Transformative Principal

Welcome to Transformative Principal, where I help you stop putting out fires and start leading.

I'm your host, Jethro Jones.

You can follow me on Twitter at Jethro Jones.

Okay.

Welcome to Transformative Principal.

I am so excited to have on the program Michael Toth, who's the founder and CEO of instructional empowerment.

And we're gonna talk about some awesome things about how to improve school for everybody.

We're gonna talk about how we'd lied to everybody during the pandemic and, uh, told them school is optional.

Um, or rather, lemme rephrase that.

We're gonna talk about how.

The pandemic changed things.

We had been lying to students and they suddenly learned during the pandemic that school is optional.

And guess what?

They have not forgotten that lesson.

There are a lot of other things that we have done and there's a way to fix it and to make things better.

So I hope you enjoy this conversation about how to do that, and I look forward to you learning from Michael Toth.

Here we go.

Also, this is one of those things where Michael and I just started talking, so I just hit record.

That's how it goes sometimes.

This was a good episode.

Enjoy.

let's set the stage just a little bit, um, because as, as I mentioned, the, the real challenge that we face is that technology can do things better than humans.

And if it's just about teaching the very basic academic stuff.

That's all the education is about then?

Yes.

Uh, I think that technology, we should turn it over to technology to teach our students, but teaching is about so much more than that.

So what would you say to that, Michael?

I, I would first of all agree teaching so much more than that.

So I, first thing I, I, a question I like to ask educators is, is this about, is education about.

Educating or developing students, which,

Mm.

and you can't, I have never been in a situation where somebody hasn't said both.

And as soon as you say development, what are we developing?

We're developing character self-control.

We're developing communication, problem solving skills.

These, it is not just content acquisition and retrieval.

And as soon as we get into the development conversation, computers are.

They, they're, they're the opposite of, of the human experience and the real concern when you study neuroscience, and my co-author of my last book, the Power Student Teams, was David Sousa and David's very famed neuroscience, uh, expert, is we really went down the path of what's scaring us is that.

Where kids are on screen so much, they're becoming moving from being human-centric development to computer centric or device centric development.

And so we have empathy loss.

We also have brain matter loss, which is

On just a

Sure.

come back to the brain matter loss, but talk about that device centric development.

What is, what does that mean and how is that different?

Device centric development is similar to addiction.

That it's triggering the dopamine pathways.

I mean, this is exactly what social media and gaming actually programs for.

And what you find is Silicon Valley pushed, uh, private equity, pushed venture capital, pushed technology to kids.

Is bringing what the game-based learning and, and it's the same process here, is that it's high stimulation, but it's not.

Learning is not its own reward.

It's the game.

And so what you're doing is actually developing some negative, uh, consequences to that.

We're having eroded communication skills.

We are having.

Epidemic of anxiety with today's students, and that's because of the amount of screen time.

Uh, we are finding that brain loss in around the areas of the brain necessary in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex around, uh, reading comprehension, particularly deep learning.

Deep reading.

Well, these are really important skills.

And so the more we outsource our tier one, the computer based learning, the more we descale teachers and not invest in, in really powerful pedagogy for deeper learning.

And that's, that's my argument.

And we, that's what our research center studies is a model of instruction for deep learning.

Because our legacy system is, uh, was PR.

I know I'm being a little random here, but let me go back and talk about this.

'cause I, I think it's really interesting.

Where, where did our legacy model of teacher centric instruction come from?

When was it popular rise?

I mean, you could argue it was always there, but.

Yeah, but you know, I think about the way that, um.

were taught in the ancient times, like Plato, Aristotle, that area.

It was through, uh, discussion, through talking

Exactly.

with a, with a tutor, um, a, a mentor if you will.

There's been a lot of talk about, um, it, the geniuses of the 16th, 17th, and 18th century all had tutors that were working with them one-on-one.

It wasn't until, I would say, probably late 18 hundreds when we really got to this current system of one teacher as a source of all authority with 30 kids in front of her.

Sometimes in a one room schoolhouse, sometimes broken up into grade levels, but that's, that's, that's where I it.

Our, our modern.

System actually is, is really formed.

When we went from that one room schoolhouse, which served an agricultural economy and agricultural workers, most people worked on farms to the industrial age.

So it was pre right in the early industrial age when we started getting schools as we know them today, and the pedagogy that we know today, and it was around control.

Same as it is today.

Teachers, the dominant provider of knowledge, students are in a dependent directed state most of the time.

And there, you know, there's a range of that that's, that's more severe, less severe.

