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

Vicki Davis (00:05): For our number two episode of all time, we’re going all the way back to 2017, when the show first started. We recorded an episode with teacher Rob Donatelli about five easy brain breaks for your classroom. This one received 27,314 downloads. Let’s learn. So today we have with us Rob Donatelli. Rob, what is a brain break?

Rob Donatelli (00:35): Well, I would say that a brain break is an opportunity for the students to take a break from the higher level processing of learning to really just kind of calm down, relax the brain, have some fun and refocus that brain. So when a teacher gets back into learning at a high level, the students can really refocus themselves and retrain their brain to learn at their highest potential.

Vicki Davis (01:03): You know, we just can’t keep going full tilt, can we? I mean, if an interstate’s at 100% capacity, it doesn’t move, right?

Rob Donatelli (01:10): Absolutely. And these students today, you know, when they come into our classrooms, they come in with so much outside noise going on, whether it’s Snapchat or their Instagrams or what happened in the hallway. So if we can hook our students either at the beginning of the class with just something fun, such as a story about what’s happening in the world or a joke or a quote or some sort of brain teaser to hook them in and to really get them going. That’s one of the best ways to, you know, kind of calm that mind down and get them ready to learn for the day.

Vicki Davis (01:41): Okay. So what’s our first easy brain break?

Rob Donatelli (01:44): All right. Here’s a really easy one that I actually just did yesterday. So you split the class. Let’s say you have 30 students in your class and you have 15 and 15. You split them up and what they do is they’re going to do a backward race through the room. So if you have two sides, and my room is set up in pods, I have eight different stations of four students at them. And what they have to do is they have to race backwards through zigzagging through the desk and they cannot touch a chair. They cannot touch a desk, but they have to go back. And the students look at you kind of like you’re crazy at first. A lot of fun to get the whole class involved.

Vicki Davis (02:21): Wow, that almost sounds like it would be dangerous in some way. So I guess that kind of helps them just reset their brain.

Rob Donatelli (02:29): Absolutely. And when they stay from their chair, it really just kind of helps the blood flow and dopamine, which really helps them refocus to get back into the learning.

Vicki Davis (02:41): Okay, Rob, so what’s your second idea?

Rob Donatelli (02:43): Second idea is to get the students to just get up. And I don’t think our students today enough have an opportunity to just kind of talk and speak and work on those soft skills. So the second one is called 60-second pitches. And you present the students with an example of something like sell your team or a few people on why homework is bad for your health. And you put a timer up on the board and the students have to go one student at a time has to speak for 60 seconds on why homework is bad for your health. And they’re not allowed to stop talking. So it really forces them to think through a problem and the students love it. It practices those soft skills. They get to work on their public speaking. So 60-second pitches is our second one today.

Vicki Davis (03:29): Cool. And they just do that to each other. So you’re not waiting for everybody to get through their pitch.

Rob Donatelli (03:33): Correct. They just do that to each other.

Vicki Davis (03:35): Cool. Okay. What’s our third?

Rob Donatelli (03:37): The third one is when you want to do just a really quick one, you have them stand up. And this one’s called Name Three Things. So I have them sometimes do a best of five because it goes really quick. And for example, I’ll have them face off against one person and I will say, “Name three fruits.” And if you and I were doing it, we would say, you know, it was an apple, orange, and banana, right? And if I beat you, then I won that round. And I’ll put out all kinds of crazy stuff. I’ll say name three brands of shoes. I’ll say name three states in the United States. I’ll say name three countries. And they just have to spit it out, and it’s really quick. It’s really fun processing. I love that one, and the kids always really get into it and get super excited.

Vicki Davis (04:23): Oh, fun. Okay, what’s our next?

Rob Donatelli (04:25): So actually last week I have long tables in my pods that we have and I went and bought some ping pong balls. I was out at the dollar store. I thought, man, wouldn’t it be fun if we took their cell phones and they played ping pong against each other on the tables just for like two minutes. So in their baskets at their pods, I have ping pong balls in there. And when I want them to stand up, they actually use their smartphones, the back of their smartphone to hit a ping pong ball across the table and they play ping pong with each other. And it gets really competitive. It only takes two minutes, three minutes. I usually say till five. And just works on those motor skills and kind of lets them decompress from all the info that we’re learning throughout class.

Vicki Davis (05:06): Oh, what a blast. That sounds like so much fun. Oh, okay. What’s our last one?

Rob Donatelli (05:11): All right. Our last one is if you have a bag of pennies, maybe a bunch of pennies laying around and you want to put them to good use. Nobody today really likes carrying around pennies. I keep a bag of pennies in my room for the penny arm flip. And what I like to do is I put a timer up on the board for a minute and the students have to put a penny on their elbow facing up towards the ceiling. And they have to, when they move the arm down, they try to catch the penny. And it sounds really easy, but it’s kind of tough if you don’t do it really quick. And I challenge the students to see how many can you get and if they can beat me in 60 seconds. And it turns very competitive. Some can do it, some can’t, but there’s definitely always some laughs to go around. And it’s a really enjoyable, just quick brain break 60 seconds.

Vicki Davis (05:58): Okay, so Rob, let me ask you this. What happens when somebody comes in and observes your room and they think you’re playing?

Rob Donatelli (06:03): Yeah, interesting question. We actually went from a model this last year. We were teaching 42 minutes and now we’re teaching 68 minutes in trimesters. And we were encouraged by our administration to really come up with some brain breaks because you want to be able to chunk that information. If a student’s sitting there for 68 minutes, just, you know, getting lectured to or doing a project, they really have a hard time. We know that through research, focusing even after 18 to 20 minutes. And so our administration is very encouraging to allow us to do these brain breaks and to challenge our students to be creative and get up and engage with each other. So it’s been really cool to have the support from that standpoint.

Vicki Davis (06:42): OK, here’s your brain break, Rob. Pitch all of the teachers out there listening for 40 seconds. Why does every classroom need a brain break? Go.

Rob Donatelli (06:51): Every classroom needs a brain break because the students are inundated with so much noise. And what the brain break allows students to do is really just take a break from all of that knowledge that is getting crammed into their brain through lectures and projects and discussions. It also improves their motor skills, creativity skills, teamwork skills, skills that allow you to build those soft skills with handshakes and talking to one another. And in a day and age where students are so inundated with their technology and they’re on it all the time, it really is fun to have them engage with one another in a fun and enthusiastic and creative and interesting way.

Vicki Davis (07:31): Teachers, to be remarkable, we need a sense of adventure. We have to shake up routine. If they’re doing the same thing every day, the same way all the time, and part of that we have because of our classroom procedures, but we do want to kind of mix things up and break the routine and make things novel and exciting and remarkable.

Rob Donatelli (07:51): Absolutely. And if I don’t do this, Vicki, they’re begging me. They’re wondering at the end of the period, when are we doing a brain break? So it’s really transformed the classroom and brought a level of energy that was missing in years past.

Vicki Davis (08:03): Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

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

Vicki Davis (00:05): We’re counting down the top 10 episodes of all time for the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. And today, we’re talking about five ways to build reading stamina in adolescent learners. This episode from Lisa Hollihan Allen comes in at number three, with just over 27,000 downloads for this episode. Let’s learn. Lisa Hollihan Allen, co-author of Strategies to Support Struggling Adolescent Readers, grades 6 through 12, recently named one of the top 25 best common core e-books by Book Authority. And today we are talking about five ideas to support adolescent students’ reading stamina. Now, Lisa, reading stamina, this is really something that a lot of teachers talk about, isn’t it?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (00:59): And it’s true. Teachers talk about it and they recognize the importance of it, but they’re not sure what to do about it or even what it really is.

Vicki Davis (01:08): So how would you define reading stamina?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (01:11): Well, reading stamina is the ability to persevere in reading tasks on your own. NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English, in their position statement on independent reading defined it as being able to sustain mental effort without scaffolds or adult support. Now, when I’m talking to my kids about this, I say it means you can keep reading and reading and reading and reading without stopping. And if you get distracted, you notice that you’re distracted and you refocus.

Vicki Davis (01:44): Because, you know, there are a lot of, well, I think it’s probably you and I were both in school. A lot of teachers will complain and say they’re just pretending to read, they’re not really reading.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (01:54): Absolutely. Fake reading is definitely one of the barriers that we face because it goes on in their heads, right? So they could be looking at the page and fake reading. And it’s really hard, especially during independent reading time with their own choice reading books, for us to know that they’re fake reading. And the problem is that most kids have word recognition by second grade to about the middle of fourth grade, but a lot of those kids still haven’t developed stamina. And they need us, especially the older kids, they need us to help them, to support them sustaining their attention.

