Sometimes that teacher is in the front of the room and leading the way so to speak,” says MacKenzie. “Sometimes that teacher is that guide along the ride. Someone who facilitating and supporting learnings.”

Makenzie, who trains educators around the globe on how to implement IBL says they’re trying to do is give the classroom experience over to the students. He says students should be able to take ownership of what they’re learning. Where does an educator begin? Makenzie pushes for a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the student.

“I always start my unit design with a big overarching ‘Un-Googleable’ question and I make that question front and center in my classroom,” says MacKenzie.

He’s even built an infographic where he models IBL like a swim coach teaching someone to swim. He even hangs the picture in the classroom for his students to see and he encourages teachers to download and print the picture for their own classrooms.

MacKenzie is also really big on provocation. He shows students a lot of videos tied to their curriculum to spark interest and curiosity, but he’s ultimately determining wha questions his students have around the curriculum. Want to learn more? Mackenzie has authored two books on the topic. He says if you teach middle school or high school “Dive into Inquiry” is for you. If you teach younger students you may want to read “Inquiry Mindset.”

To hear our full conversation about Inquiry-Based Learning with Trevor MacKenzie, listen to Episode 152 on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice

Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders, and Curiosities of Our Youngest Learners

"If you don't understand how to reach a child, your intellect and your content knowledge will mean nothing." As an educator, it's sometimes difficult to know the challenges their students face outside of the classroom. Some students have a parent that's incarcerated or parents that are rarely home. Some students show up to school hungry and malnourished. Some students are effectively left to act as a head-of-the-household for their siblings.

For years, Mississippi principal, Kristina Pollard, has worked with students facing unimaginable hurdles at home and she's learned that her students' social-emotional issues can manifest into inappropriate behavior.

Equally as important, she knows that some of her teachers may begin at her school without a clear perspective on the challenges her students face.

Pollard says that there are some things they do, to try to help with that.

"Like taking our teachers on a bus ride at the beginning of the year so they can actually see where their children are living," says Pollard.

She says some of her teachers are at a loss of words after the ride and there are other teachers who come from similar backgrounds that are not shocked. But either way, the goal is to formulate ideas on how to connect with those children.

"If you don't understand how to reach a child, your intellect and your content knowledge will mean nothing."

Pollard says you might be living check to check as a teacher. But you know where your next meal is coming from and you have gas in your car and you can go do your laundry.

Pollard says, "We have children that are sleeping on the floor, that don't have windows, there's plywood up. And we don't know what they're eating. They don't have a regular meal, dinner time at 5:00, and homework at 6:00."

Those little things we take for granted are missing for a lot of children. Using Restorative Practices Disciplining children that are facing trauma at home can be difficult for administrators. Teachers typically handle the initial discipline, but when the child is referred to the principal the administrator needs to use restorative practices.

"Sometimes we issue consequences or none at all and that is infuriating and upsetting to teachers," says Pollard.

But Pollard says she gets to talk to the students and get to the root of the issue.

"If they can't read. If they're embarrassed to talk because they have a speech impediment. If their parents or mom and boyfriend have been physically fighting all night," says Pollard.

We have to make decisions that are best for children, not always what the policy says.

To hear our full interview with Pollard and learn how she uses Restorative Practices when working with students. Listen to Episode 151 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes CDC Reopening Guidelines for Schools

Maryland's COVID-19 Recover Plan for Education

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus, please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2020

Half-time high school? Back in March, when schools closed their doors and began aggressive distance learning, there was a belief that life would return to normal in just a few months. But now it's mid-May, and our risks to coronavirus have hardly improved. Educators are now brainstorming on how they can approach learning in the 2020-2021 school. Districts are considering delaying the start of the school, modifying attendance policies, reducing class size, and staggering schedules.

However, Michael Petrilli recently penned an opinion piece for Bloomberg that highlighted what he considered a silver lining to the COVID crisis.

Petrilli raises an obvious question: Why can’t our high schools look more like college? Does every high school course really need to meet in person every day, given the technology available to us? What if kids could choose an every-other-day schedule, where they attend class in person on even days and stay home (or work from the school library or computer lab or do an apprenticeship) on odd days? Or they select a morning or afternoon schedule rather than attending all day long?

Does Petrilli have a point? Is the high school model out of date and due for a change? We discuss on Episode 150 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. Bright Idea Segment - Understanding Texts and Readers Best selling author Jennifer Serravallo is already a rock star in the education community. Her previous books, “The Writing Strategies Book” and “The Reading Strategies Book,” have helped thousands of educators offer strategies for reading and writing. Now, Serravallo is out with a new guide designed to help teachers make sense of reading comprehension.

“Understanding Texts & Readers” offers the tools for an educator to identify if a student is comprehending a book, even if an educator is not familiar with the book the student is reading. Are They “Getting It”? Serravallo says her goal is to make sense of something that is sometimes hard to make sense of. There are many different viewpoints on what it even means to understand comprehension. Ranging from the Rosenblatt Reader-Response Theory to a Proficient Reader Research, it can get murky for educators. “SOMETIMES THE CLASSROOM TEACHER IS LEFT THINKING, WHAT AM I REALLY LOOKING FOR? WHAT DOES COMPREHENSION LOOK LIKE?

Credit: jenniferserravallo.com Serravallo says, “Sometimes the classroom teacher is left thinking, what am I really looking for? What does comprehension look like? What does it look like when a kid really gets it?”

With stories, charts, and examples, “Understanding Texts & Readers” quickly helps educators determine if their students are “getting it.”

In the book, Serravallo offers a quality of response mechanism, so teachers can look at a student's response and identify if the student needs some support.

“If we know that a plot in a “level R” text is likely to have a flashback, then if a child is reading a “level R” text then we ask them to retell. If they’re only telling us in sequence, we can know that they might be missing something in the text,” says Serravallo.

The ultimate goal is to make reading fun and create lifelong readers.

“If you are not comprehending, then what fun is reading? And I think a lot of disengagement with reading is rooted in a lack of understanding,” says Serravallo.

To hear our full discussion with Serravallo and get ideas for doing something similar in your school, listen to Episode 150 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus, please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

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The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers

Understanding Texts & Readers: Responsive Comprehension Instruction with Leveled Texts

The Writing Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers

A teacher's passion. A musician's voice. A family's journey.

Special education teacher Konrad Wert was a great teacher. In fact, he was awarded Teacher of the Year for his district in 2012. But like many educators, he was struggling with the workload. He was putting in 50-60 hours of work, and his family life was suffering. So Wert decided to take a break from teaching.

He had another passion. Wert, a part-time musician, was known by the stage name of Possessed by Paul James. So in 2015, he and his family decided to roll the dice. Wert quit his job as a teacher, and he, his partner Jenny, their two kids, and their dog went on tour.

The traveled from state-to-state in 26 foot RV playing shows and spreading a message about the overwhelming strain on teachers in the United States.

But Wert and his family had company. Also in that RV was filmmaker Todd Tue. Tue shoehorned himself and his camera gear into the RV with Wert and his family.

"Intimate is a very polite word for it," said Tue laughingly.

Along for the ride, Tue was able to capture the meaningful conversations Wert was having with fellow educators. He documented Wert as he engaged with teachers, parents, and audiences in a discussion about the current state of Special Education and the epidemic of Teacher Burnout.

On May 4th, Tue releases his documentary titled When it Breaks. In it, Wert must decide how his service is most effective. As an advocating artist or as a teacher in the classroom?

In Episode 149 of Class Dismissed, we interview Todd Tue about why he felt so strongly about telling Wert's story. You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

To watch When it Breaks visit whenitbreaks.com

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

Other Show Notes

Did closing schools helps stop the Coronavirus?

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2020

Staggered Schedules, Looping, more Social Emotional Learning? School districts around the globe reacted with lightning speed to modify learning during the onset of COVID-19, but they're now turning their focus to how they can safely reopen in the Fall of 2020.

In Episode 148 of Class Dismissed we discuss some of the ideas being floated, including staggered starts, and setting aside time at the start of the year for remediation.

There's also a push for bringing teachers out of retirement to help with substitute teacher and tutoring.

One idea that many K- 4 classes may want to consider is looping. In an opinion piece published by Education Drive, Mike Rogers makes a compelling argument. He says that with looping, teachers hit the ground running in the fall by saving the time normally spent learning names and family information and establishing classroom routines.

NPR also published a highly circulated story titled, 9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen. In it, they discuss, modifying attendance policies, reducing class sizes, and increased focus on social-emotional learning.