Uh, but that's the predominant way pedagogy is taught today that, that we.

That fountain of knowledge ends up being the teacher and the students are developing skills to sit in the chair, have enough self-regulation to be able to listen, and then something happened at the pandemic and we keep waiting for kids to go back.

They're never going back.

They changed and what it, they didn't change.

It's an acceleration of the change that was happening anyway.

Right, because when you talk to teachers about how this negative behavior misbehavior has been been happening, it really accelerated after the pandemic.

But it was there before.

And if you looked at the teacher satisfaction surveys, you see that trend line that just accelerated dramatically.

We put kids on computers constantly.

We remove them from human interaction during the pandemic.

And they have absolutely changed and the the new ones coming up are also changed.

So go back.

When was the first smartphone released?

The iPhone in 2007, but it was expensive.

was born.

It was expensive, so a lot of kids didn't get it.

But it's ubiquitous now.

So we, our teachers today have the first generation that was raised on the super addictive devices and social media.

They have all the male development in the brain that has come with that.

And there's something called, uh, device parenting.

And again, we're, we're not making a judgment on it.

I get it.

I mean, if you're in a restaurant and there's a couple toddlers really outta control what the parents used to do, they used to correct them.

They used to, to have them exercise self-control, speak respectfully, teach them boundaries.

Instead they give 'em an iPad and that, you know, it's like magic.

It works like the whole restaurant's like, yay.

Uh.

But they didn't learn those skills.

Those skills were not exercised.

So what we have today is that rolls into the classroom.

So the misbehavior is simply a lack of development.

That's what it is.

So teachers go.

I can, if I can go back a second there, there's another thing that that happened during the pandemic that we, we have to confront also.

And this speaks to the issue of control, and you're talking about behavior and behavior is not an issue unless the kids are not doing what you want them to, which is what the issue is really here, and especially in our schools.

But the other thing that happened during the pandemic is that we, our, our students learned that we've been lying about everything for so long.

We said, tests are super important, school is super important, and then we just canceled everything all across the world.

For, for what?

To them was not going to harm them because it wasn't, it, it harmed older people and those people work in our schools, and I'm not saying that that was like to, to do that.

What I'm saying is our kids experienced something.

Everything they told were told was important.

We could cancel in a heartbeat.

And this thing that was not going to hurt them most likely, uh, was the cause of it.

And just like that we told them that we lied about it all and every kid who was alive at that time understood that.

And they are teaching that to their peers, whether or not they can articulate it, that is exactly what happened.

So I'm gonna frame it just slightly differently.

I think what it taught parents and students is schools optional.

And that's why we have chronic atten attendance issues.

Schools optional.

I grew up, did you get a personal day?

Was there a mental health day when you were growing up?

You could say, parent, I wanna stay home today.

absolutely

is common now.

It is common now.

Uh.

It.

So my, my point of this is that what teachers are facing in the classroom is literally a different student and we can see it in, in the brain scans.

It's fascinating to study it that change over time.

The narrow science on male development due to excessive screen time, which includes ed tech by the way.

It's all screen time.

It is not.

As bad, obviously as, um, excessive screen time with short, short videos, TikTok, whatnot, that, that super addictive form.

But when you're on a screen, I don't care what you're doing, let's say a tech, you know what's not developing

all the human skills, all the human side, and that is going to produce a graduate.

That is going to go out with male development of that human side.

And we have a massive problem of lack of empathy in society today in part because of this.

So, you know, to build that back in is we have to have relationships.

We have to have, uh, like I talked about this.

Students today growing up with massive anxiety when, so this is, this is this dichotomy.

We're the most connected society ever in history and the most lonely society in history.

We don't eat together, we don't talk together, we don't make eye contact together.

And it's awkward for young people to do so, particularly when they're outside of a a small peer group.

But these are life skills.

The other thing that's happened is that the media's become so addictive and so hyper, um, bringing you in and you have such a choice on what you, you do that kids talk about having to power down in the classroom 'cause it's so disengaging.

It's almost painful for them to sit in a chair and listen to a teacher because they're different.

I didn't have that problem.

I got bored, but I sat there and behaved because you had to.

Mm-hmm.

was the expectation.

That is not the expectation today.

It's a different society.

It's more permissive parenting.

I'm not judging it, but that spills into the classroom.

My whole point of this is that teachers have been underinvested in and ill-equipped with a legacy pedagogy to engage today's students.

We have found today's students incredibly smart and capable.

They do have, uh, developmental deficits that we didn't have before, and school has to recognize that and we have to change.