Vicki Davis (02:33): Okay, so what is the first idea?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (02:36): First idea is they need time. We need to provide protected opportunities for them to be reading, which is hard to do with our schedules being so busy and our time being full as it is. But there’s a direct correlation between the amount of time our kids are reading and their reading achievement. There’s a serious Matthew effect they’re discovering that the more kids read, the better they are at reading. I talk to my kids a lot about running. If you want to be a better runner, you have to practice, right? And I can help you with techniques and nutrition and increase your speed. And we can do all kinds of things like that. And I talked to the kids, well, I’m your reading coach. And I’m going to make sure we have time to practice because it’s…

Vicki Davis (03:23): Yes, for sure. So we need protected time to be reading. What second place?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (03:29): It’s a big deal, especially for adolescent kids, to self-select what they’re reading, especially during independent reading time. Interest drives engagement. It motivates them. They’re more likely to understand the vocabulary if they have background knowledge and experience on the topic or an interest in the topic or background on the series. So, you know, most of the day, teachers are telling them what to read. So if we can give them choice during independent reading time, that’s a huge plus.

Vicki Davis (03:59): So they have a choice. They need uninterrupted, protected time to be reading. What’s the third?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (04:05): Is conferencing. Now, I conference with my students at least once a week and I do, you know, teachery things while I’m conferencing with them. But you can also conference, the kids can conference with each other. They can work with a small group. I want them to feel like they’re part of a reading community, even like online blogs where they can talk about it. Talking about their reading is a huge thing because don’t we do that as adults? We don’t read a book and not talk about it or, you know, fill in something about it. We talk about it with each other. So we want to model that for the kids as well.

Vicki Davis (04:41): I love that. And you can model and teach them how to conference with each other. I re-shared something that Larry Ferlazzo recently shared. And it was basically that all peer review and collaboration works. All of it. So we want to get them together and let them talk about what they’re doing.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (04:59): It’s very effective.

Vicki Davis (05:00): Okay. What’s our fourth?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (05:02): Fourth is vision. And I should mention that I’m getting these. I’m sort of combining NCTE, some work from Laura Robb, and a lot of it I’m depending heavily on Penny Kittle. And she calls it vision. Essentially, you’re advertising great reads. And we do this. We book talks, book tastings. We want to provide for them a wide range of voices, of topics. We want to have a great classroom library. Thinking about the mirrors and the windows analogy where we want kids to see themselves in our books and we also want them to look through windows. So there’s a visibility to cultures that aren’t our own that we need to be preparing them for the real world and exposing them to different cultures. So, you know, sort of that all-encompassing category of vision. Just get them out there trying things.

Vicki Davis (05:53): And even, you know, the book trailers, those are a lot of fun. And people record and put the QR codes in the front of the book. This is also something peers can do for each other, right?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (06:02): Absolutely. Yep. And they sort of just naturally that ends up happening. Book recommending to each other, talking about books with each other. I do read-alouds, even with my older kids all the way up to high school. They love it, love it, love it. And like if I read the first book in a series, they want the second one. They want the third one. And if I have it in my classroom library, they’re going to pick it.

Vicki Davis (06:26): That’s fantastic. Okay, what’s the fifth?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (06:28): And the fifth one is challenge. We need to challenge our kids. We want to encourage them to stretch. They can stretch through levels. If something’s more difficult for them, it’s a challenge for them, but they need to be attempting that. If they have, let’s say they’re really good about skateboarding, they know a lot about skateboarding. And even if the book is, you know, technically too hard for them, if they’ve got that background knowledge, they’ll be able to, they know the vocabulary. They understand the whole schema of skateboarding, so they’ll be fine. Length of books, try to get them to read longer books. They feel pretty accomplished when they’re reading, you know, or I’m halfway through this. They want to talk about how they’re amazed with themselves. Genres, have them branch out if they’re always reading fiction, try to get them to try some nonfiction and topics. Again, that’s where the mirrors and windows comes in.

Vicki Davis (07:18): You know, the stretching was really something with me and my own children. You know, this may be a bad topic or a good topic for you. I don’t know, but I have a feeling, you know, you have the Accelerated Reader with the points. And my children would always, you know, my son, you know, he was fascinated with the Chronicles of Narnia. And I had read a couple chapters out loud in the car and he was ready. And supposedly his book level was not high enough to be able to read that book. And I fought to get to let him read that book because he wanted to. And guess what? He read it and his reading level jumped. So a stretch is not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (07:54): No, you’re right about that. And he was motivated to read it.

Vicki Davis (07:58): And willing to look up the words, you know, if their motivation can really overcome maybe gaps.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (08:04): For sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Vicki Davis (08:07): And he’s dyslexic, too. So now he’s a great reader, but it was that stretch that really made a difference for him. So, Lisa, as we’re looking at all of these and you are right in the trenches right now, you’re teaching reading. You are working with this as we record this in fall 2021. You have some teachers tweeted out yesterday, what are your biggest challenges right now? And this student engagement is a big part of the challenge, you know, engaging students and do discipline methods even work right now is one tweet that I got back. What do you say to teachers who are just struggling to re-engage kids as you talk about stamina?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (08:49): And I’ll tell you what, that’s something we’re all talking about. It’s bizarre what we’re seeing this year. You know, they’re good kids, but they’re not used to coming to school every day and all day and being expected to be engaged every day, all day. Between the quarantines that they had to go through last year and when we were remote for part of the time last year, some kids were remote all year long. Our district offered that as an option. And it’s just different. We can’t just say, oh, well, we have to face it and we have to deal with it. And increasing their reading stamina is a big deal because it’s their brain stamina too. It’s their ability to pay attention in social studies and science. And when they’re working on something and don’t really feel like it anymore, you have to power through and just to give them those skills, those expectations.

Vicki Davis (09:44): So when you have those students come across that you can tell they’re struggling with, what are some of the words you use? I just heard you use the word power through. What is your sort of pep talk to those students who are right in front of you and are struggling? you know they can read it, but they’re really struggling with stamina. What’s that vocabulary sound like?

Lisa Hollihan Allen (10:04): Positive reinforcement, baby steps, let them know that it’s okay to feel frustrated. We all feel frustrated. I think sometimes as teachers, especially with older kids, especially older struggling readers, we want to avoid frustration at all costs. And I don’t know that that’s doing them any favors. We want them to power through. We want them to, okay, I’m frustrated. What do I do now? And just help them through those steps. I see that you’re frustrated. You’re not feeling great about this. What should we do? Maybe take a brain break. Something as simple as noticing that you’re frustrated, that doesn’t mean you have to blow up or give up. We can work through this, you know, depending what it is. You know, take a brain break, take a walk, go get a drink, take a deep breath, all those kinds of things. And don’t give up. You got this.

Vicki Davis (10:55): It shows that you’re noticing. So Lisa, as we finish up, think about all the teachers out there who are struggling with this very thing, just like you. Give a pep talk to those teachers.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (11:06): It’s our responsibility. Those are our kids. Those are our students. They’re depending on us. Their parents are depending on us. Their families are depending on us. And we can do it. It’s our responsibility and we can do it. It might look different this year. We might have to break things down a little bit or go a little slower, but we can do it. It’s our responsibility.

Vicki Davis (11:29): It sounds like this hits a hot button and emotional button for you.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (11:33): It does. It is. I mean, I look at my students and I see my students and I think about their struggles and it does. It gets to my heart. And my children are all the way through school, but I always think about that, you know, I’m a mom too. So I know what those moms at home are hoping for and thinking about. And I think about that for my students. Like, I want their mom to know that I am doing what I can and we’re going to get through this and everything’s going to be just fine. And your child is going to progress and make positive steps forward. And I love this and it’s going to be great.

Vicki Davis (12:09): And, you know, every parent wants somebody who’s going to believe in and reach their child.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (12:15): Mm-hmm. And I’ve been teaching for a long time and I have never had a kid that hasn’t made positive gains somehow, somewhere through the things that I do with reading. You know, if it’s reading aloud, if it’s finding their subject or topic that they enjoy. My husband hunts and fishes, so I know that vocabulary so I can talk to kids about hunting and fishing if that’s what they need. And I will be your go-to person about hunting and fishing. I’ll bring some of my husband’s magazines to school and share them with you. You just figure out what a kid needs, you know, diagnose and prescribe, and then you do it.

Vicki Davis (12:55): Whatever it takes. So, educators, we have gotten some fantastic strategies to help promote reading stamina with our adolescent readers from Lisa Hollihan Allen. The book is Strategies to Support Struggling Adolescent Readers, Grades 6 through 12. Thank you, Lisa, for coming on the show.