Listen to Episode 148 for a list of ideas being considered by districts. The argument for gaming with your kids In the "Bright Idea" segment of Episode 148, Jordan Shapiro makes an argument for gaming with your kids.

The unknown surrounding new technologies often cause concern. In the case of iPhones and Xboxes, parents worry their kids are over-engaged. But Shapiro is offering a different perspective. In his book, “The New Childhood” Shapiro argues that everyone needs to stop worrying about our children’s device usage and instead harness that usage for good.

Shapiro, who teaches the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University, says the reactions to smartphones and video games today are not much different than the way society acted to new technologies in the past.

For example, when the printing press was invented and books were bound for people to take home there was an uproar that stories would become too isolated of an activity.

“Because stories had always been told communally, whether that’s around a campfire or at church,” says Shapiro.

While we forget that trains were once a new technology, Shapiro says physicians and neuroscientists were once worried about kids staring out the window of moving trains.

“Because the images go by so fast and the human brain is not capable of taking in things at that speed,” Shapiro says back then the physicians were concerned about brain damage. Play video games with your kids Several years ago Shapiro was going through a transition in his life. He and his wife were separated, and he was worried about his kids.

“They were little, and it was hard enough on me, I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be on them to go through such a giant shift in their life.”

Shapiro wanted to find a way to spend time and bond with his kids. So he tried sitting on the couch and playing video games with them.

“And that gave me the opportunity to talk about so many other things cause we were just sort of sitting next to each other playing,” said Shapiro.

But he also believes he was helping his kids create narratives about their digital life.

“I was both using the digital world to help them make sense of their none digital life, and I was also preparing them to have a much more stable and healthy digital world,” said Shapiro.

To hear more of our conversation with Dr. Jordan Shapiro listen to Episode 145 of Class Dismissed. You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

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The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

Heidi Mesmer is challenging educators to think big when it comes to reading comprehension. Mesmer, a professor of literacy at the Virginia Tech School of Education, says there are many foundational reading skills. Such as print concepts, fluency, and phonological awareness. In a recently published article in EDWeek, Mesmer questioned why we only talk about phonics?

Mesmer says, "the foundational skills are an integrated whole, and they have to be taught together." She wants to be clear, phonics is important, but the focus in classrooms is so heavy on phonics, she believes it's isolated from the other important reading skills.

"Phonological awareness is not phonics," says Mesmer. "Phonological awareness is actually the ability to orally identify and manipulate units of sounds or to hear those differences. So it's just the sound part."

Mesmer says that the skill to hear words and break them apart is crucial to learning phonics.

She points out that phonics is putting a sound with a symbol or letter. "But if you don't first have an insight or recognition that words actually have these smaller constituent parts, the whole system makes no sense to you."

If you're not sure how phonics fits within your daily instruction, or crave a more effective process for teaching phonics, Messmer recently wrote a book on the topic. "Letter Lessons and First Words" provides a research-based vision of what lively, engaging phonics instruction can look like, along with practical, classroom-tested tools to make it happen in your classroom.

To hear our full interview with Mesmer, listen to Episode 147 of the Class Dismissed Podcast.

You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

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Letter Lessons and First Words: Phonics Foundations That Work (The Research-informed Classroom)

Teachers, professors, educators, and instructors are suddenly in a place where they need to teach from home to their students.

Actor and Voice talent, David Lawrence XVII decided to create a free digital course designed specifically to educate teachers on how to select and set up a camera, microphone, lighting and all other gear they need to teach and to create a safe and effective online class culture.

”A teacher’s superpower is teaching, not knowing the ins and outs of cameras, mics, lights, and keeping our kids safe on Zoom,” Lawrence says.

The course will be free for a month, after a month the course will be $49.00.

Lawrence offers ways teachers can improve their online presence without having to purchase new equipment. For example, in a lesson about smartphones, Lawrence shares some settings that a lot of people are not familiar with. Such as the built-in autofocusing and auto exposure settings.

"A simple tap and hold on the screen on your phone as you're getting it set up, will not only automatically focus on you but it will set and allow you to adjust for the permanent setting of the lighting," says Lawrence. "It makes all the difference in the world in how professional you look when you use your phone."

To hear more tips from Lawrence, including how to improve your audio and what type of background educators should be using their videos, tune into Episode 146 of Class Dismissed.

You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

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A parade for students during COVID-19 For Principal Kristina Pollard, success with students both before and during the COVID-19 shutdown has always revolved around relationships. So when she and her colleagues considered having a parade for their students the decision was a no-brainer.

On Wednesday, April 1st she and her teacher's from the Forrest County School District put signs on their vehicles and fell in line behind a school bus that was running food delivery to students scattered throughout the district.

The teachers honked horns and stood up through their sunroofs and shouted "we love you" to the students that were lining the streets.

"When the students realized their teachers were in those cars, oh it just melted my heart,"

Pollard says students were jumping up and down and waiving and the parents were just as grateful. Teachers were shouting we love you and we miss you and parents were saying back we love you too.

"They were just so grateful because we put smiles on little one's faces," says Pollard. "We felt like we were some sort of healing power."

Pollard says the parade was a relationship booster with the students and it got teachers out of the house. How to parade safely during coronavirus Pollard says teachers were asked to pull up in the school parking lot 10 minutes before the school's food delivery was about to run. As a safety precaution, teachers were required to stay in their vehicles.

Some of the educators had spouses or family members drive for them. This allowed teachers to wave from their vehicles without being distracted.

The message of safety was also passed on to the students. Signs read "keep calm and stay safe," "we are social distancing," and "we are disinfecting."

The event soothed the minds and hearts of the teachers because they could see their colleagues and know that everyone was ok.

"Anything we can do that's safe, healthy, and within our governor's guidelines, we're going to try it," says Pollard.

You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have a great idea about learning during coronavirus please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

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Schools' Secret Weapon

In mid-March, when coronavirus began sweeping throughout the United States, schools shuttered. For most districts, the decision to shut their doors came quickly. The result left millions of educators trapped at home with fragmented ways to communicate with parents and students.

However, there were about 50,000 educators that had a secret weapon. They were already using SchoolStatus, a communication tool that allows teachers and administrators to send one-to-one text messages to parents without giving up their personal phone numbers.

"I can't imagine having done this without SchoolStatus," says Sanger ISD teacher Beth Sullivan. "I can text, call, and email parents with absolute ease! It's making a complicated time so much easier!

SchoolStatus

SchoolStatus was already a heavily utilized tool by 143 school districts. On any given day before COVID-19 SchoolStatus would facilitate about 125,000 messages between teachers and parents. Since COVID-19, the software company's usage exploded. They are now connecting teachers and parents close to a million times a day.

SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis says they're seeing 700 - 800 percent spikes in traffic. "We're doing as much traffic in a week as we previously did in a month."

Davis says it's not just the volume that's significant, it's also when it's occurring. SchoolStatus is seeing major increases on Sundays.

How SchoolStatus got a head start on the Coronavirus

Russ Davis, CEO SchoolStatus

Employees at SchoolStatus began discussing COVID-19 almost two months before the outbreak in the United States. On January 22, their sales operations manager posted an article about the coronavirus in one of the company's Slack channels.

"I'm sure you've been following this, but in case you haven't, the virus was discovered about a month ago and originated in Wuhan China," he shared with all employees. "9 deaths, 456 confirmed infections, about 2% mortality rate so far."

Just days later, on January 27, a marketing manager shared a Facebook post of a friend of hers that lived in Wuhan, China.

The post was a frightening perspective describing how they were trapped in Wuhan. Her friend couldn't get on an evacuation flight out of China, read the Facebook post. They also had a father-in-law that had contracted the virus, but hospitals in Wuhan couldn't take him because all the beds were full.

By February, weeks before any schools shut down, SchoolStatus CEO, Davis, began planning.

He started emailing all-hands announcing guidelines on how to prevent the spread of the virus at their three offices. Davis ordered hand sanitizer, UV-C phone/device sanitizers, and he asked all employees to stay more than 6 feet from each other.

Most crucial, Davis had already established a robust infrastructure to be able to "flip a switch" and allow all employees to work remotely. All employees had laptops, Zoom, and Slack credentials, and SchoolStatus VoIP phone lines directly into their homes.

"I'm kind of a paranoid guy by nature," says Davis. "To me, this is like years in the making. Whenever we started seeing it spread more aggressively outside of that region [China]. We thought this is coming and it's not going away. That's when we started putting our plans in place."

Scalability

Having much of the United States and the world suddenly shift to remote work and distance learning has reportedly put a lot of stress on cloud computing. Davis says their system is built to automatically handle a pretty heavy surge in traffic but in order to handle as much as a 900% increase they had to quickly make some manual adjustments.