So when we work with teachers with this pedagogy for deeper learning, and it is a very specific research-based pedagogy that gets just crazy learning gains.

So we started this as a research center, like how do we get kids to engage in high level critical thinking, independent of the teacher leading their own learning?

How do we get students so engaged?

They engage in a high level discourse and argumentation, and they stay in emotional control.

Why they do it and they develop empathy and care for each other.

That goal is absolutely achievable, but not today's pedagogy.

We have found that we had to create structures and norms and different classroom management.

You plan your lesson different.

The teacher has to move from director to facilitator to coach if they're during an extended task time.

And what we found is that misbehavior went down dramatically.

Teacher satisfaction went up, achievement gaps closed for all reporting categories, all reporting categories.

Uh, and the students had a better experience, but what the students were reporting is they have meaningful relationships with the students in their teams.

They have new friend groups.

The attendance went up, enrollment went up.

We weren't even factoring those things in, but you know, why they started coming to school more?

'cause they didn't wanna let their team know.

It's just, um.

It changed the life of the teachers that went through this.

We have such great videos of teachers talking about how this is reinvigorating them.

Teaching became a joy again.

The students are leaving tired, more tired than they are, and that hasn't happened in a long time.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's, it's so fascinating because I did this at my, at the last middle school that I was principal of, and we, we forced them.

To change by, by doing things a little bit different and what we had to do, the thing that that made it click for our teachers was we took students out of the general class time and we put them in a different time period and said.

This time, which we called Synergy is how we did it.

And we, we helped teachers go from being a sage on the stage, which is what the legacy system was, to

right.

on the side, which they could do.

And we helped coach them through that during, during the time to a compass.

And that was the, that's the phrasing that I use, that you be a compass among the students so that you're not the one who's saying this is what has to be accomplished.

You're saying here's the North Star.

And when kids.

where the North Star is, then they can determine their own path about where to get, what to do, to get to where they need to be with support of the teacher.

And the other thing that I imagine your teachers probably say also is that.

Not was teaching more fun, but it was actually significantly easier

Hmm.

you weren't spending all your time making these things that the kids were gonna hate, that you were gonna have to fight with them about you.

Instead, were spending your time answering specific questions, supporting students in the things they were interested in, so that when you came back as a teacher with a solution, the kids were like, oh, that's great.

Why didn't I think of that?

I'm gonna go do that right now.

And figure out how to do it myself, which is so much more fun as a teacher.

We all go into education for those light bulb moments, but our current system does not allow us to ever have those because no kid's gonna have a light bulb moment from on a, uh, on a tool that, you know, just quizzes them constantly or on an ed tech tool or, uh, just sitting there doing a worksheet.

And, and that's, that's the beauty of, of what this thing developed for our teachers.

And I'm sure something similar with your teachers.

A hundred percent.

Um, what, what we're studying is how to do this at scale and how to do it.

Uh, so there's always been outlier teachers that have done this.

So we, we need to acknowledge, there's always been great teaching.

But it tends to be in more pockets of more wealthy students, middle class, upper middle class students that have access to AP courses and so forth.

That's where you tend to see it.

Then you get into, uh, you know, your general track and you're like, okay, why don't we see all classrooms like that?

Why don't we see classrooms like.

That predominantly in schools that serve black and brown students, low socioeconomic status, students Title one schools.

But that's what we study.

How do you scale that?

And we have done this with Title one school after Title one school after Title one school.

'cause our, our social mission at instructional empowerment, and it comes from my experiences of being raised in poverty, is that to end generational poverty through strengthening tier one instruction.

And we believe that's the key.

The key.

It's not, you cannot intervention your way to proficiency.

You must strengthen tier one.

And it has to be rigorous.

It has to be student led, and it has to develop students while we're educating students by giving them the agency skills that they need.

A traditional classroom.

A teacher-centered classroom actually suppresses the development of agency.

When you look at the research, the research is creating an autonomy supported learning environment and, um, self-determination theory.

There's all kinds of, of really interesting theories behind this work that are very deep.

It's how humans are, are wired.

They have to have voice and choice.

They have to learning rote memorization is boring.

There's some you have to do.

You have to know your times tables, you have to have certain things, facts that you're fluent with.

But what is fascinating to kids is debating how to apply it.

Transferring what knowledge from one discipline to the next, and seeing the inner relationships to understand how the world works.

And what we find is they will debate and argue that for.

And they are just enthralled by it.

The teachers are just like setting back and orchestrating that.

They're like, wow.

Wow.