Lisa Hollihan Allen (13:15): Thank you very much for having me.

Vicki Davis (13:18): Okay, teachers, so let’s talk about a few simple action steps you can take today to apply what we’ve learned. First, start the conversation with your students. Know what reading stamina is and talk to your students about how to build it. Help them understand when they’re getting off task and also how to refocus. Second, work with your administrators or other teachers to carve out time for you and your students to read. If you want to know how a principal did this with his whole school, check out a podcast episode I did sometime back with my friend Todd Nesloney. I’ll share it in the show notes. And you can make reading something everyone does together. Third, after you’ve done these first two things, look at the graphic I created with Lisa’s five steps and figure out what’s next for you. You know, I always talk about innovating like a turtle because all progress is slow steps forward. So figure out what is next. Fourth, I hope you’ll share your story. Teacher Emily Hardeman tweeted last week, at the end of Reading Intervention Group yesterday, a student told me she feels getting to learn to read with me. And three of her friends is a gift she gets every day. Emily says this is why she became a dyslexia therapist. We need more positive stories like Emily’s to flood Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere. Helping kids read is an act of love that will change their life forever, and you might also encourage other teachers and parents. Finally, I’ve learned about a Literacy Matters conference that is free and coming up this Saturday, February 5th, 2022. If you want to learn more, build your PLN and connect with others. I’ll also have a link to that in the show notes. Now, let’s get out there and let’s help kids read.

Announcer (14:56): You’ve been listening to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. If you like this program, you can find more at CoolCatTeacher.com. If you wish to see more content by Vicki Davis, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter under CoolCatTeacher.

Vicki Davis (15:07): Thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

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

Vicki Davis (00:00): Welcome back, educator. This is Vicki Davis with Cool Cat Teacher Talk. Today’s show is an inspiring one. We’re calling it “Because Someone Noticed.”

Announcer (00:11): Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips, and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Kathy Nimmer (00:24): We tend to find what we seek, so choose to seek that good. Choose to look for those things.

Vicki Davis (00:29): You just heard Kathy Nimmer. She taught high school English for 29 years and is totally blind. This year, the American Foundation for the Blind gave her the Helen Keller Achievement Award for 2026. Now, we’ll get to her interview, which is so inspiring. But let’s talk about “because someone noticed”. So this is Vicki Davis.

John Davis (00:54): And this is John Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:55): We’re going to break down some of the news we’re talking about right now. First of all, John, an article broke on NBC News that was repeated from Chalkbeat. And it was about all of the AI slop that ended up on Teachers Pay Teachers. In the meantime, I’m part of a Teachers Pay Teachers forum. And a lot of people are having their stores just taken away and revoked because of this, even some people who say they’re not using AI at all. So AI slop, John, seems to be a word that a lot of people are throwing around right now.

John Davis (01:32): Well, a big part of that is that people are using AI to flag AI, and a lot of the times it’s not good at picking that up.

Vicki Davis (01:41): Yeah, so AI detectors do not work. We know that. We’re going to talk about an MIT report in just a minute that says that. There’s actually a thing now on LinkedIn where you can pick a button and say this is AI slop. And Claude now, Anthropic, says that they’re putting a watermark in all of their material to say that it is AI, quote, created. Well, the problem I have with that is that we use Claude and some other tools for AI transcripts. So if it’s you and me talking like we’re talking right now, why would that somehow be marked as AI? Like, that bothers me.

John Davis (02:22): Malicious bots can use the report that says AI and just completely flood a video with reports, even if it’s made by a human.

Vicki Davis (02:32): Well, there was a short story that some time ago was reported, and they won a prize, and somebody used an AI detector on it and said, oh, this was created by AI. Well, the person since has gone back and shown their whole process, all the revision savings, all the pieces, all the different parts of when they created that story. And that’s been debunked, that the AI detector, that that was a false positive. But that author had to go back through and mark everything and really had a black mark put against them because of a false positive of artificial intelligence. And the point is, we can’t really tell. So we’re desperately looking for a way to say AI wrote it or not.

Vicki Davis (03:15): But not all AI use is the same. I just don’t think that an AI used for a transcript is the same as someone using AI to totally create a paper. Let’s go to the MIT report that just came out. In August 13, 2026, MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching and Learning and Research Training released a report that is worth reading. I like that the report says to be humble and be bold, But one other thing it says is it says that Instructors told the committee that policing AI was damaging their relationship with students and that students told them they were afraid of being wrongfully accused, just like that author we talked about. And the committee wrote, such an underground river of mutual suspicion is no foundation for a healthy classroom.

Vicki Davis (04:09): It also says that detectors are unreliable and misfire on second language and neurodivergent writers. So we’re realizing that this whole AI detection, AI conversation, like that’s impacting the classroom everywhere. All AI use is just not the same. So I want to go back to this MIT report. And this is for MIT trying to grapple with what are we going to do in the AI age?

Vicki Davis (04:38): It says that all of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma, but themselves, their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight and judgment.

Vicki Davis (05:03): And I really like that they are talking to their students about what learning looks like. Because as we’ve been going through this whole AI process, one thing that I’ve taught my students is, hey, there’s a productive struggle involved in learning. They go on to use a word that I love called cognitive surrender. Basically, when someone gives up and uses AI to cognitively surrender, which basically means I can’t think about it. I can’t figure it out. I don’t know what it is. I surrender. I’m just going to let AI pretend to do this work for me. That that’s a real problem. John, do you feel like that that is the true AI slop when somebody cognitively surrenders?

Vicki Davis (05:45): AI can’t think, but just let’s AI produce something that they’re pretending to think. So I know that you’re not a huge fan of AI. We cover AI a lot, but we use AI for editing these shows. And sometimes AI can do some stuff, I mean, better than us, because face it, we fatigue. So like, how do you decide when you’re editing our shows when to use AI and when not to? Like, what can it do better and how can it help you?

John Davis (06:13): Well, because I’m dyslexic, I can’t find everything that’s wrong with a transcript. So if there is a misspelling more often than not it’ll pick it up or if there is something that I will miss like punctuation and the like inside the transcript things that are, would take me hours and it can do in like a minute I’ll let it do that but, like actually getting a hold of, the message I don’t let it do that because it’ll take the human out of it.

Vicki Davis (06:45): Yeah and AI is terrible at being creative and if it’s truly unique a lot of times it’ll suggest that we cut it now it does do fact checking pretty well but you know this week I searched for the hallucination rate of current AI models and I did it on Google and I got that generative search. Well, I took that generative search, I plugged it into Claude, Claude found a bunch of errors. I cross-checked it with ChatGPT. ChatGPT actually found an error that Claude made, went back and forth between these different models.

Vicki Davis (07:14): Now, there is a word for that that I have found and that word is called ensembling. It’s actually using one AI model against another to try to improve the accuracy rate of the output. But I’ll say that just trying to get the hallucination rate was pretty much impossible because it gave me this big simple answer. But the fact was, it was mixing together a bunch of research reports that weren’t even measuring the same thing. I have to go to the original source documents because a lot of times it is wrong. Here’s the thing is that AI has uses and we don’t want to cognitively surrender. We need to be noticing. I mean, that is what this whole show is about today is actually noticing.

Vicki Davis (08:03): So back to the MIT story, what they’re after is that they want AI to be pro-learner. This is their phrase that they use. So we don’t want AI to do the hard fun of thinking, learning, creating, and problem solving. So these are the things that we need to be thinking about. We need to be talking about AI safety and how to use it safely and wisely.

Vicki Davis (08:25): But also, I think things like productive struggle, cognitive surrender need to be part of our language, and we need to be noticing. Like, one thing that the MIT report talked about was to encourage professors to start doing things like oral reports, documenting process, that you would actually document the whole process of how you created something.

Vicki Davis (08:49): Portfolios for a class, actually putting things together that represent the thinking of the human and having those conversations. I actually think conversations with your professors and with teachers and with teaching assistants is actually a great thing to do. I think the AI slop is on the other side of cognitive surrender. Like that to me is what AI slop is. So there is another story called A Great AI Regret and about AI guilt. And so these are AI native graduates, graduates of college who basically used AI to get through college. This AI guilt is a named phenomenon among recent grads. People who are never caught using AI but feel the loss of the learning.

Vicki Davis (09:35): Obviously, they cognitively surrendered their learning to AI and they realize that they’re the product of college and they didn’t learn anything. One person on Reddit, and I know we’re quoting Reddit here, but is redoing her senior year assignments on her own.