The SchoolStatus developers spent the last couple of weeks enabling those changes. Davis says, "Things are autoscaling now, so whenever we see bursty traffic, the system automatically scales up and whenever that traffic goes down the system scales back down."

Davis says of the millions and millions of messages...

Can we educate 40 million K-12 students remotely? With schools requiring students to stay home across the United States, educators scrambled all last week to quickly adjust to this new way of teaching in the world of coronavirus.

Here on Class Dismissed, we will spend the next several episodes sharing and examining which methods of distance learning are working and which methods may turn out to be too ambitious.

Class Dismissed co-host and Mississippi School Principal, Kristina Pollard, shares with us her district's plan to educate students remotely. What if your students don't have internet access? Pollard who serves a school that is 100% poverty is well aware of the digital divide that many of her students are facing.

"They don't have internet access at home. We're already trying to figure out, what can we do as a district," says Pollard.

Her district is rolling out a plan using bus routes to ensure that all students get breakfast, lunch, and a snack.

"When we do that, we will have academic packets ready for our children," says Pollard. "And we're going to hit those bus stops just like we would when we were running those routes."

The idea is not without its challenges. Last week, in Shelby County Tennessee, they were forced to suspend their meal distribution plan when an employee in the nutrition department tested positive for COVID-19.

Pollard is also concerned about the social-emotional well being of her students during the COVID-19 outbreak.

She says it's going to be important to provide some type of comfort to students. She says her K-6 students really rely on a routine, they look forward to going to school every day.

"It's going to become a challenge I think by the third week. Students will miss their teachers. They'll miss the interaction with their classmates. It's going to go beyond the academic support," says Pollard. What do educators expect of parents? Longtime educator Lissa Pruett says parents do not need to fill their child's day with instruction just like at school.

"You forget how much time children spend in transition during their school day, with car line, lunch, bathroom breaks, recess, and then PE or art," says Lissa.

She says parents should not fill the day with eight hours of instruction.

"Please don't do that, please don't do that to your children. That is not how long they would have been in active instruction from the highest qualified individual." Teachers should not overcompensate Lissa also recommends teachers keep their lessons brief. She notes that this is an unusual time and you're not going to be able to get everything done.

"I can see where some teachers out there may be thinking, I've got to plan all this stuff because I don't want the parents to think we don't do anything all day," says Lissa. "I think that would be a mistake."

Lissa says there are insecurities everywhere, but teachers do a lot within a day. Fun activities for kids during the Coronavirus Outbreak Parents all over the world are clamoring for fun activities to keep their little ones occupied and learning.

Lissa, who had operated her own children's art studio over the past two decades is now offering many lessons through instructional videos online.

Lissa made video bundle packages of her taking students through lessons. There are crayon activities of a tiny monster where you can use items at home to trace circles and more advance lessons like watercolors and pencil art.

"Most of the parents have emailed back and said their children were engaged with zero help from the parents for about an hour.

The packages are available for anyone and can be viewed at bristlesstudio.com

To hear our full discussion about how COVID-19 is impacting school districts, listen to Episode 143 of the Class Dismissed Podcast. You can find the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have a great idea about distance learning please contact us info@classdismissedpodcast.com

Note: This episode was recorded on March 9. This episode includes in-depth conversations about COVID-19's impact on school districts in the context of the active coronavirus cases as of March 9.

We will air special COVID-19 coverage that will focus on K-12 education beginning March 23. Does blended learning make teaching easier or harder? Catlin Tucker has been a thought leader in the world blended learning. But a lot of the educators Tucker would interact with perceived blended learning as more work for teachers.

"I couldn't understand why that was," says Tucker.

So, as Tucker started visiting classrooms she realized teachers were still doing the lion's share of the work in the classrooms even when they were trying a blended classroom. Tucker noticed that workflows were staying traditional and it was placing a lot of burden on the teachers.

For example, she says the teachers would

set the assignment 150 kids complete it teacher collects those assignments teacher processes the work teacher inputs the data in the grade book the teacher passes the assignments back to the students.

Tucker says she also observed a lot of teacher talking and students listening. But she feels there should be much more balance between the two. Blended Learning Requires a Mind-Shift Tucker goes about blended learning from a different angle. She says it requires a mind-shift around how teachers view their role and their students' role in education.

"What responsibilities do we each own and which responsibilities do we each share?"

Catlin Tucker - Courtesy of catlintucker.com

Tucker says teachers should feel more like they are partnering with students. She suggests using models in dynamic ways to try and create time and space in the classroom. Hopefully, this will allow for teachers to move some of that work they traditionally would take home, back into the classroom.

"I wasn't in the front of the room. I was sitting side by side with them, giving feedback as they worked."

Tucker also suggests frequent conferencing with students about their goals and pulling them into a side-by-side assessment conversation where the teacher grades the work as the student sits next to them.

Tucker highlights the topics in her new book "Balance With Blended Learning." In it, she talks about the value of forming a partnership with kids and she goes in-depth on metacognitive skill-building and real-time feedback. All tools that allow teachers to have more balance inside and outside of the classroom. "I think if we don't start to really shine some light on how we can approach this job in a sustainable way, we are going to continue to lose exceptional people from this profession," More of a coach less of a fountain of knowledge Tucker says that if teachers are moving into a blended space hopefully that means that they're starting to look at their role as a more of a coach and less of a purveyor of information.

She suggests letting go of the traditional roles and not lead the class by talking and transferring information. Tucker says teachers need to use that time to give feedback and work with students one-on-one. It's all about balance Tucker is concerned about the number of great teachers that quit because of the toll teaching can take on a person.

"I think if we don't start to really shine some light on how we can approach this job in a sustainable way, we are going to continue to lose exceptional people from this profession," says Tucker.

Her goal is to help educators find ways to use technology in moderation.

"How do we leverage technology to shift students to the center of learning?"

For Tucker, the goal is to have students ask questions and investigate topics. She believes that the more we can shift students to the center of learning the less pressure there will be on the teacher at the center of learning.

To learn more about Blended Learning with Catlin Tucker, listen to Episode 142 of the Class Dismissed Podcast.

Balance With Blended Learning: Partner With Your Students to Reimagine Learning and Reclaim Your Life (Corwin Teaching Essentials)

Why this educator believes he became a better teacher without a desk. For some, your teacher’s desk is a must. Not only is it functional, but it’s also a symbol of your leadership and authority in the classroom.

To others, the teacher’s desk is an obstacle; A barrier between you and your students. A large desk also takes up a big chunk of real estate in your classroom.

In Episode 141 of the Class Dismissed podcast, we caught up with Matthew Morris. Back in 2015, Morris wrote an article about why he got rid of his desk in his classroom. Readers from all over the world applauded his post, which is on his website and Medium.com. An unintended barrier Morris says it pushed him to walking around, help students more, and it allowed him to be the lead learner.

"It did disolve a little bit of the barrier between teacher and student," says Morris.

Morris believes that being forced to move around the classroom made him build better relationships with introverted students. He admits that when he had a desk he would sometimes quickly go and grade quizes while the students were working independenly during class time.

But without a desk, things were different. Morris would go and sit near students that were often quiet or maybe struggling with the work.

"Those students would actually ask me more questions about the work," said Morris.

In Episode 141, we ask Morris if he has any regrets about ditching his desk. Where does he keep his stuff? Where does he grade papers? And most importantly, what did it mean for his relationship with his students.

Listen to the latest episode of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes, and find out if Morris is still managing his classroom without a desk today. Other show notes This high school cheer squad is caught between two worlds -- Divided by a border.

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It's the #1 Environmental Issue Purdue University Professors Dr. Daniel Shepardson and Andrew Hirsch believe that we need to do more when it comes to educating K-12 students about climate change.

Shepardson, who is with Purdue's Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Science says currently climate change is not well covered in classrooms.

"It tends to be addressed in a piecemeal fashion," Shepardson says students may touch on it a bit in earth science or biology class, but that's not enough. "There's not really a clearly defined conceptual framework to help teachers to teach about climate change."

That's why Shepardson and his colleague, Hirsch recently co-authored “Teaching Climate Change - What educators should know and can do” in American Educator.

They argue that climate change is the #1 environmental issue. "If we don't address a warming climate then we are going to find ourselves having to deal with extreme heat, extreme storm events and food security may become a problem," says Hirsch. Battle through the political storm For some teachers, educating students about climate change can be a political minefield.

"Regardless of whether you accept the fact that changing climate is driven by manmade activities, the climate is nonetheless changing, says Hirsch. "Farmers can tell you that, insects know that, birds know that. There are quantifiable measures that need to be considered. It's not a matter of politics, it's a matter of adapting the situation that is changing."