And it, it, it is relatively easy to get this going once you know the structures.

Uh, but what, go ahead.

about those structures

Mm-hmm.

what do we need to be implementing to make this happen.

So our research shows that that unstructured groups creates uneven learning.

The worst type of group that you can form is a, um, ability group.

Uh, we, our research is incredibly clear.

You have to have mixed ability teams, not groups.

Teams require in their dependent tasks.

So they have to work together.

Um.

They have to have discussion protocols.

They have to have norms, team norms, and they have to have roles.

So we have team member facilitator learning monitors, our basic role package to get started, but then you have to feed curricular resources and rigor to that.

And what we're looking for is something called productive struggle.

So productive struggles when kids, it's not boring.

It's not actually struggle at all.

It means they have to work with each other to get to the solution because they're not on easy task anywhere.

There no worksheet in this learning environment.

No worksheets and unproductive struggle happens when you give a rigorous test to a bunch of kids that do not have the strategies on how to form little peer learning support.

So what we do is we give a toolbox of strategies to students so they can work together to move from unproductive to productive struggle, which means the learning's moving forward, unproductive struggle, the learning's not moving forward, and they don't know how to get unstuck.

We coach teachers on whenever that happens, how to get them unstuck quickly without giving the answer.

Keep the students in an inquiry mode through that process and.

Yeah, and here's the magic with it.

Why mixed ability groups?

We want students with IEPs, with students without, we want English language learners with, uh, native speakers gifted and talented with everybody else.

Why?

Because they share background knowledge.

And so the big thing that our flawed accountability system.

Shows you can predict test results by the wealth of zip codes.

Well, what, what makes a wealth of a zip code different?

Yes, there's enhanced structures typically to support schooling.

Wealthier parents, higher tutors do tutoring.

They provide structures, but they speak with different vocabularies.

They have different exposures, background knowledge.

So what tests pick up is a lot of background knowledge and support from home.

We think it's tier one, but often what we find is the tier one's pretty much very similar between a lower performing, a higher performing school.

The students are different, the background knowledge is different, the support's different, uh, and the discipline, et cetera is different.

So they're, they're figuring out, you know what our.

Goal when we're working with students that don't come with a lot of well-developed agency yet.

So I wanna be very clear.

All students of all races, backgrounds, religions, cultures, genders, identities have equal potential to develop high agency skills.

Not all have equal opportunity to develop those skills.

Skills.

I mean, I came from poverty.

I get it.

What a lot of that growing up in a trailer park, you know, it's, it's different, right?

Uh, you're learning agency, but you're learning very different agency than what we call student agency.

So we have to develop those skills.

So we provide the structures for students to be able to work together.

'cause they may not know how to do that, how to de deescalate conflict.

'cause they will have conflict when you get into content discourse.

And you can't take it personal to depersonalizes.

We teach these our code agency skills and students develop really rapidly.

Now, they may not get these at home where you could have, if you're in a blessed situation where you have an AP classroom and.

Kids already coming from Advantage households, you can just start going into some of these methods.

But everywhere else, we have to actually build that foundation.

And once we get that foundation where they learn how to self-regulate with each other, how to peer regulate something called collective efficacy starts taking, manifesting.

Wow, do we see that sense of belonging and they just start taking off?

So we're doing two things.

We are developing students, we're very intent on developing these agency skills while we're using that and leveraging it to develop the cognitive or the, the, uh, academic skills.

And you can't separate those two and school separates them all the time.

We take these kids that, that come from lower socioeconomic status and uh, we put 'em in high control environments and think PBIS is going to be enough and it isn't.

I can tell you story after story where we go into schools and they, I always am like, what's your number one issue?

So these are historically lower performing schools.

What is the issue?

And they say, behavior.

Alright, let's go walk classrooms.

Guess what?

It's not behavior.

It's boring instruction.

Amen.

And that

And so they're, they're misbehaving.

But because of that, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I.

Well, that's the key is that we think that the, the symptoms we see are the cause of the, of the symptoms and they're not.

We see kids misbehaving and we think behavior is a problem, but really.

Your kids are bored outta their minds and they don't want to be there, and

And these, today's kids get bored easily.

They are different.

We, I was bored, by the way, but I sat there and took it because you had to.

And if you got a note home to your teacher Yeah, it wasn't fun at home.

That's, it's a different situation today.

You, you correct a child.

The parent might be coming back after you as a teacher, right.

Different world today.