Vicki Davis (09:52): A U.K. study, they went in and they used AI to submit these exams without the professors knowing. And the AI written exam submissions went 94% undetected and scored above the average real student. So keeping AI out of classes is important for all the students because we grade on GPA, right? If AI goes and makes a better grade than average students, average students feel like their humanness is not respected. So this isn’t a doom stat here. This is one that says, hey, we need to deal with this cognitive surrender, with this disillusionment. And if we’re just letting some AI write an exam, we need to actually talk to the person who supposedly completed that exam. But, John, what do you think about AI regret?

John Davis (10:47): I think that comes down to, well, you know, college debt is a big issue. People are going to debt, going to college to get a degree just to have AI completely take away all the learning they would have done if they actually did the work. And now they’re in debt for having done basically nothing.

Vicki Davis (11:07): And they don’t know anything either if they have cognitively surrendered. And this goes deeper. And I love this story because there was a teacher, Patrick O’Neill, and he taught at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington. So he had a full course load, but he read some meta-analyses claiming that GenAI produced large positive effects on learning. And he started saying, OK, this doesn’t look right. So he went and taught himself the field. He read 40 papers and chapters on meta-analytic methods, and then 14 GenAI education meta-analysis, read all 60 underlying studies, and then he produced a forensic review that shook everyone. So here you have a teacher at a community college who has shaken the education space All because he noticed. He found that 11 of the 14 meta-analyses had no study population criteria.

Vicki Davis (12:04): That meant that children in a study could be pooled with medical trainees. Okay, six included a paper with fabricated citations. And three included a study citing references published before November 2022 that referred to ChatGPT. Now, we know ChatGPT became publicly available November 30th, 2022. So studies citing references on the use of ChatGPT prior to 2022 have to be false. And so my friend, Justin Reich from MIT, who’s been on this show and wrote Failure to Disrupt, said publicly on LinkedIn that he had to retract his own advice that meta-analyses are a reliable way to synthesize evidence, at least for the GenAI era. So I love this because a working teacher with a full class load did the work that the journals didn’t.

Vicki Davis (13:01): We as humans, we need to notice. We need to notice when students are cognitively surrendering.

Vicki Davis (13:08): We need to notice what’s happening if we’re going to try to do the AI detection charade. We need to notice the harm that’s doing on our relationships. We need to notice that when we’re having kids handwrite everything because we’re afraid of AI, that gives a disadvantage to those dyslexic, dysgraphic students or students who just struggle to spell. We need to take the best of, okay, this is the best of what technology can give us, but we need to be detecting learning. So we need to make sure that the humans are the people actually doing the learning and we need to understand that the person is the outcome of the education, not the grade. Things have got to change and we’ve got to look at things differently and we have to notice.

Vicki Davis (13:58): So John, is there anything you want to say based on what I just talked about?

John Davis (14:02): Well, I feel like a lot of these studies could be generative AI itself, because a lot of the news articles, people could summarize this interview, and then they’ll write on the summarization, but if there’s an, hallucination inside that, they’ll end up writing on that. So I think that’s a big issue in news itself. And then once it’s out there, news becomes self-referential. There’s also a different story I wanted to tell. When you were talking about the AI charade, There was a story about NASA when they were first testing out different rocket fuels. Eventually, some hydrogen escaped and caught on fire. Hydrogen does not burn on the visible light spectrum.

John Davis (14:46): So there was this burning invisible air in front of people that if you walked into it, you would catch on fire. So people had to hold mops out in front of them. And when they saw the mop catch fire, they knew the hydrogen was there. It’s cause and effect. people are going out in the workforce without learning anything and whenever they walk into the workforce they’ll catch fire because they don’t know anything because they completely offloaded everything to AI.

John Davis (15:14): So they’re the burning hydrogen out there right now and unless they take steps like that person talked about having to relearn everything because they offloaded their, cognitive thinking to AI they’re gonna catch fire and they’re gonna be the burning hydrogen in the room.

Vicki Davis (15:33): Wow. I would encourage everybody listening to this show to go read that report of AI in education from MIT as an example of an organization that’s grappling with artificial intelligence and how it’s teaching and learning move forward. Okay, so every story we talked about has people noticing, noticing where things are not the quality they need to be, noticing where they’re not measuring up to what human excellence looks like. Noticing where artificial intelligence is not being used properly. Our guest today has built an entire career out of noticing, noticing the good. Here’s Kathy Nimmer.

Announcer (16:15): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (16:19): Today we’re talking with Kathy Nimmer. She taught high school English for 29 years and then she spent the last three years doing something a lot of districts don’t think to do. Built a program whose whole job is protecting the joy of brand new teachers. Kathy is the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year and a National Teacher of the Year finalist. This year, she received the Helen Keller Achievement Award 2026 from the American Foundation for the Blind. Kathy, thank you for coming on the show.

Kathy Nimmer (16:54): I have been looking so forward to this. Thank you for having me.

Vicki Davis (16:57): Kathy, we want to go back to your first year teaching, and you’ve done quite a few interviews on this. I don’t want to steal the Thunder. Just tell the story so that everybody listening can just understand. Because my first year was rocky and I know yours was too. So let’s talk about it.

Kathy Nimmer (17:17): Rocky is a mild term, I can say. Let’s call it the Rocky Mountains, perhaps. I think that’s a little more apt. I’m totally blind and I am smart. I’m capable. I’m driven. And I’m still looking back at that super young, naive teacher. Everybody starts there. Totally blind teaching in a regular public high school classroom. First, I didn’t know what I was doing since I was a new teacher. Second, I didn’t know how to be. And that statement is pivotal to my career because I’m Here I am as a person who cannot see anything and I wanted to be a great teacher. So I knew that was one thing I wanted to be. I didn’t know where the blindness fit into that. So my early choice was to minimize that.

Kathy Nimmer (18:03): So I did all the wrong things to try to be less blind or make that less central. I didn’t want to bump into furniture in the classroom when I was teaching, so I stayed behind the podium. I didn’t move around. I didn’t want to call on the wrong student or get the name wrong, so I didn’t call on students. I lectured. Kind of silly and free and enthusiastic, but I didn’t want to do that without being able to really gauge their response since I couldn’t see the visual cues, so I was really stern. All the things that in hindsight were poor teaching choices, but done with justified intent. After the fascination of having a blind teacher, it caused just such a wide open door for disconnection, for misbehavior, chaos.

Kathy Nimmer (18:49): And I didn’t have any answers because I was certain I was right about trying to minimize my disability. It was nuts. I wasn’t building relationships. I wasn’t being my authentic self. It was chaotic and the big climactic piece that is part of plenty of my speeches because it’s real.

Kathy Nimmer (19:06): A couple months in, the kids were horsing around before class and two kids were playing catch with a loaded book bag. This was back when there were heavy textbooks instead of digital textbooks. One kid tossed his bag to another whose catching ability was approximately like mine. The bag slammed into my window in the classroom, and the whole window shattered. Glass flew. The sound was gigantic. It was horrifying. I remember standing there just with my hands on my face and Everyone came running, you know, everyone. I feel like the whole school came running and It was other students, it was teachers, it was administrators. I just wanted to disappear. That moment, a plan B for a different thing I wanted to do that I felt called to do besides teaching, that would have been the moment to start pursuing that.

Kathy Nimmer (19:56): But I didn’t, everything shattered. I started not trusting my own decisions because how could I be right that I was supposed to be a teacher when this happened? My principal had every right to let me go at that point. But you know what? They didn’t. They let me have the year. And I came back after pure devastation, after I decided to change my approach and brought my authentic self to the classroom because I figured they wouldn’t ask me back anyway the next year. But I had a little time to play and become different from how I started. Things started changing and there was enough change, enough authenticity, enough joking, moving around, building relationships, being light, being the person with a disability, being okay with it.

Kathy Nimmer (20:41): The students started to feel more okay and they kept me for one more year. And really, when I started being authentically myself, that included my blindness, then started the year that way, then everything changed.

Kathy Nimmer (20:56): Shifted my career, but needed to include that shattered window because otherwise I wouldn’t have figured it out that we need to bring our true selves, our abilities and our limitations to everything to the classroom. I think back to that time and I think of what I needed, what I had, what I didn’t have, what I learned about me, what I learned about life. I am glad that it began that way. I wasn’t glad when it was happening, but I’m glad it began that way because it launched me into a career that is the signature of my professional being. I am a teacher and it began there.

Vicki Davis (21:29): And I love what you said. I mean, you’ve been interviewed by CBS, you’ve had TED Talks, of course, Indiana Teacher of the Year, finalist for National Teacher of the Year. So we didn’t just get it together a little bit. You just really had an amazing classroom. But you said that even though you’re blind, you learned to see your students. Okay, so help me understand that beautiful, wonderful sentence and what it means to you to see your students.