However, the pair say that educators shouldn't really open the classroom floor for debate on climate change. They know it's common for teachers to present both the scientific perspective and the skeptic's perspective on climate change, but they argue that allowing debate is a mistake.

This is because there is a scientific consensus on climate change. "We don't debate other science concepts like photosynthesis or earth system science," says Hirsch. "It's accepted science and that's what should be taught."

Hirsch says the debate should be about how we deal with the issue. "That's where teachers can engage students in debating the ways we mitigate and adapt to our changing climate.

To hear our full interview with Hirsch and Shepardson listen to Episode 140 of the Class Dismissed Podcast.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on iTunes here. Other show links Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map (COVID-19)

American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics.

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Dr. Ben Burnett served as a school administrator through Hurricane Katrina but he never imagined he would face two more powerful tornadoes later in his career. In Part 1 of our interview about what to do when a natural disaster strikes your school district, Dr. Ben Burnett reflected on how he and his colleagues kept students and teachers focused after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Burnett was the principal of a middle school in Lamar County Mississippi during the devasting hurricane, but a few years later he took on the responsibilities of Lamar County Superintendent.

But even Hurricane Katrina could not fully prepare Burnett for what happened to one of his high schools just eight years after Katrina.

Dr. Ben Burnett

On February 10, 2013, Oak Grove High School, near Hattiesburg Mississippi was struck by a powerful EF4 tornado that cut a path three-quarters of a mile wide and had maximum sustained winds of 170 mph. The tornado demolished a field house and caused significant damage to much of the large high school.

Burnett says that as he first rounded the corner to survey the damage at Oak Grove High School, he thought, nobody ever prepared him on how to manage in this situation.

Fortunately, the storm struck on a Sunday, and while there were a few people in the school, there were no fatalities or injuries. However, the cleanup expenses would run into the millions and the disruptions to instructional time and extracurricular activities had to be addressed.

By 2017 Burnett had retired as Superintendent and he was now the Dean of Education at William Carey University. Unbelievably, a powerful EF3 tornado struck at Burnett's new job site. It was his third natural disaster.

In the early morning hours of January 21st. The tornado packed winds of 145mph and damaged 58 of the 60 buildings on WCU's campus. Remarkably, Burnett's William Carey University story is one of resileence. They adminstration moved quickly and had students back in class in just two days.

To hear the full story on how Dr. Ben Burnett responded to both tornadoes, listen to Episode 139 of the Class Dismissed Podcast.

This is part two of a two-part interview. Tune in to Episode 138 to hear Burnett talk about Hurricane Katrina.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on iTunes here.

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Dr. Ben Burnett served as a school administrator through two powerful tornadoes and Hurricane Katrina. Most school administrators are fortunate enough to make it their entire career without witnessing their campus destroyed by a natural disaster. Some administrators may have experienced it once, maybe even twice. But probably only a handful can say they've faced a natural disaster striking their school on three separate occasions.

Dr. Ben Burnett is one of the few.

Dr. Ben Burnett

"I try not to talk about it," he jokes.

Burnett worries that if word gets out no one will want to hire him in the future. After all, it's a record that no one really wants. But it's also a job experience that no one really has. “The only source of knowledge is experience.” Albert Einstein Over his 30+ year career in education, Burnett has helped clean up and rebuild schools after three major storms.

Hurricane Katrina (2005) - Principal of Oak Grove Middle School Hattiesburg EF4 Tornado (February 10, 2013) - Superintendent of Lamar County School District Hattiesburg EF3 Tornado (January 21, 2017) - Dean, School of Education at William Carey University

Oak Grove High School (2013) - Credit: Warren Kulo AL.com Historic Weather Events There are no simulations for dealing with events of this magnitude. Katrina needs no introduction and the tornado that struck Burnett's Oak Grove High School in 2013 was featured on the Weather Channel's "Tornado Alley".

"One of my first thoughts as Superintendent when I rounded the corner and saw Oak Grove High School had a big path taken out of one of the sections was nobody prepared me for this."

On Episode 138 of Class Dismissed, Burnett will walk us through his lessons learned.

How did they get the campus ready after Hurricane Katrina? How did students get back on track after missing three weeks of school? How do you react to the unknown?

In 2005, Katrina exposed all sorts of problems that arise when you don't have power for weeks on end. Burnett reflects on how the district struggled to distribute paychecks. "The school district had to find a generator and cut checks plugged up to a printer," Burnett recalls. "There were at least a thousand employees who were depending on those checks.

He also reflects on how he was nearly brought to tears when the students returned to school.

This is part one of a two-part interview. Tune in to Episode 139 to hear Burnett talk about the 2013 and 2017 tornadoes.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on iTunes here.

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How can you make science cool? Lynn Brunelle is a four-time Emmy Award-winning writer for “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” and she describes her time working on the Nye’s show as similar to working for a combination of Mr. Wizard and Saturday Night Live.

“It [Nye’s show] tapped into my love for writing funny things,” said Brunelle.

Brunelle said she enjoys making difficult concepts accessible and fun.

“In my experience, if it’s funny, and you laugh, you remember it,” said Brunelle.

Over the past several years, Brunelle has shifted her energy into writing science books directed towards kids and those that educate them.

Her works include “Pop Bottle Science,”“Big Science for Little People” and she’s releasing a new book which will be available April 3 called “Turn This Book into a Beehive.”

The latter is packed with 19 sensory-driven experiments and activities that offer a deeper understanding of what it’s like to BE a bee.

Brunelle says “You actually do turn the book into a beehive!”

The book comes with a removable book jacket and paper nesting tubes that turn into a home for the mason bee, with each “room” providing space for 10-12 mason bee babies. Ignite that love for science when they’re young In our conversation in Episode 40 of Class Dismissed, Brunelle talks about the importance of encouraging more girls to learn STEM and she tells us the age kids usually decide if they’re going to be interested in science.

Brunelle believes that everyone is a science person because it’s all based on how the world works.

“I think we need to rebrand this and show how cool it is.” Said Brunelle.

You can listen to our full conversation with Brunelle on iTunes here.

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Big Science for Little People: 52 Activities to Help You & Your Child Discover the Wonders of Science (An Official Geek Mama Guide)

Turn This Book Into a Beehive!: And 19 Other Experiments and Activities That Explore the Amazing World of Bees

Pop Bottle Science

Why the structured essay writing we're teaching in school is not necessarily what employers want. Learning to write an essay in school is standard. You brainstorm, research a topic, develop a thesis, outline the piece, and begin writing.

Jill Pavich, Ed Pioneer

In the end, students create a well thought out composition that is grammatically correct and punctually sound. While learning those fundamentals is crucial, do those skills transfer to today's workplace? After twelve years in the classroom, Jill Pavich began following up with past students, and she learned the answer was no.

Pavich interviewed several "star students." She asked one of them if what they learned in her class was transferable to the real world.

"She [the former student] said a lot of that writing gave her the just-in-case knowledge, but it wasn't giving her any applications," said Pavich. "She had to reteach herself what it meant to write for slide decks, and what it meant to write scripts for videos, or to write for blog posts, or LinkedIn posts, things she was doing for her clients."

Knowing that the discipline of writing an essay was not connecting to a modern world, Pavich decided to do something about it. She started EdPioneer, and now helps high school English/Language Arts teachers make writing more authentic, more relevant, and more real.

To hear our full interview with Pavich and get some ideas for making writing real in your classroom, listen to Episode 136 of Class Dismissed.

You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

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It's demoralizing, and here's what you can do to prevent it.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a beautiful story, and it is one of the most commonly taught books in the secondary curriculum. But educator, Jennifer Buehler, can’t help but wonder how many students relate to the characters.

“At the end of the day, that book represents white America’s vision of racial progress and injustice,” says Buehler. “It’s a really different thing to get a story that asks questions about racial justice that’s not coming from the white perspective.”

Buehler, a former high school teacher and current associate professor of English education at Saint Louis University raises a question that all educators should consider. What does it mean if you never see yourself in a story?

She says it’s a common problem in schools nationwide because it’s a hard shift for teachers to make.

“Our curriculum remains pretty traditional nationwide. It requires teachers to be reading out of their comfort zones and exploring new authors and new texts. And it involves parent and administrative support.” says Buehler.

Money is a factor as well. “To bring different books into the classroom you have to be able to pay for those books,” Buehler says.

Is it hard to find diverse books?

According to School Library Journal’s 2018 Diverse Collections Survey of 22,000 school and public librarians, 15 percent said they find it “very difficult” or “difficult” to find appropriate titles to round out a diverse library collection.