So one of the things

that I want to go back to what you were saying is, is this idea of the, the power of shared background knowledge and how that, is really powerful and that is, that is something that we have tried to through tier one instruction tried to solve by just giving everybody that information.

is, is that if you just, if you just put the information out there and say, here it is, kids, just because a kid is present in your class doesn't mean that they're actually going to learn what you're teaching.

And, and the reason why I bring this up is that we think that we are doing a good job.

And, and, and the way that I have, have put this together in my mind is that if you are not taking action.

Then you're not going to learn.

So if you are not taking action in the learning process, which as you're talking about would be having this discussion with your peers, with your team, and having a role in doing something.

Then you're not you.

We can't be sure that you're going to learn it, but if you have to discuss the issue and give your perspective or give your background knowledge, then that is a thing that helps you know that somebody is learning.

If they're passively receiving everything, a teacher lecture or just filling out a worksheet that's not action on their part, student has to take action in order for that learning to actually sink in and be part of it.

What would you say to that?

Uh, what a hundred percent.

So what we find is that teachers often, uh, conflate teaching with learning, but they're two separate processes.

One, the teacher does one, the student does one.

And if the, if you set up the classroom correctly, and again, this is a flaw of our his.

Historical way.

We have taught pedagogy to teachers, not teachers' fault.

To me, teachers are heroes.

They're working far too hard with an antiquated pedagogy that's not equipped for today's students.

But what you have to do is start right sizing the lecture.

And giving extended learning time to students where they are engaged with each other around a rigorous task.

And you have to get curricular high quality curricular resources, uh, complex text into their hand and getting them digging into it with really good inquiry questions.

Unless you do that.

And, and then you, you have the mixed ability.

So let me talk about the mixed ability and background knowledge and give you a couple examples.

So in the average math class, uh, and this is a, a fact, uh, shared with me with the famous Dylan William, who's just brilliant.

I enjoy working with Dylan.

Um, the average math classroom has five to six different grade levels of ability.

That's just normal today.

So that's a lot to ask for a teacher to try to personalize.

This is another reason why they falsely, in my opinion, wanna put kids on computers to personalize that when the reality is a team can do that so much better.

So when you do a mixed ability team there, there's students stronger and not as strong in math on the same one.

But so math is procedural.

You may not be able to do the equation simply because you don't have some of the previous.

Uh, procedures down, but somebody does and they start tutoring each other and working through it, sharing that, and they socialize that background knowledge much better than the teacher does at the small group table.

Much better 'cause they're able to personalize and, and break it down for each other.

They're quite amazing at at, at peer tutoring.

Honest to goodness.

And the teachers still can pull during the lesson, kids that, that are still struggling into a small table and, and remediate it up quickly.

But they just get a little frustrated.

You pull 'em out of the team, they wanna be back with their team, then take, uh, reading comprehension.

So once we have, you know, they can decode and are fluent and emmic awareness of phonics, we got to get them into.

To first of all where they need to be in nonfiction texts that build background knowledge.

Like this is essential.

You know, when I went to school is all fiction, holy K 12 fiction, uh, where you've learned out of the reading sciences that we have to build background knowledge through text.

And so there's.

Pretty famed research study called the Baseball Story.

And so they had students that were really good at reading comprehension and those that struggled in reading comprehension and they gave 'em a pretty technical piece on baseball.

Uh, so it was not gonna be easy to read.

The kids that had good reading comprehension skills, they did fine with it.

The kids that struggled, there were two groups, those who.

Played baseball and those who didn't, those who played baseball but struggled, did extraordinary under reading comprehension.

Well, they didn't come masterful readers overnight.

What was it?

They got the vocabulary, they had the background knowledge, they could make sense of the piece and they could read it more deeply.

Now, when you go, that's all, all done individually.

So when you put that into a team, somebody's gonna have more background knowledge on that piece.

And they get to share that and, and socialize that experience.

That's the discourse you have to have around text.

I get so frustrated when I am in, uh, see these really small clicked pieces of text, so they're not very deep anyway.

They might be.

Technically complex or grade level, but they're just not deep enough to build background knowledge and kids surface learning, diagramming and whatnot like they're that.

You just took it to a retrieval level, something that's a rich content building.

We want kids to practice precise vocabulary in their argumentation and discourse.

This is essential.

It's one of building background knowledge, and building vocabulary is essential to closing gaps.

Academic gaps, and particularly reading comprehension.

I think after the NATE data, you saw it, 70% of the United States children are not proficient in reading comprehension.

70%. We went backwards since the pandemic because again, kids have changed.

Their brains are rewired because of this constant exposure to high engagement, high dopamine level.