Kathy Nimmer (21:59): It’s an advantage or maybe a superpower that I didn’t understand at the beginning. As my momentum built and I reflected, because I’m a strong believer that we need to reflect after everything that we do, the things that don’t go well, why that didn’t go well, and the things that are going well, why it’s going well. I think both sides are important. When I started seeing changes in my classroom and I started thinking, what’s happening here? Why is this so much better? And I realized that whole relationship piece, which we all know is crucial for educators. I thought, okay, I’m getting to know my students, but what do I know about them? What I don’t know about them is their hair color and their weight and whether they’re going through a spell of acne.

Kathy Nimmer (22:48): I taught teenagers, so, you know, we’ve got all the things going on, right? About everyone else who’s in those transitional phases. I didn’t know those things. And I was still thriving with the relationships. And it just dawned on me one day, I’m getting to see my students from the heart. That doesn’t mean that I had it all completely figured out of factors that…

Kathy Nimmer (23:12): Intuitively cause us to make quick judgments. None of those things are in place for me because I am listening to their voice. I am reading what they’re submitting. I am hearing the silences and the things they’re saying. And I’m not distracted by the visuals, the price of their clothing or the brand of their shoes or things like that. And there are disadvantages, not picking up on some language or the look. There are other things that are harder, but seeing them for who they are is easier for me. I’ll take that. The harder stuff with being blind, there’s plenty of that, but I’m sure going to take the wins as well.

Vicki Davis (23:56): I think it’s a beautiful attitude. Some of your students have publicly said, I didn’t know I was a writer. And Ms. Nimmer helped me see, What’s your message to those who struggle at first, that first year? Because we’re getting ready to talk about your new teacher program. And most of us, me included, my first year was pretty terrible.

Kathy Nimmer (24:19): When I’m looking back, I wish it were a better first year. I’m a big believer in the word and versus but. I feel like but counts what’s in the front part of the sentence and includes the front and the back of the sentence, the whole picture.

Kathy Nimmer (24:35): I wish it were an easier first year and I would not be the teacher I became without that first year. I think going into an early career experience, you’re going in with wide eyes and a lot of hope in your heart. And I hope you come out of that with wide eyes and a whole lot of hope in your heart in spite of all the things that happen along the way, because things will happen. You don’t have it figured out. You don’t have the context that everything will be OK. And you know that and you can lean on that because you don’t have that experience. There are so many moments that are going to unfold that are good and hard both just going in with that realistic view that learning requires change we’re asking that of our students we’re asking them to not be married to old ways that stay there just because they’ve always been that way we’re asking them to stretch and change and for the new teacher that has to be a baseline that has to be foundational.

Kathy Nimmer (25:37): Every day is progress, and it’s not measured by how well it went or how poorly it went. It’s measured by the sunrise every morning. There is a chance to get better, and getting better means reflecting on what is going well, what is not going well, and why, and then harnessing that knowledge, keep moving forward to that next sunrise and that next sunrise.

Vicki Davis (26:00): So let’s talk about the new teacher program that you’ve been working with for the last three years.

Kathy Nimmer (26:06): It began with a beautiful alignment of when I was Teacher of the Year, coming off of that year of service of traveling and doing hundreds of presentations and public events. And my district wanted to capitalize on what I had learned and where my passion was and keep me in the classroom. So we created this hybrid role for me to teach part of the day and then simply to pour in the new teachers the other part of the day. There was no name for the program. There was the knowledge that new teachers needed more than they were getting. And we didn’t have the answers. We just had that need. And what a beautiful thing to work for leadership today. That recognizes that. So still teaching and still grading and still loving that.

Kathy Nimmer (26:51): And then I just traveled around the district and I visited the new teachers. I visited them when they were teaching. I visited them when they were not teaching. And I simply loved on them. Can you imagine a better job than that?

Kathy Nimmer (27:04): Pouring it to them, like lifting them up the same way I had lifted up students, just this time, just listening to them and affirming them. Over those years of the hybrid experience COVID approach. And my leadership, again, very wise and insightful, knew that this would change things in education. And this was the time to commit to creating a new program, a true program with protocols, with depth. And that would be my whole focus. At the COVID year was the creation, lots of research, deep thought about what the program would be and the naming of it, which was beautiful. We called it SEEDS, S-E-E-D-S, Supporting Educators Entering District Service, and all kinds of free analogies and growth and all of that.

Kathy Nimmer (27:53): That’s what I pivoted to do full-time, pour into the true newbies, those 22-year-olds, but also everybody, all newcomers who were in our district for the first time.

Kathy Nimmer (28:05): And I did that on lots of levels. But I will tell you without a doubt, the core of that program and the core of my belief system is not based on professional development. It’s not based on access to resources. It is based on love and happiness and well-being. It’s the same thing that I discovered as a new teacher after that window shattered, that when we are in a situation that is a place to grow, we are only going to grow if we feel loved and nurtured, recognized and seen. So I simply took all those principles that I used in the classroom and To make a difference with my students, I simply took that and made that the center of this program and just found ways to love those teachers and to nurture their happiness and take care of their well-being so that they could thrive.

Kathy Nimmer (28:57): Because there was no way I could ever know what professional advice to give to a kindergarten teacher one morning and a high school chemistry teacher the same afternoon. Yeah.

Kathy Nimmer (29:10): There was no use trying to be that answer. That’s not what good, true new teacher support is, in my opinion. It is loving them. It is nurturing them. It is speaking the affirmation. One of my favorite practices in the program is called affirmative observations. So I would schedule a half hour to an hour where I would just come into their classroom, open my computer, put my earbud in because I have a screen reader, a real robotic and actually rather creepy sounding.

Kathy Nimmer (29:45): And I would take notes for the solid, the entire time I was in there, only on the good things, only every single positive that I heard. Nothing negative, nothing suggested, nothing. And just all these affirmations. And I can’t tell you how many teachers were so nervous about having me come in. They see somebody taking notes in the corner of the room and they’re thinking of their administrator doing an evaluation. And that’s intimidating. That first time I often had to push my way in, but I did push for that because when it’s something good, it is worth being pushy about it. And I’d write this, clean it up, and I’d send this to them. And they would receive this huge email of pure affirmation. That’s it.

Kathy Nimmer (30:28): There’s no catch, Nothing. Just hearing the things. Even down to, I loved your tone of voice when you talked to Jane about stopping this or whatever. Just anything I overheard, I affirmed. Could we make the world a better place if that was our default communication? Yes. And I can’t change the world, but I could change those classroom experiences. And what happened because some skeptical colleagues thought those affirmative observations would make a teacher complacent. Okay, I’m doing all of these things so well. And you know this, I bet, and your listeners know this. A true educator does not become complacent when they are affirmed. They become grateful and thirsty to amplify that and keep it.

Kathy Nimmer (31:18): Why do we ever think it’s not that way? You’re not falling into education. You are choosing education because you’re drawn that way. There are a lot of easier careers to fall into that don’t require the emotional price that teaching commands. So if they’re there, they’re there because they were drawn there. And so if I’m affirming those things, those little things that they don’t even notice, their wait time and their movement and how many times they called students by name is always so important. All those things. That’s just so simple, right? The low hanging fruit, the thing we can all do. Speaking those words of affirmation. I didn’t have that as much as I needed it when I was a new teacher.

Kathy Nimmer (32:00): But boy, I sure can give it now.

Vicki Davis (32:02): This is the thing is the observations. I don’t know why those who do the observations think that it’s really important to find everything that’s wrong. Because a true observation, it is the and you talked about earlier. We can have great things and we can have areas in proof, but you’re right. Kathy, I’ve always been my biggest critic. And sometimes when I just hear negative, I wonder, should I even be doing this? You know, I mean, we go into that. And then if I ever had anybody who would come in and notice something positive, I could go for months on that praise because you are proud of the things you do. And it is hard and it is difficult. You know, I bet you had some teachers who received that email who just came back to you and what were the kind of things they would say to you when they would receive that email.

Kathy Nimmer (32:56): The emails I saved because I hope every teacher has that folder they create in their inbox, you know, a subfolder of things to save. My folder, I named it saving. That was a word that mattered to me because I was saving these things. But honestly, those things were saving me at the same time because they were the words of shock, of deep emotion, of I didn’t even know that this was happening. I didn’t know that I did these things. It’s more than in the classroom that we need this. And my sector of influence during the time of building and directing this program was the classroom. And if I could give them that there, then they were going to use that.

Kathy Nimmer (33:41): And I’m a strong believer too on specifics. So not just great job. Great job is a nice starting point.