The librarians surveyed cited finding portrayals of “characters with disabilities, Native or Indigenous peoples, and English language learners” as the most difficult.

What can teachers do?

Buehler knows teachers have a desire to make a change. She also knows that a lot of the “classics” already in the classroom are not bad books.

“They [the books] just can’t meet all the readers’ needs, they can’t do all the work that literature should do,” says Buehler.

Buehler suggests that teachers need first to make sure administrators are aware of the challenge. She advises teachers need to do their homework and know the books that they want to champion.

“You have to have your own argument, that’s appropriate to your own educational context, for what change is needed and why,” says Buehler.

Another major challenge is money for new books. Buehler suggests organizing small fundraisers. Teachers may also want to consider using PledgeCents or DonorsChoose.

She also cites a foundation named “The Book Love Foundation,” which dedicates their time to putting books in the hands of teenagers.

To hear more from our conversation with Buehler listen to Episode 135 of Class Dismissed. You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

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How and why Global School Play Day is working to restore unstructured play for kids For five years now, the first Wednesday in the month of February has been designated as Global School Play Day. This year, on February 5th, schools all over the world will pledge to allow students to spend an entire day playing with their classmates.

Here are the guidelines for educators...

Don't organize anything for the students Supervise students, but don't tell them how to play Call for toys - board games, Legos, blocks, balls, cards, puzzles Don't suggest how to use toys or games No screens or battery-powered devices

Why play is essential to social and emotional learning The catalyst for Global School Play Day was a Tedx Talk given by Dr. Peter Gray. During the 16 minute talk, Gray presents a compelling argument that today's kids do not grow up playing and this could have a negative impact. He backs his case with the science of how animals develop.

"Young mammals of essentially all species play. In play, they develop fit bodies they practice physical skills that are crucial to their survival and they also practice social and emotional skills," says Gray. "By playing together they learn to cooperate with one another. They learn to be in close vicinity to one another without losing their tempers, very important for social animals to develop.

Gray also points out that "risky play" teaches animals how to take risks and experience fear without losing their minds. The Start of GSPD A group of educators was so influenced by Gray's lecture, they decided to do something about it. Global School Play Day was their answer. The grassroots movement in 2015 had over 65,000 participants and by 2019, GSPD had over half a million involved.

GSPD Co-Founder, Eric Saibel, says they would love to see a million participants in 2020. The California principal says it's incredible to see images of students in New Zealand doing slip and slide while the kids in Minnesota are building a snowman.

"There's this idea that has kind of crept into American society and education over the last 50-60 years that things need to be directed by adults for them to have importance for kids. And that is simply not true," says Saibel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA8rLXrjcv8&t=3s

Saibel says GSPD is about building awareness. He knows that one day out of the year will not build a new paradigm, but he hopes it will build a new culture at a school and maybe across a community.

A culture where people interact says Saibel, "Where there is a greater value placed on connecting face-to-face, person to person."

To hear our full conversation with Saibel and learn how you can participate in GSPD, listen to episode 134 of Class Dismissed.

You can listen to all the Class Dismissed Podcast episodes on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

Click here to learn more or register for Global School Play Day. Other Show Notes The Power of Play

Unvaccinated Students Not Allowed Back to Seattle Public Schools

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

"I wanted to find something that would possibly interest them and that they can’t find on the internet."

Dina Leygerman was tired of having her high school students pretending to read the classic novels assigned in her class. She knew many of them were using SparkNotes and other shortcuts online and she guessed that some had probably never read a novel cover-to-cover. So Leygerman set a new a much loftier goal. She aimed to spark a love for reading amongst high schoolers.

With the support of her principal, Leygerman decided to take a break from the classics. She passed out a set of Young Adult books that a friend recommended to her. The book, “Scythe” by Neal Shusterman, is a dystopian title. One that she admits she had not even read herself.

“I wanted to find something that would possibly interest them and that they can’t find on the internet. Like information about it on the internet,” said Leygerman.

Teaching a book you’ve never read

At first, the students were skeptical because their teacher had not read the book herself.

Dina Leygerman – Credit: Dina Leygerman (Medium)

“They were like, wait you didn’t read this? How are you are going to teach us” says Leygerman “And I said, we’re going to learn together, that’s going to be the beauty of that.”

It didn’t take long before the students were hooked. Since Leygerman didn’t have a unit planned out yet, she set the students up in literature circles and she sat in with a different group every day.

“I was pleasantly surprised when the students just got into it. Like two chapters in, they were really into it.”

Leygerman says she had about 40 of her 45 seniors clearly engaged with the novel. This was a massive improvement over the classic novels she introduced in the past.

At times, the students would read well beyond their teacher and the results were heartwarming.

“They would be like, Ms. Leygerman, did you get to that part yet — Oh my God, oh my God, we can’t wait until you get there,” said Leygerman. “They were so excited, and they were so excited for me to get to the part they were at. That to me was like, I won!”

Once the students finished the book many of them came up to Leygerman and said “this was the best book I ever read” and some even said, “this was the only book I ever read.”

Several of the students even asked for a copy of the sequel. Leygerman referred them to the school principal and the students made the effort to request the book through the administration. The principal ordered 25 copies of the sequel that could be borrowed.

“Out of the 25 copies that she ordered, the kids borrowed 20 copies,” says Leygerman.

Breaking from tradition turned out to be a huge success.

To hear our full interview with Dina Leygerman listen to Episode 133 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

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Scythe (1) (Arc of a Scythe)

The Role of Emotion in History Education Dr. Dave Neumann is an Assistant Professor of History Education at Cal Poly Pomona and he was recently published in “Social Education” with his article titled “A feeling for the Past: The Role of Emotion in History Education.”

Recently, some of Neumann's students (future educators) were presenting their culminating model lessons in his history methods class and he noticed a crucial missing element to their presentation.

"The students had presented this model lesson in a pretty exemplary way, in terms of the content," said Neumann. "But as I was sitting observing it, I noticed the rest of the students participating in it just really didn't click with it, and I felt like something was missing."

What became apparent to Neumann is that the students were missing the emotion in the lesson. His students had presented the topic in a very cold analytical way.

In Episode 132 of Class Dismissed, Neumann tells us what his students could have done better at that moment and he gives us some tips on how educators can bring more emotion into their lessons.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes The Quiet Rooms A teacher makes 10 predictions for education in 2020 — some of them rather hopeful All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2020

These are our favorite interviews of 2019

Every year on Class Dismissed, we have an in-depth discussion with scores of amazing people working in education. We introduce our listeners to, innovative teachers, administrators, college professors, and even educational software developers.

Towards the end of each year, it's always fun to reflect on a few of those interviews that stand out to us. This week we selected our top four guests of 2019 and we look back on what we loved so much about those interviews.

To hear our full list listen to Episode 131 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2019

Shakespeare is arguably the most widely taught author in the United States, but should he be? Christina Torres has been teaching Shakespeare to her students for the past seven years. She loves Shakespeare, she's read it, she's performed it, and it's an integral part of the lessons she crafts for her eighth-graders in Honolulu.

However, Torres recently opened up about why she feels guilty about assigning Shakespeare to her students.

"The guilt comes from wondering what would it mean for my students if my students had more access to literature from someone with a similar background," says Torres.

Torres, who is half Mexican and half Filipino, says she did not get access to a Latino author until her junior year of high school.

"It was this huge revelation," says Torres. "Here's a Mexican writer, writing about things I understand! It was so overwhelming, and I feel a little sad that it did not happen to me until I was 16."

Torres says she can't help but feel guilty that she's taking time in her curriculum that could be dedicated to other authors. After all, most schools teach Shakespeare through several grade levels.

Torres's concerns don't stop there. To hear our full interview with Torres listen to Episode 130 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2019

We shouldn't obsess over early achievement.

We live in a world where we applaud kids that do amazing things at a young age, but Rich Karlgaard is not focused on those early achievers. Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes Magazine and author of "Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement", and he wants to start a national dialog about why it's essential to recognize that some people's prime comes a little later than others.

Late Bloomers begins with Karlgaard highlighting a 53-year-old woman named Joanne. When Joanne was in school, she was described as a "high-mediocre" student. Many professors do not remember Joanne, but one professor described her as a student that would often stare off into space while in class.

After attending school, Joanne got into a bad marriage, worked as a receptionist for a bit, and went into a spiral of depression after her divorce. For a time, she was even on public assistance.

But Karlgaard says Joanne is an excellent example of a late bloomer. "At age 35, while taking a train, Joanne, otherwise known as J.K. Rowling, dreamed up Harry Potter," says Karlgaard.