So you short video.

So when we were kids, I'm older than you, so I'll say, when I was a kid, we actually watched full length movies.

Kids get little TikTok sections of movies with no real plot.

They're just the action sequences or, or the interesting sequences.

Or they get a hyper condensed plot because there are a lot of great storytellers who are telling stories in six to 60 seconds, which, which is a valuable skill as well.

But it goes back to that piece of it is not.

Deep enough, and it's not forcing you to connect things from an hour ago that you saw as, as this foreshadowing point to say, oh, that's why that was in the movie.

And, and that is a, a very true, uh, different perspective that, that we're not responding to either.

Exactly.

So this is where, where the research in neuroscience is going is.

Short duration sequence of videos is eroding the deeper reading comprehension.

Uh, and so you can build it back.

So here's the great thing about, about children that's different than adults.

By age 25, our brain's mature, uh, which is roughly when the insurance rates are dropping, particularly for males.

Um, when a child is first born.

And neurosciences have studied the brain worldwide.

When a child's first born, they have about a hundred million, uh, brain cells, uh, sounds like a lot.

It's actually very small.

Every 60 seconds of new life, it's 60 seconds every one minute.

Just fathom this.

They're generating 250 to 500 million new brain cells.

That's why the head grows faster and, and, and babies, and that's why they're probably hungry and cranky all night long.

Um, but they don't have many narrow connections.

So the, again, this has all been studied.

They scan children's brains, but by the age three, right, they're speaking, they're walking, they have 1000 trillion connections because they've looked.

Uh, the brain's a neuroplasticity learning machine.

You didn't have to, they just, they will learn and get smarter by aging and experience.

So they have something that the human brain doesn't have the ability to form their brain, so their environment will form their brain.

Teachers can shape.

The development of the children's brain in our classroom.

So this has been studied, this was studied around, um, phonemic awareness.

Those who taught it developed the explicitly, and those who dentist goes back to the reading wars of, of yesteryear still going on.

Uh.

And those that taught the phonemic awareness developed and he scanned the brain before and after of these children, and this was at National Institutes of Health.

Reliant did a lot of directed this research.

I had an opportunity to work with him,

and what was fascinating is that the teachers that taught those strategies, the phonological centers of the brain, developed.

Teachers that did not teach those strategies, pH like phonological centers, the brain did not develop.

What gets exercised in a growing brain gets developed.

This is essential to understand because this is how you level up.

So we see it on a test, but in a neuroscience scan, we're seeing it in the brain.

Right.

So it's, it's about brain development.

So lemme go back to these babies that are, are, are born.

One of the things that neuroscience likes to study is the cerebral cortex.

That's the wrinkly outer layer of what we typically visualize is the brain.

That's where the heavy reasoning is done, and that's the part that takes the tests, you know, so it's really, really important, particularly for the independent critical thinking questions.

It is the exact same size.

Scan.

Children all around the world, there is no difference by race, gender, religion, culture, no difference.

This is really profound 'cause it's not genetic.

This is, but by school age, they scan the brains and now there's a gap in cerebral cortex development.

So the neuroscientists studied it.

And they studied intensely.

They got it down to one factor and one factor only.

Wealth of the family.

That's it.

So you know what, it comes back down.

Background knowledge that we've been talking about, the environment that works, that brain or our nutrition and other aspects to this.

But that's the big one.

So when I come back to the example, I showed you teachers that require the brain to work more.

Develop that brain, like productive struggle is really important.

So think about this, when you go to a gym, if you lift the same weight all the time, do you get stronger?

No.

You know, there's these annoying people go personal trainers.

They're like, okay, you, you got there now let me add five more pounds.

They're like, oh, now it's hard again.

But you know, in a week or two it's not hard anymore.

Then they add a little bit more.

Or they make you run a little bit, few more minutes, and then they teach you some technique.

The brain is very similar.

It needs productive struggle to develop worksheets.

Do not do that.

Do not do that.

They have to gauge in debate.

They have to be able to have complex.

And deeper thinking around the text.

We have to create that.

So we find the students that need this development the most are often denied rigor the most, and I think it comes from a couple places.

One of it is a misguided con.

Go ahead.

they, the, I think is close to what you're gonna go into, but it's not that they are denied rigor, it's that they are given a false sense of what rigor is and, and told that rigor is something that it's not.

So if you would what you were saying, but define what that rigor really looks like because rigor is not harder.

Questions more work.

Rigor is something different.

How would you answer that?

Well, I'm gonna bring it back to productive struggle.