Kathy Nimmer (33:48): Great job with blah, blah, blah. And that’s the English teacher in me. That’s the person who’s graded probably thousands of short stories and research papers and all of that. I was strongly committed to specific feedback. And I just translated that into the new teacher support as well. Because great job doesn’t stick when you don’t know what was great, what you didn’t maybe even recognized as great. I love that. And I love outside of the K-12 scene, I love being a person committed to those things. And I thirst for that myself. And when I’m struggling personally about something that’s not even related to my profession, sometimes call up that friend who’s really good at this too, you know, really good at that specific affirmation, because we all need that.

Kathy Nimmer (34:35): The human heart needs that, that fervor and that honesty. And I loved giving that to the new teachers.

Vicki Davis (34:42): So, Kathy, I believe this program, you received some grants. And what was the success of the program for new teachers?

Kathy Nimmer (34:50): We did wonderful things. And the state of Indiana created several pathways to recognize various initiatives, new programs for all different specific focus points throughout the state. And so as SEEDS gained momentum and, of course, looked different the second year from the first year and the third year from the second year, as we all should be looking different as educators, the program was evolving as well. So we applied for a grant that was connected to an award from the state of Indiana, and the award was called Excellence in Leading and Learning.

Kathy Nimmer (35:33): And we were the proud recipients of that grant $225,000 for amazing, just like Christmas Day surprise type, like wow things for all of our educators. And then a chance to be celebrated at a big banquet by the state for daring to dream and act on the dream. And that really, again, circles back to a leadership team from the top down, from the bottom up that knew that it was worth an investment in our newest teachers for practical reasons. We want them to stay and we want them to thrive. So recruitment and retention. So the tangible, numeric outcomes. But for the bigger reason of well-being and happiness and knowing that somebody who is in the heart is going to be more impactful for the students, be more likely to lead and take risks and recover from the hard moments.

Kathy Nimmer (36:44): And so what a privilege to work for a leadership team that knew that, to be trusted as the person to create the program, coordination with the central office folks.

Kathy Nimmer (36:58): And yet with such independence given to me to really dig in and create, I have actually myself recently taken an early retirement and handed the program off to the next director and carry on all the principles of the program as I do professional development and speaking opportunities and consulting and simultaneous to that. So, so proud that I created something that is of lasting impact. So my teacher classes in SEEDS were, I’m certain, the biggest that our district will ever have because turnover, as you know, was a growing issue before COVID. And then post-COVID, the numbers have been just gigantic. SEEDS simultaneously grew into existence at that time.

Kathy Nimmer (37:50): So we had so many new teachers, so many needs, so many teachers coming in who were not trained, who were coming in on alternate pathways and taking classes at the same time, like so much. I was able to lead and grow seeds beside and with them. Some of the best, best memories of my education career will always be during that season. The sapling of seeds was wonderful to witness.

Vicki Davis (38:17): So this year, and you do have so many opportunities because you’re the 2026 award winner of the Helen Keller Award, and that’s not an award you apply for. They basically find you. Now, when that happened, describe it. I mean, were you surprised? And then when you received it, like, what were the things that you said? Because that is just remarkable receiving that award.

Kathy Nimmer (38:43): So when you said my first year was rocky and I said, that’s a mild word. I will say surprise is a mild word for the Helen Keller because you do not apply. You are not nominated. Like there is no pathway. It is happening everywhere. Outside of you. When I got the call from the American Foundation for the Blind, I did not answer the call because I thought it was a spam. Would they be calling me? I did not. I literally did not answer. Let it go to voicemail. And it did go to voicemail. So I listened to that and I recognized the name of their CEO and I recognized his voice and like, huh, this is either a highly sophisticated scam or it’s really them.

Kathy Nimmer (39:25): And of course, the message didn’t say why he was calling, but I called him back and he told me and I was so excited and really thrilled until I hung up and I researched the award and the past winners and everything went Downward when I saw Stevie Wonder’s name on that list. And lots of people who are not disabled but have made an impact on the world of disability with access and inclusion. And the reason I went spiraling down is my name does not match those. And I stand by that. It is not, we are not the same. And I’m always my harshest critic, but, you know, we’re so self-aware when we’re those reflective people, we’re so aware of all the ways that we have fallen short.

Kathy Nimmer (40:10): And I know those things well. And that began quite the process for a couple of months. It was embargoed information, so I couldn’t share beyond my inner circle. So it was quietly sitting with this discomfort of, my gosh, when people know and they see my name on there, they were going to think, oh, they must have really been short of candidates.

Vicki Davis (40:32): No, you’re here. I’m not going to let you keep putting yourself down because a teaching is so noble and it’s so underappreciated. And that’s who you are.

Kathy Nimmer (40:41): Well, and that’s where I ultimately landed. My superintendent, who I’ve referenced, not by name, but Dr. Scott Hanback, who was behind me for the creation of seeds. The turning point with my acceptance of the Helen Keller really happened in a conversation with him when he quoted Philippians 4:8 about focusing on the things that are lovely and good and true and right.

Kathy Nimmer (41:08): And he talked about how we are used, we’re not just grown in the valley, we are also grown on the mountaintop, and that there was purpose in all of it. And I settled in around that. When I won Teacher of the Year, I knew I wasn’t the best teacher in Indiana. I wasn’t one of the top four teachers in the nation. I knew those things.

Kathy Nimmer (41:30): But it was an active part of that competition cycle. There were interviews and like all of that. This Helen Keller felt like I had nothing to do with it at first, and then it just felt so wrong in such a poor fit and then thinking about it, it’s like, you know, if this award is recognizing someone who simply followed her passion and kept looking for that sunrise day after day after day, if that’s what the message is in me receiving this award, then so be it. Because that’s what most people have the chance to do. It’s that rare air where there’s somebody famous and, you know, doing all the superstar things. I’m not a superstar. I am somebody who had a calling and found my way forward one step at a time.

Kathy Nimmer (42:15): And if that’s a messaging that is given to people with disabilities or people watching the world of disability, if that’s the part that is named after Helen Keller, the part of the struggle before the big breakthrough, not just everything that happened after that, then I can sit in that and I can stand in that and I can be okay in that because that is true and it is right and it is good. And it was a beautiful experience. I loved the opportunity to represent Somebody not reaching for the stars, but simply, again, watching for that sunrise and believing that there was purpose in every day. And yes, it was a beautiful thing.

Vicki Davis (42:54): But if you think about Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, her teacher, she saw Helen and saw the greatness in her when nobody else did. And it was a teacher who persisted and made it through. She had far more than a broken window, Anne Sullivan. I mean, Helen fought her, and it was more than thankless for so many years. And here is this brilliant child inside, and I think it’s very fitting for a teacher. And I know you’ve told me previously that your friends say that you’re a grab-a-tissue kind of speaker, and you are because I’ll tell you something that I’ve not shared on the air. Philippians 4:8 is my litmus test for who I have on the show. It is my litmus test for what I choose to air, if it’s praiseworthy, if it’s excellent.

Vicki Davis (43:50): Because we’re supposed to, our minds are so needing to think on the positive and the good things. It doesn’t mean that there’s not bad things in the world. It doesn’t mean that there are controversies or injustice. I’m not saying any of that, you know. But we need to choose how we think. And when we’re a teacher, it is so important. That we control our thought life.

Kathy Nimmer (44:14): Yes.

Vicki Davis (44:15): Because if our thought life gets away from us, we lose what you talked about earlier, the emotional strength to continue to do the job because we have so much negative coming at us all the time. I mean, we work with kids, for goodness sakes. They’re not known to be the most positive human beings on the planet at that stage and age. They tend, you know, complaining kind of becomes a hobby of middle schoolers and many high schoolers. So this focusing on the excellent and the praiseworthy. And I’m glad you accepted the award. I think it’s poetic and beautiful. And speaking of poetry, you are a poet. So is there a line you would love every teacher to carry into this school year?

Kathy Nimmer (45:03): Two things. Two things that I ask the new teachers to hold. I ask the mid-career teachers to hold and those teachers who are almost at the finish line all two things. Number one, we tend to find what we seek. What you were just saying about the good and focusing on the good does not ignore the truth that there are hard things. But our brains are inclined to remember those hard things so well. So we don’t need help with that. We also don’t need help from our hardened next door colleague to remember the negative either. Like that’s going to happen. We’ve got that. So we tend to find what we seek. So choose to seek that good. Choose to look for those things.