Why do parents push so hard?

If being a late bloomer is ok, then why do we see parents, coaches, and teachers push kids to be an early achiever? Karlgaard's theory is that the predominant rewards in society are coming from two industries, software and high-end financial services. "I like to say Google and Goldman Sachs," says Karlgaard. "Now, these Google and Goldman Sachs, who do they look for in college grads? They look for college grads that have gone to most elite universities." This has created the idea that the most significant rewards go to those that attend elite universities and have the best test scores. Consequently, it leads to parents and educators pushing kids towards doing whatever it takes to get into the best universities. Karlgaard says his goal in writing Late Bloomers is to start a discussion about applying unneeded pressure on students that may need more time. He's concerned that our current trajectory is causing financial indebtedness, anxiety, depression, and sleep-deprived kids.

What we're getting wrong

Karlgaard says we have a very narrow idea of what K-12 education should be. "That it should be a conveyer belt, and at the end of that conveyer belt, it deposits these kids into the best possible colleges that they can get in to."

Karlgaard acknowledges some kids are going to succeed on that conveyer belt. He knows some will get high test scores, and they'll manage the homework, and that's great. But he wants to make sure society understands that if kids are not succeeding, then "Plan B" is not to double down.

"There's overwhelming research that the conveyer belt is missing more kids than it's hitting," say's Karlgaard. "Many kids, their talents, deepest passions, and purpose, are never going to be revealed on that conveyer belt."

This is what motivated Karlgaard to spend five years researching and writing Late Bloomers.

What can we do?

If we see kids succeeding at an early age, by all means, we should applaud the success. But we also need to be sensitive to the signs of kids that are rebelling against the current system.

Karlgaard says to watch for kids…

Mentally dropping out Retreating to the basement and playing video games Clinical anxiety or depression Dropping out school

It used to be much easier to be a late bloomer, says Karlgaard. We didn't have social media, where kids compare themselves to the curated versions of other kids.

Karlgaard says educators' success should not be measured by how many kids you get into Havard.

"Success is measured 20-30 years down the road when you see your students are well functioning, healthy, happy, fulfilled contributors to their families and society."

To hear our full interview with Karlgaard, listen to Episode 99 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes o...

Happy Thanksgiving! This week we take a look at some myths surrounding the origin of Thanksgiving.

Were the Indians and Pilgrims that first ate together friendly with one another?Has Thanksgiving been a tradition since the 1600s?Who declared Thanksgiving a federal holiday?Was turkey served at the first Thanksgiving meal?Did the pilgrims really wear black and have buckles on their shoes?

Listen to Episode Class Dismissed your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Over a 30 year period, Kim Marshall served as a teacher, policy advisor, speechwriter, director of the curriculum, and a principal for Boston schools.

After that incredible career, Marshall began chapter two of his professional life with the publication of the Marshall Memo.

Marshall's weekly publication is widely known in education circles and for the past 17 years, the "Marshall’s Memo" has been emailed out weekly to educators around the world.

In Episode 127 of Class Dismissed, Marshall talks about which ideas in education have had decades of lasting power and Marshall told us that he thinks teacher teams may be the "secret sauce" to successful schools.

Marshall says that when schools create groups like the algebra team, the 4th-grade team, or the kindergarten team they get results.

Marshall says these teams should be sitting down planning curriculum units together and then looking at the actual student work that comes out of their classrooms on a day-by-day basis or from assessments and sharing the most effective ideas.

Marshall says this needs to happen because teaching is contextual.

"Any middle school teacher will tell you they can have a lesson that's going really brilliantly the first lesson and then the same lesson in the second lesson doesn't go as well," Marshall says this is because teaching is so hard and so complex.

Marshall just released a new book encapsulating the "Best of the Marshall Memo" and he and his co-author, Jenn David-Lang, are offering a free chapter on time management to anyone that emails them to requests it.

Those interested can email Marshall at kim.marshall48@gmail.com

You can listen to the full interview with Kim Marshall on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

Other links from the episode

Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School

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So many of the moments that change us are surprise moments.

Have you ever had a spontaneous event define who you are? It’s possible you have and you just didn’t recognize it.

Our guest explains how we can use neuroscience to trigger growth mindsets in the classroom and ultimately enrich the lives of our students.

Dr. Michael Rousell is a psychologist and associate professor at Southern Oregon University and he's spent years studying how spontaneous events can change the way we believe and see ourselves.

In Episode 126, Rousell teaches us how educators can give their students a burst of dopamine by combining surprise with positive reinforcement. If done properly, the results can have long-lasting positives effects on the way students perceive themselves.

You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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How Silent Sustained Readers was a gamechanger for this high school English teacher.

Steve Gardiner's first assignment as an educator was a challenge. He was responsible for teaching five sections of a class called basic communications.

"It was exactly what it sounds like. The students in there had failed all of our other English classes," said Gardiner. He was their last chance for them to earn the credits that they needed to graduate.

Unfortunately, that first year had a rough start. Gardiner says the students were not enthused and he admits that he was struggling to find stimulating curriculum material. But then a colleague suggested Sustained Silent Reading, also known as SSR.

Gardiner thought why not? I need to try something different. So they headed to the library and each student got to pick out their own book, and then every day the read for about 15 minutes. It was the consistency that seemed to make a difference.

"It wasn't that long, a week at the most, I was getting an occasional complaint when I asked them to put down their books and go to their packets," said Gardiner.

He thought wow! I'm getting somewhere with them.

Gardiner says he had success with the students the first year, but he wanted to learn more about SSR. He began researching and fine-tuning his program.

Over the next 27 years, Gardiner had success with SSR in his high school classroom while also becoming one of the leading champions for Silent Sustained Reading in the country. He authored a book on the subject and gave workshops.

In Episode 125 of Class Dismissed, Gardiner teaches us how educators can roll out SSR in their own classrooms. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

To keep up with Steve Gardiner you can visit his website at https://www.quietwaterpublishing.com Other links from the episode 7 reasons why teachers should use the educational versions of Assassin’s Creed in their classrooms All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

Building Student Literacy Through Sustained Silent Reading

Our guests and Episode 124 of Class Dismissed spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a teacher great. As a director of English language programs in the United States and overseas, Paul Morin had the opportunity to observe a lot of teachers.

During that time he began seeing three commonalities amongst the educators he thought were the most effective. Morin wrote about those in a recent post on Medium and he went more in-depth about them in the "Bright Idea" segment of our latest episode.

Good teachers watch their students faces Good teachers check for understanding Good teachers deviate from the lesson plan when necessary

To hear our full interview with Paul Morin listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

We've seen wellness and mindfulness rooms for students, but this public school decided to create one for their teachers.

For more than 30 years Debbi Rakowsky attended to the health and happiness of students. She served as the district social worker of the Three Village School District on Long Island, New York. However, over the past ten years, Rakowsky started to notice a shift amongst the staff. Teachers and faculty would frequently come to her and vent about the stresses that are involved in education.

"A lot that has to do with the complex parent and family needs and the high stake job demands," says Rakowsky. "For me, when I started in the district school was a very safe place for people to go. And one of the things that happens a lot with teachers these days is they go through this rehearsed trauma. Where the first day of school we're learning about what you do if an armed shooter comes into your school and how do you protect your students."

Rokowsky had dedicated her life to helping kids, but she wanted to do something for the adults that keep the school running. She began piloting a "Winter Wellness Series." Rokowsky says the cold winter months in New York are difficult because you leave for school in the dark and you come home in the dark. So she took a faculty room and repurposed it by making it more "Zen" and she brought in practitioners every Wednesday.

"And the staff just went wild for it," says Rakowsky.

After that, she began to think big. What if she could make a permanent place just for teachers and school staff to decompress? A place that was off-limits to students. Not a teacher's lounge, but a place where staff could come in think and breath without distractions. "I've had people walk in they literally cry. They say I can't believe that this is in our school," says Rakowsky. Rakowsky wrote a proposal and handed off to administrators and she says they didn't even blink. "They said let's do this!"

The district moved Rakowsky to the high school and they gave her a classroom that wasn't in use. She applied for grants and they began to furnish the room.

"When you walk into that room, you do not feel like you're in a school," says Rakowsky.

There is a faux wood floor, window treatments, and the lights are different than the normal school lights. Rokowsky also added a water feature, massage chairs, and a meditation area.

"I've had people walk in they literally cry. They say I can't believe that this is in our school," says Rakowsky.

For Rakowsky and the staff, it's more than a room. She also offers several programs for teachers, she offers workshops on managing anxiety, she has lunch and learns with practitioners, and they offer free short term counseling.