So you, but you're correct.

It's not more memorization, that's not rigor.

That's just makes kids more bored and not like school.

It's definitely not Stacks homework.

It is the complexity of the task.

It's the complexity of the thinking that the task re requires us to engage in.

So that, to make that really simple, they can use Web's taxonomy, Bloom's taxonomy, Marzano's Taxonomy of Learning objectives.

Uh, I, I'm a research partner with Marzano, so we, I use his taxonomy, uh, and, and what we do when first thing we walk into classrooms when we're doing a rigor walk and a rigor walk is, is really, really powerful.

It's the nation's most researched based, uh, walk for measuring rigor in the classroom.

Um.

And you can find that if they wanna learn more about it on instructional empowerment.com.

But what what's powerful about this is the first thing we do is we walk in, we wanna see what's the level of the standard, what's the level of the thinking in the standard?

Do we see it in the task?

Then what's most important and what's most predictive?

Because we do item analysis all the time.

So does this predict test scores is what's the level of thinking the students are engaged in?

So what we'll find is the curriculums at a higher level.

Teachers tend to lower the task below the standard, and then the students lower.

It's even lower in the student work.

So the curriculums are actually pretty good today.

But we have this massive drop off and, and we have the drop off for a number of reasons.

One of them is ruinous empathy.

Ruinous empathy is misguided concept that these kids struggle so much and they're so deprived.

I don't want them to engage in struggle in my classroom.

So I make a happy comforting.

So, you know, aspects of that are fine, but.

You're not developing the brain, you're not leveling them up.

They have to engage in productive struggle.

Productive struggle requires you just like a personal trainer to set the task slightly above your current level of your kids, not at the level you need them to engage and reach and work harder.

We're not asking 20 pounds, we're asking that five pound personal trainer that we're adding it incrementally.

So rigor is somewhat relative to where your kids are, but you're moving it forward.

Our goal is to get 'em into productive struggle and then give 'em a structure where they can share the background knowledge and debate.

And when we do that, we're developing their agency because they have to exercise their emotions as they're doing this.

And they are exercising their brain as they're doing this.

So we're developing academics with, uh, agency skills.

It's, it's amazing at how fast students develop it.

I mean, it is blazingly fast because again, it's, if you can see it in the brain, the brain's literally developing, they're adding all these brain cells.

Remember I talked about what a newborn.

It's like crazy, like the amount of brain cells, but when they're our age, it's 700 or less brain cells a day.

Not a minute a day, it's just replacement.

But these kids are actually growing their centers of their brain.

So if we give 'em the right learning environment, so let me put it this way, the brain will develop to the demand of the learning environment.

Yeah.

Low rigor learning environments do not benefit children, particularly children that don't get those exposures at home.

yeah, so one of the things that, um, that teachers, uh, complain about when asked to do things like this is that I, I only have so much time in the day.

Mm-hmm.

have so much content to get through.

And this takes longer because it does take longer than just saying, here's the question, here's the answer.

Fill out the worksheet.

It definitely takes longer so.

I know like my first response is the kids learn way more than you could ever capture because they love to do it and they love to learn and everybody does, and they just hate school.

But number one, uh, they learn way more than you could imagine.

But why else is this worthwhile to do when, when the time investment is significantly greater?

So what we, we have to step back and think about.

If you look at state by state, by their standards, and this has been approximated, it takes 25 years to cover today's standards.

It's not possible.

So first of all, this idea we have to cover all the standards is a physically flawed.

Concept.

Uh, so when I work with curriculum offices, identify the focus or priority standards and the supporting standards, minimize your time on the supporting standards and really focus on where it brings it all together.

That's where your deeper learning is.

Uh, and you don't spend equal time.

That's pacing.

Guys are typically antiquated.

It.

Uh, and for teachers, we should empower teachers by making curricular decisions for them, not relying on the teachers to make those decisions.

But if we're working with PLCs and teacher planning, that's exactly what we do.

And what we will find is the test better, they will test better if they can independently think about the content.

And so it's about, the neuroscience is a little wonky, but what you're.

It is very hard to get memorization from short term to long term memory.

You have to practice it over and over and over, and that's our, our, our, our crazy test prep right now.

They just, it's all retrieval level.

It, it, it, it's just grinding kids through and, and it is boring and is really boring to today's kids, particularly when they can pick up a smartphone and ask Siri.

Or chat GPT and it can bring up recall so fast.

You don't even need it in your brain as much as you used to it.

It's an antiquated, the whole thing's antiquated.

What we need is complex learning.