Kathy Nimmer (45:47): That’s what I was doing with the affirmative observations. You know, I think those were as much of a gift to myself as to those teachers, because all I was doing was looking for the good. And I found it in every single classroom, every single classroom. We tend to find what we seek, so choose what you are seeking. And number two, make sure that you are always remembering that sunrise is always Because no matter whether a day went incredibly well or poorly, no matter whether you have that parent, the nightmare situation with a parent, or that administrator who doesn’t vibe with you, there’s a tomorrow. And with every sunrise, it’s fresh. And that is so cliche, and it is still so true.

Kathy Nimmer (46:32): Both things can be accurate. There is a tomorrow, and you have that choice. You have that choice every time the bell rings to come in with a new attitude. Every time that a student has a need, you have that choice. It’s always new.

Kathy Nimmer (46:48): And I sure don’t have it all figured out. And I sure have had hard seasons. And, you know, it’s a constant process. And knowing that the sunrise is always there, gosh, even when I literally can’t see it, knowing that it’s there, that is the difference maker for me.

Vicki Davis (47:07): Sometimes you meet these people who you feel like see life more clearly than others. And, Kathy, you can say what you want to about yourself, but I do believe you clearly see the classroom and you clearly see the struggle and that you’re a great representative of us teachers. And I do want to talk about this because as somebody who’s used assistive tech your whole career, what is actually helping with assistive tech these days? And those who say, okay, I’m blind, I want to contribute, I want to add to the world like Helen Keller and like Kathy Nimmer. What are some of the important things that they need to master so that they can truly impact a profession just like you have?

Kathy Nimmer (47:59): Such a complicated picture. It’s competency and the basic things. So I have a screen reader that helps me navigate on the laptop and my iPhone. So it’s competency in those things. It’s strong skills in your area of focus. So rightly or wrongly, I think I needed to be in the upper half of teaching ability to compensate for any doubts that came along with, can I even do this because I am blind? And I’m talking about internal doubts and doubts of others, both, both. So really strong development of your skills in your area. You can’t be average.

Kathy Nimmer (48:44): Maybe should. You should be able to be average, but you can’t be. You need to be in the stronger part to prove the doubters wrong. And all of that can be in place. While the world still sees three candidates, one is blind, it’s going to be easier to go with one of the other two. And so it’s that whole advocacy, resilience, that whole awareness, that whole staying positive, not just for yourself, but to spread a belief in the world that is not disabled, that people with disabilities actually can do the things and actually can be among your best potential employees. And they need that chance. That door needs to be opened. On top of that, those of us need also to be willing to mentor and through that open door, help usher someone else through.

Kathy Nimmer (49:39): It’s not much of a door if it only opens to one person.

Vicki Davis (49:42): But, you know, life is not easy for anybody. It’s more difficult for others, absolutely. I only had my eyes, quote, I guess you’d call them fixed or whatever. I have some cornea stuff. I don’t have your situation. But I did have a month where I really… Struggle to see. After that particular surgery, I couldn’t make the screen readers work. I was so limited in what I could do. I tried and it was a month of like, how am I going to do this? And how do those who can’t see, you know, use all these technologies? It does take persistence. It doesn’t come easily. But I want you to think about as we’re finishing up, let’s talk about the people in your career who truly saw you.

Vicki Davis (50:25): Because in order to have opportunities for people with disabilities, with differences, who struggle, we’ve got to have those people who saw you, right? They saw the greatness in you before you realized you could even do it. Describe those people and the kind of things they said to you at the key moments in your career. So that 30 years later, this career that has not only helped your students but has helped new teachers stay in the classroom. Who are those people? You can name names or not. It’s just up to you. But I want to kind of get the kinds of things they said and how they saw you so that I can be that person for somebody else.

Kathy Nimmer (51:08): It’s so many. It’s just this huge array. It’s the second grade teacher who saw me suddenly struggling when I had been succeeding and suspected that I needed glasses because I was a fully sighted child and started to struggle in second grade. And she didn’t just brush it off as me needing some academic ceiling that was now suddenly making errors show up. She thought harder and watched and suggested that I needed glasses, which began the whole chase down of what was going on and ultimately a diagnosis of impending blindness.

Kathy Nimmer (51:47): If she hadn’t seen so early, I wouldn’t have been able to track the progress of what was happening with my vision, which affected every part of my life. It was my parents. Five doctors told my parents that there was nothing wrong with my vision. I was doing this to get attention, making it up, and they believed more. And through my whole life, I’m fortunate to still have them. They’re in their 80s now. And my whole life, they were afraid for choices I made and always ended up being my biggest cheerleaders. The consummate belief in me. It was the fifth grade teacher who took off of school to go down to the School for the Blind with us to tour when we knew I would be going there in sixth grade.

Kathy Nimmer (52:30): She wanted to make sure the school was good enough and that I would be educated well there. She took a personal day to go down three hours away with us to tour that campus. And hearing her voice in the hallways that I would call home, literally living there and being schooled there for seven years through middle and high school was amazing. It was the professors who helped when my vision had dropped a lot in college. And, you know, ultimately it was that first principal who hired me, I think, because I had credentials, but also because he liked to be first and the daring. He liked to be on the cutting edge. So I was the first.

Kathy Nimmer (53:11): Blind teacher in anywhere around here. And I’m sure he regretted that for a little while, but I know ultimately he didn’t. He saw beyond where I was and took that risk. And honestly, it was the students who, once they started responding to me, were the affirmation that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. And so many more, you know, pastors, counselors, and therapists because, yeah, it’s not been squeaky clean and easy for me all the time. Colleagues, the colleague who defended me to another colleague who said I was only winning awards because I was blind and they felt sorry for me. The whole array, the believers and the doubters and those who’ve stayed by who I am and reminded me of who I am and whose I am.

Kathy Nimmer (54:03): I am not alone and none of us not one of us is alone thank God absolutely

Vicki Davis (54:09): Thank God for sure and I appreciate you telling your raw, honest story. What’s your encouragement to that new teacher going in the classroom this school year? You have words.

Kathy Nimmer (54:21): I’m an English teacher, so I always have words.

Vicki Davis (54:24): Oh, no.

Kathy Nimmer (54:26): But my biggest word is just hold on to that hope. Hold on to that belief that you are here because there is a student in your classroom, maybe more than one, but it doesn’t have to be more than one. There’s a student who needs exactly and only what you, you alone can bring. I am so confident of the intricacy of the big plan that I believe that wholeheartedly, that there is somebody sitting in one of those desks whose life can be changed only by you. And you may never know who that person is. You may not know who that person is until a few years down the road. You may know it instantly. It doesn’t matter. The belief that that student is waiting for exactly what you have to bring because of your life experiences and the words you speak and the way that you are, that will keep you going.

Kathy Nimmer (55:14): So never, ever forget that someone needs you and only you. So what a privilege to be in a position to make that kind of difference.

Vicki Davis (55:22): So it’s been a privilege today. We’ve been talking with Kathy Nimmer, taught high school English for 29 years, spent the last three years helping new teachers transition into the profession. 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year, National Teacher of the Year finalist, and the 2026 Helen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind. Kathy, thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for telling your story so openly and honestly. I believe that this will be a show that will help not only new teachers, but all of us teachers to understand that we need to truly see our students, but we also need to truly see each other. And you have helped us, I will say, I guess this is a pun to see that clearly, even in the struggle of your disability of blindness.

Vicki Davis (56:13): This has been a beautiful show, and thank you for being part of it.

Kathy Nimmer (56:16): Thank you so much.

Announcer (56:19): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (56:23): Kathy said we tend to find what we seek. We opened this hour with a stack of things that went wrong. But all of these things were found by people who were looking, by people who were noticing. The reporters, the professors, the teachers who said learning isn’t happening. We need to find a better way. And then Kathy told us about her second grade teacher who noticed. Five doctors told her parents there was nothing wrong with this little girl’s eyes. She was making it up for attention. But one teacher looked at her a little longer and said, look again. And their girl went on to teach high school English for 29 years. And so much more was done because that teacher noticed. It’s important to notice if the kids in your class who are turning in these amazing papers know anything about what they wrote.

Vicki Davis (57:21): We need to move forward and we need to move forward with relationships and by encouraging and by noticing the good. There is a path forward for educators and for students and for parents who truly care about human excellence. So I hope that what you’ve gotten out of today’s show is to stop, to listen, to observe, and to take notice. You’ve been listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. This is Vicki Davis. See you later, educator.

Announcer (57:52): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow at Cool Cat Teacher everywhere you connect. Cool Cat Teacher.

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

Vicki Davis (00:04)
We’re counting down our top 10 episodes for the 10 Minute Teacher of all time as we prepare for our thousandth episode. This episode was aired in 2021 and received 26,813 downloads, and it was with Dr. Douglas Fisher. He talked about Rebound — how do schools bounce back after the pandemic? And we’re still struggling with this one. But he’s going to talk about the research on how you accelerate learning, something that still applies today.