To learn more about program listen to Episode 123 of the Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

If you have questions for Rakowsky, she can be contacted at drakowsk@3villagecsd.org

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

What if we could use data to determine the best rapper?

“Who’s the best rap artist?” This a question that one of Peter Nilsson’s high school students wanted to answer.

For most high schoolers, it’s subjective. Is it Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, or someone else? Students could debate the topic until they’re blue in the face.

But what if those students could prove who’s the best? What if they could come up with a qualitative answer? What if they could use computers to analyze rap lyrics and determine which rapper has the most significant use of internal rhyme?

In Nilsson’s class at Deerfield Academy, they did just that.

Creating Knowledge

Nilsson an English teacher by trade but he has also helped students dive into the world of the digital humanities. In his class, students learned how to use computers to parse through massive amounts of text and answer questions that may otherwise seem unanswerable.

Nilsson calls it distant reading. And his students didn’t stop their research with rap. They analyzed how Harvey Weinstein was covered in the New York Times, before and after the MeToo movement.

They also examined news coverage of their favorite sports teams.

“Part of the way that we designed the class was so that they would be able to pursue these topics of interest. And enable them to see these topics of interest from a new perspective,” said Nilsson. “They start to realize that they are creating knowledge.”

To learn how Nilsson is executing and teaching distant reading, listen to Episode 122 of the Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Nilsson offers multiple examples and directs us to resources for getting started with distant learning in your classroom.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

The "math person" myth Far too frequently educators hear students say "I'm not a math person." Often, children and even adults convince themselves that they're "built" for other subjects like history or the arts. But Dr. Jo Boaler is on a mission to prove that the idea of a "math person" is a myth.

Boaler is a Professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford University and the faculty director of youcubed.org. She believes (and science backs her up) that we all have the potential to be great at math. So what are we doing wrong? When asked what we're doing wrong right now with math education, Boaler says, "Where do I start?"

Credit: YouCubed.Org

Boaler believes an emphasis on speed can be devastating in the classroom. She says it's particularly damaging when little kids are expected to memorize and regurgitate lots of math facts.

"At that point, when they're given those timed tests, many of them develop math anxiety, and from that point onwards, it's downhill for them," says Boaler.

Boaler also believes math teachers should not call on the first student that raises their hand with the answer to a math equation. She says it reinforces a misconception that you have to be fast with numbers to be good at math. "If I was to ask an adult to do a calculation, an area of the brain would light up that is seeing fingers," Dr. Jo Boaler "I like to share the stories of lots of math mathematicians who will openly talk about how slow they are with math," Boaler says some mathematicians thought they were stupid in school because speed was valued. It's ok to count with fingers Boaler also talks about the importance of visual thinking when working with numbers. She says everytime you think about math; there are five pathways in the brain that light up. Two of them are visual.

"If I was to ask an adult to do a calculation, an area of the brain would light up that is seeing fingers," even if you're not physically looking at your fingers, says Boaler. "For adults, how well they know they're fingers, predicts how well they'll do on calculation tests."

In Episode 121 of Class Dismissed we learn more about the tools Boaler offers educators through www.youcubed.org listen to the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

How do you navigate “fake news” with your students? Let’s face it. We live in a politically divided country. President Donald Trump often describes news stories as “fake news.” He’s listed the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN as the “enemy of the people,” and he’s on record saying that 80% of media is fake news.

So what responsibility do teachers have to reconcile these comments with students? And how do educators wade into the political turmoil without getting complaints from politically charged parents?

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Tackle fake news without being political “Lots of educators are afraid of having that talk,” says Jaquelyn Whiting. “And I understand why they’re afraid of having that talk.”

“I begin every conversation about media literacy by saying, while we are in the room together, we are not going to use the term ‘fake news’,”

Whiting is the co-author of News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News. She’s also a library media specialist at Wilton High School in Connecticut. Whiting has made it her mission to inform students and in some cases colleagues on how to identify media bias

“I begin every conversation about media literacy by saying, while we are in the room together, we are not going to use the term ‘fake news’,” Whiting says she’ll feel successful as an educator if she can remove the term from the students’ vocabulary.

“When that term is invoked. It tends to be invoked with the intention of shutting down dialogue.”

Whiting asks her students to think about three things when evaluating news.

Information – What’s happening
Misinformation – When someone tries to convey to you what’s happening and they make an unintentional mistake. You know the mistake was unintentional when they come back and write a retraction or clarification to correct the error.
Disinformation – When someone tries to convey incorrect information to you for their own personal gain.

Whiting says dividing news into these three categories allow her and her students have a quality conversation about how we understand the world.

“We can start to differently about the choices that journalist are making when they choose to print or not print something,’ says Whiting.

Whiting says that the political climate is what it is and we have to learn to operate in it productively.

In Episode 120 of Class Dismissed we talk in-depth with Whiting about how to help students become media literate by identifying native advertising, influencers, and media bias. To learn more listen to Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News

Most educators will agree that school is more than just teaching academics. It’s about teaching life lessons that prepare our children for the future.

In fact, we all make thousands of decisions a day. So shouldn’t we begin teaching the psychology of decision making to our students?

Our guest on Episode 119 of Class Dismissed is a former high school English teacher and the Senior Educational Content Designer for the Alliance for Decision Education. Jillian Hardgrove says they’re trying to help students recognize the need to make a decision, as well as develop skillful processes that are involved in making a decision.

“We have the attitude that it’s better to learn these things when you’re young and you have the opportunities to practice them, rather than waiting for something negative to happen,” says Hardgrove.

Hardgrove and her colleagues at the Alliance for Decision Education offer a few different programs and resources to educators.

HabitWise When students dream about their careers and life goals, it’s important they understand how habits can turn their dreams into reality or simply get in the way. HabitWise helps middle and high school students achieve their goals by teaching them how to create and track beneficial habits and crush problematic habits.

Mindful Choices Mindful Choices is a Social and Emotional Learning program that helps students manage stress and anxiety, increase self-control, and sustain attention.

To learn more about Decision Education listen to Episode 119 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

Softening the blow for new teachers In Episode 118 of Class Dismissed we talk with Chase Mielke about ways new teachers can keep their flame for educating ignited. After a decade of reflection Mielke compiled a list of what he calls his five “Passion Stokers” for educators.

Find a positive tribe
Curate the good, don’t hoard the bad
Forgive
Own your present and future
Craft your calling

Mielke, who has been teaching for over a decade in Michigan is quick to acknowledge that many teachers will fight burnout at some point and he believes much of that burnout will come from something other than students.

“The main cause I think stems from a lot of conflicts and perceptions that a are adult-driven rather than student-driven,” says Milke.

Mielke says a lack of autonomy or respect, colleague conflict, and struggles connecting with parents are leading causes of teacher burnout.

Practice what you preach Mielke, who authored “The Burnout Cure: Learning to Love Teaching Again”, says there was a time in his life that he considered quitting teaching himself.

He had been teaching for 8 years but he says he felt so bogged down by extra stuff. Ironically, he was teaching a positive psychology class and he decided to double down on what he was teaching. In a way, he was counseling himself when he was writing the “The Burnout Cure.”

“It was like, what were that things that have help me? What were the things that I’ve talked about a lot. And how do I put those in language that any teacher could use to help them reestablish their love.”

Much of Mielke’s notoriety in the education community stems from a blog and video he produced back in 2014.

The high school teacher and instructional coach found himself unable to sleep one night and wrote: “What students really need to hear.” The post has been read around 4 million times and the corresponding video (below) has been watched almost a million times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O7v4EJjx-g

To hear Mielke talk in depth about each of his five “passion stokers”, listen to Episode 118 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

The Burnout Cure: Learning to Love Teaching Again

Cybersecurity Incidents Strike Often A recent report highlighted on EdSurge says a new cybersecurity incident strikes K-12 schools nearly every three days. Now more than ever, school districts are reliant on using computers and servers to store student and employee data and burden of securing that data is a massive undertaking for educators.

For most districts, the challenge of protecting data is a chief responsibility for the director of technology. The person charged with guarding that data has to plan for attacks in several forms, which include but are not limited to.

Denial of Service Attacks
Phishing Scams
Ransomware

How to “mitigate” the problem? “The key is not complete containment. That is not possible,” says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. “The gold standard is mitigation.”

Davis has been working with school districts for over a decade and he says there are steps districts can take to reduce risk to a reasonable amount. Davis believes that districts need to have policies and plans in place to prevent extreme damage from cyberattack.

“What happens when there is a breach? What do we do?” Davis says these are the types of conversations districts should be having.