You do need a certain amount of foundational knowledge to do that.

We, we would agree with that.

And you get that through reading complex text.

You get that through the discussion.

You get that through the inquiry.

So kids wanna dig in more.

If we're gonna use ai, AI should be a research tool.

I'm not producing summaries of text so they don't have to read.

That's the wrong and interesting research on AI with college students is the more they use it, the more it shrinks their hippocampus.

Like it's actually pretty fast because if you don't use a muscle, you put a muscle in a cast for a year, you have to do physical therapy to get it back.

It atrophies.

It doesn't stay the same.

If you outsource your critical thinking to AI all the time,

you're gonna, that part will begin the atrophy of the brain.

That's what we know.

It'll actually trim those, those areas that aren't being used.

So we want the critical thinking part, staying with the student, but you know, some of the main mundane lit reviews and all that kind of stuff.

AI can absolutely help make that better.

You still have to check it.

Uh, but AI should not be writing the papers.

We should not allow that to happen.

We should make sure students are doing it.

The only time I think that is beneficial is when they're critiquing and evaluating different AI engines and what they're producing, just to see the errors.

I think that, but again, the human is doing the thinking here.

Yep.

do not wanna outsource the thinking.

You outsource the thinking.

You're outsourcing the brain development, and that's the anti-education.

Yep.

It's like outsourcing the uh.

Exercise and the sports playing

Yeah.

If you hire somebody to go to the gym for you, what benefit did you get?

yeah, you certainly didn't, but that person got double benefit.

Well, AI will keep getting smarter if you know.

right.

If anybody wants to hire me to go to the gym for them, I'm happy to do it.

Um, so, uh, the last thing I want to ask you is, uh, we've talked about a lot of stuff and had a great conversation.

I've really enjoyed it.

does a principal start?

What should a principal do this week to be a Transformative Principal?

To be a Transformative Principal, we should start looking at a couple things.

And again, they can come to our, our website, we have a lot of free tools.

They, they can start looking at a lot of videos.

First of all, who's doing the work?

When you walk in the classrooms just stop at the door.

Who's working harder?

The teacher or the student whose voice is dominant.

The teacher of the student who's using the resources.

The teacher or the student,

how do you flip that?

And, and, and really my encouragement is we've gotta stop teacher proofing and we gotta start investing in our teachers.

Our teachers need planning skills.

I find this as a, a very significant issue.

We, you know, teachers pay teachers and like, I get the shortcut.

It's incredibly, uh, easy.

It is not rigorous and it's not helping kids.

Uh, I'm making a generalization.

Obviously, there'll be some stuff there.

Our curriculums are, are, are, are much better than they used to.

But all today's high quality instructional materials require high level discourse in the classroom to activate the learning if you don't have that discourse going on.

And so the next thing you do if you have the discourse, is it just kids talking?

Are they on topic?

Are they taking equal terms?

If they're not doing equal effort, equal terms.

And we have protocols for this and that's why I don't like unstructured groups.

The rich get richer.

That's what's gonna happen.

The more confident learners will dominate the conversation and great, they get, you know, you know, they'll, they'll get some learning game, but you'll have these, uh, real time learning gaps and you can see it by who's participating, who's not.

So I wasn't a confident learner 'cause I was behind.

Because of the way, way, the experience that I had in poverty had a just lack of schooling, lack of access to literature, all kinds of stuff.

So I get it like you have to build that up and you have to get that by getting that equal participation, or you don't get the background knowledge share.

Are they using precise vocabulary and are they.

Functioning and, and if they're not constructing new learning in the discourse, they're just low level processing.

Mm-hmm.

teachers get so excited that the kids talk and there will be a learning gain out of that, by the way.

Uh, 'cause at least they're processing content, but it's not the critical thinking that develops the brain to the high levels that breaks generational poverty.

That's what we're after.

And it also helps the more kids coming from greater advantage households to be able to perform better as well, helps everyone.

Yeah, and it's one of those things that that lifts everybody.

No matter where you start, you can improve and be better.

Um, thank you for this conversation, Michael.

This was awesome.

Uh, once again, instructional empowerment.com.

People should

and, and look at our library for deeper learning articles.

There's a whole series on everything I'm talking about.

We're adding more on the neuroscience and everything else, but it's great resource.

All articles there are.

Excellent, and I'll put a link to that library in the show notes so people can go check it out.

Uh, the show notes at Transformative Principal dot org.

Michael, thanks so much for being part of Transformative Principal today.

Thank you.

I hope that you asked me back someday.

Yes.