Don’t store student’s social security information Dane Conrad, who is the technical on-boarding specialist at SchoolStatus spent the past few decades serving as the Director of Technology for large school districts. Conrad says they quit storing student’s social security numbers in their SIS (Student Information Systems).

Conrad says criminals would love to have students social security numbers because those socials often go unchecked for foul play.

“If somebody steals my identity and they use my social security number. Typically I’ll fumble upon it. So I’ll see information being accessed on my credit card or my debit card,” says Conrad. “But for a student, they are not necessarily in that environment.”

Conrad says criminals could use that number for years before anyone realizes the damage.

Superintendents should ask their director of technology if they’re storing student socials anywhere on their servers. If so, find out why? Is it a necessity?

Educate about Phishing One of the most common ways districts are compromised comes from phishing attempts. This is typically when a fraudulent email tricks employees into handing over sensitive information. Often employees may be tricked into handing over their login credentials.

Conrad says it’s critical for districts to educate their staff about what a phishing attempt may look like.

He also recommends using a resource like knowbe4.com. He says they offer literature you can share with employees and they’ll even run phishing attempts to test the system and see where you may have vulnerabilities.

How to combat Denial Of Service Attacks A Denial of Service AKA DDOS attack occurs when multiple systems flood bandwidth or web servers. As a result, your schools network could be temporaily shutdown.

Davis says having a quality ISP (Internet Service Provider) can help prevent this. He says that good ISPs offer intrusion prevention and detection systems. He also suggests that districts should tighten up their firewall.

Frequent Backups to protect against Ransomware A district unprepared for a ransomware attack can be devastating. Ransomware can infect a computer system or server and block access to crucial data and files. The ransomware may quietly go through and encrypt a server until a ransom is paid.

So what do you do if one of your servers is encrypted with ransomware?

Davis says fixing it may make it worse. “First of all, mitigate the risk by disconnecting that device from the network.”

It’s important to isolate the risk and contain it before it infects the entire network.

Davis says one of the challenges is that most people don’t have any kind of detection mechanism. They don’t find out there’s an issue until employees start letting them know that they can’t access certain files.

This is where a great backup system can save you.

Davis says “If you can say we’re not paying the ransom. We’re just going to restore from last night’s back up,” you’re in great shape.

“But if you don’t have those policies and procedures to ensure getting a backup every night.” Davis says you’re in trouble.

You’ll most likely have to pay the ransom or risk losing those files.

You have a backup. Can you restore? Conrad notes that the joke has always been “a backup plan is only as good as your restore plan”

He says that you can have as many backups as you want, but if you can’t restore from them, you’re not helping yourself.

Conrad recommends that districts restore something every once and while just to make sure it works. He says the Privacy Technical Assistance Center is a great resource for learning best practives.

To hear our full interview about securing school district data, listen to Episode 91 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.

Other Tips * Have Enterprise management to manage update devices with the appropriate patches. * Upgrade your firewall – The new firewalls offer insight to what kind of traffic is running through the system.

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What is Inquiry-Based Learning? In Episode 116 we talk with Inquiry-Based Learning expert Trevor MacKenzie. MacKenzie has authored two books on the topic and just returned from an Australian Tour in which he was spreading the word about Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL).

For MacKenzie, IBL is all about getting the students to have a more active roll in the class and exploring students questions and curiosities as entry points into the curriculum.

“Sometimes that teacher is in the front of the room and leading the way so to speak,” says MacKenzie. “Sometimes that teacher is that guide along the ride. Someone who facilitating and supporting learnings.”

Makenzie, who trains educators around the globe on how to implement IBL says they’re trying to do is give the classroom experience over to the students. He says students should be able to take ownership of what they’re learning.

Where does an educator begin? Makenzie pushes for a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the student.

“I always start my unit design with a big overarching ‘Un-Googleable’ question and I make that question front and center in my classroom,” says MacKenzie.

He’s even built an info graphic where he models IBL like a swim coach teaching someone to swim. He even hangs the picture in the classroom for his students to see and he encourages teachers to download and print the picture for their own classrooms.

MacKenzie is also really big on provocation. He shows students a lot of videos tied to their curriculum to spark interest and curiosity, but he’s ultimately determining wha questions his students have around the curriculum.

Want to learn more? Mackenzie has authored two books on the topic. He says if you teach middle school or high school “Dive into Inquiry” is for you. If you teach younger students you may want to read “Inquiry Mindset.”

To hear our full conversation about Inquiry-Based Learning with Trevor MacKenzie, listen to Episode 116 on your favorite podcasting app or iTunes.

All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2019

Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice

Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders, and Curiosities of Our Youngest Learners

“The start of something big” When most students attend a university to get a medical, nursing, or pharmacy degree, they typically participate in a residency program. So it should come as no surprise to hear that Universities around the country are now testing similar programs for teachers.

Over the next several years, Dr. Ben Burnett, of Williams Carey University, will be piloting a teacher residency program in South Mississippi.

Dr. Ben Burnett. Dean, School of Education, William Carey University

“Doesn’t it make sense that somebody taking care of our children would go out and do a residency within the school building and see what that’s like?” says Burnett.

Burnett knows that a teacher residency program won’t just better prepare future teachers; he believes it will improve teacher retention.

He says the nation is down 35% in undergraduate teacher education over the last decade. But this year WCU is experiencing a 25% spike.

“We’re hoping to be on the start of something big.”

With the teacher shortage the way it is in Mississippi and throughout the country. Burnett is optimistic that better training could help combat the national teacher shortage.

“Even if we don’t produce more teachers, which I hope we’ll do. We’ll have better retention,” says Burnett.

When do undergrads move to the classroom? Students can apply for the residency once they’ve completed two years of course work. The undergraduates at WCU are integrated into two participating school districts on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The program at WCU is in conjunction with the Mississippi Department of Education and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The residency offers two major selling points for students.

Students get their foot in the door at a solid school district
The grant from the Kellogg foundation covers their tuition for two years

“That will also help the longevity of the teachers,” says Burnett. ” If you have a lot of outstanding student loans, it’s difficult to pay those back on a teachers salary.”

Burnett says students lined up to enroll in the program and they had somewhere between 200 and 300 applications.

Is the program sustainable? Burnett knows the grant money may not be available forever, but he’s optimistic that the program is sustainable, with or without having the cost of tuition covered. He says that educating with residency programs allows for local school districts to “grow their own.”

As Dean of the School of Education at WCU, Burnett is putting serious thought into educating all teacher undergraduates with some form of a residency program.

“I think the future of teacher education needs to be less inside our buildings and more inside of a school,” says Burnett.

To learn more about the structure of the residency program, listen to Episode 115 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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Lay a foundation with your students on day one On the first day or two of school, it can be tempting to want to lay the ground rules. You know, set the expectations about workload, go over the rules, and fill out required forms. But Rick Wormeli wants to challenge educators to think differently this year.

Wormeli, who is one of the first Nationally Board Certified Teachers in America, says that students want to know that you’re going to transcend their current condition and help them aspire to something more than they are.

“And when all they [students] get is more rules and regulations they realize one more year where there’s nothing here for me.”

Wormeli recommends laying a foundation of meaningful relationships with students by mixing in activities that allow you to get to know and understand where the students are coming from.

Wormeli recently listed ways this can be accomplished in a recent article he penned for AMLE, and he elaborates on those ideas in Episode 114 of the Class Dismissed podcast.

Wormeli’s beginning of the year ideas “The Best Way for You to Learn” Cards Using index cards, teachers can ask students to describe how they best learn that particular subject.

“Kids are candid,” says Wormeli. “They will say things like, look if it’s really important, write it on the board.” Or he says some students may ask you not to assign online assignments because their sibling always hogs the computer.

“I’ve got a stack that I rubber band and I look through that as I try to decide what I’m going to do next,” Wormeli says kids will say some really cool things and give him lots of examples.

Letters to the Teacher from Students as their Parents When students write under a pseudonym, they feel much more free to speak their mind, says Wormeli.

“When I get what they say about themselves, and then I get what they think their parents would say about themselves, I’m getting a really fleshed version of the child,” says Wormeli. “When someone is fully dimensionalized, you really care a heck of a lot more.

Six-Word Memoirs “I love six-word memoirs!” says Wormeli. They really make kids come out of their shell and say profound things.

The brilliance of six word memoirs is the brevity, teachers can use six-word memoirs as their students examine the content. “It really reveals a lot more about what the student is thinking.”

Wormeli says he often has students continue to send six-word memoirs after class about sports or pop culture.

To hear more from Rick Wormeli, listen to Episode 114 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

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