Vicki Davis (00:36)
Today we are revisiting with one of our most popular guests from 2020, Dr. Douglas Fisher. Last year in 2020, we had a show called The Four-Part Distance Learning Instructional Framework That Works. Currently, Dr. Fisher — or Doug, as we’ll call him in the episode today — has co-authored a bestselling book, Rebound, Grades K–12: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools. Doug, this is such a relevant topic for right now. Are most schools talking about how they’re going to rebound and rethink what they’re doing?

Douglas Fisher (01:17)
I think so. And I’m happy that they’re having these conversations and getting ready for increased in-person learning — using some of the tools that we all learned during remote learning, and not forgetting those lessons learned from that extended remote, hybrid, HyFlex, simultaneous learning period — but really making schools better as a result of everything we endured for the last 15 months.

Vicki Davis (01:41)
Now Doug, I hear some teachers talking on Twitter saying, did we learn any lessons? Do you think that most schools learned lessons, or do you think most schools survived?

Douglas Fisher (01:49)
We learned lessons. When I ask people — students, adults — about their unexpected learning in the last year, it floods the chat with things like technology. I mean, look at all of us. We’re Zoomers now. We know how to do all this stuff on Zoom. We know how to Padlet and EdPuzzle and PlayPosit. We have new tools that we can use. We also learned a lot about social-emotional learning, and I think we forget that.

And some of us even learned about personal care, and that unexpected learning we shouldn’t forget. Let’s use that technology. Let’s take care of ourselves. Let’s recognize the value of social-emotional learning for us and for our students.

Vicki Davis (02:30)
Do you think all schools are ready to rebound, or are some schools still in survival mode? Because it kind of seems like there’s a lot of different places where schools are right now.

Douglas Fisher (02:39)
I totally agree with you. I think some of us are rusty. Some of our students are rusty. We haven’t been in person for a while, and maybe we haven’t had 30, whatever, 40 students in our rooms. So yeah, there’s a little rustiness. But we’ve been in school for several weeks again — full in-person learning — and the routines are starting, the procedures are in place, the students are getting into the routine, the teachers are getting into routine. Tolerance, respect, all that stuff. So we’re ready to rebound.

And I think schools are in different places, as you were saying, but we have to get to the place where we rebound. We cannot keep being stretched forever like a rubber band. At some point, we have to rebound. And then we have to take what we learned and say, you know what? Let’s look at student agency as an example. Let’s look at how students see the connection between their effort and the impact of what they do. And maybe there are students that we have to help rebuild their agency. We have to let them know that you put forth effort, and there were great things you learned, you did, you accomplished. And reattribute — reconnect that.

I do think this learning loss narrative, this COVID slide, is really dangerous. That’s what’s killing my morale right now. What is demotivational to me is I keep hearing learning loss all over the news and the politicians. I recognize there’s unfinished learning. I totally get that. But I’m not convinced that the ninth graders all of a sudden started reading like fourth graders, or that everybody forgot how to multiply. We don’t see huge regressions, but there is unfinished learning — and that’s our superpower as teachers, to know where kids are and teach them the things they need to know.

Vicki Davis (04:15)
I think the challenging thing that I’ve seen is that when students have parents that move and they are tested to go into a new school, these schools somehow are holding students accountable for pre-pandemic levels in terms of grade placement. And so I know of parents who’ve been told their children would have to go back two and three and four grade levels, because there is that disparity there. So what do you say to that? What’s that answer there?

Douglas Fisher (04:43)
I think it’s about having some honest conversations about where we are in our learning journeys, where we need to be going next. I think we shouldn’t shame people for what happened in the last year. Some kids learned a lot. Some kids thrived. Some did not. There’s a young person with a disability who talked to me privately on a chat and said, “It’s my best year ever. No one bullied me. I got to participate. I learned a lot.”

And then other kids didn’t do so well. So I think we need a little bit of hold harmless, and we need to respect — this is where you are. And my role is to figure that out and have you learn, have you start to accelerate. I think we need to get rid of this remediation language, you know, slow things down and focus on isolated skills. I think we need to start having an acceleration conversation. How can I accelerate the learning that you’re doing based on where you are right now?

Vicki Davis (05:33)
How do we rebound?

Douglas Fisher (05:34)
You know, the acceleration research is really interesting. I have never read this research before. It’s not my area of knowledge. By the way, most of it comes from students identified as gifted and talented. And there’s some lessons learned here.

Number one, you’ve got to know where kids are. And what we recognize is that on average, 40% of instructional minutes are spent on things students already know. And when you look at the research for students identified as gifted and talented, they spend a lot of time being retaught stuff they already know and they get really bored. So that’s why I think that applies to everybody. Know where they are and what they still need to learn.

I think we need to increase the relevance. We need to make learning really relevant. Why are we learning this? How does it connect to the things that are important for you? I think we also have to be building some confidence with learners. I think there are learners whose confidence was compromised. They aren’t sure that their learning strategies are working. I think that’s important.

I think we need to keep the pace up. In remediation, we tend to slow down, and the acceleration research talks about how you can have a rapid pace — active, fast pace — but you still have some wait time to build in there as well.

And if we can build knowledge in advance of instruction — quasi-flipped classroom — if we could do some knowledge building in advance, our lessons live with students can go faster. For example, what if you made a one-and-a-half-minute video where you introduced students to a couple of concepts and a couple of vocabulary words? And if they went on their LMS and they watched that video, and then all of a sudden they know some stuff for the time they are synchronous with you, in person with you — what a great investment.

And if we could rethink that asynchronous learning and think of it as preview and review: what do I need you to preview so that we’d make the most of the time we are together? And then what do I need you to review asynchronously? So I do think we learned some things. I mean, how many of us were using “synchronous” and “asynchronous” a year and a half ago? That’s now common vocabulary that we all say. So we did learn.

Vicki Davis (07:28)
I’m fascinated with this acceleration research, because I think you’re the first guest I recall even mentioning it in over 760 episodes now. So there is a body of research on how to accelerate learning.

Douglas Fisher (07:41)
It is. And because it almost exclusively comes from students identified as gifted and talented, you don’t see it referenced very much. Nancy and I read all the studies. We downloaded them all last summer, and we started to think about — we thought we were going to rebound earlier than we actually did. Last summer, we were super hopeful, but it took longer than that. But we started reading these studies, and the trends are really obvious. Don’t teach students things they already know. Keep the pace brisk. Keep them going. Make sure they see relevance. Make sure they’re not being — you know, because the students are comparing themselves to others and saying, “I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough.” Make sure you attend to the confidence issues of learning. These are all things that have been around this research base for a long time that I think apply to all of us. They apply to all of us.

And then some students, despite our best acceleration efforts, they’re going to need additional support. They’re going to need some tutoring. And so let’s make the tutoring super effective and super efficient. Let’s not just teach the gaps. We talk about, oh, I identified a gap and I’m going to have you tutoring. I think that part of the tutoring session should include how to learn, not just what to learn. Because if we only cover up the gaps and address those little areas of need, and the student goes back to regular — you know, let’s say you have a 30-minute tutoring session after school, and then you address some of the needs of unfinished learning. Well, the next day, they still don’t know how to learn. There’s a reason why they are in the place they are.

So what if part of our tutoring was to address how you learn? For example, when we’re learning today, we’re going to take some notes. We’re going to practice taking notes. Or when we’re learning today, we’re going to reread, or we’re going to summarize. We’re going to ask ourselves some questions. Focusing on some of those how-we-learn approaches, not just what we need to cover.

Vicki Davis (09:21)
It sounds like also you’ve really got a strong case for formative assessment.

Douglas Fisher (09:26)
Yeah, I think we need to use our data. We use assessment. We need to interpret those assessments and then take action on them. Nancy and I wrote an article years ago that starts off with “water, water everywhere” — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, applied to data. There are servers all over that store student data. The question is, are we actually using it or not?

That’s what I want to think about. So we have all this assessment data. We have checks for understanding. We have benchmark assessments. We have summative tools. But are we actually using the information to make decisions? Because it takes time to interpret.

Vicki Davis (10:01)
So Doug, besides picking up the book — and the book is Rebound: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools — where you have teachers and administrators getting ready to sit down or having these conversations right now, or they’ve been having these conversations, where do they start?

Douglas Fisher (10:17)
I think there’s some usefulness in looking at what happened last year and recognizing that all was not lost. I think that’s part of the healing process, is to recognize that, yes, this was awful. It’s been awful. There are colleagues who are gone. They’re no longer with us. They’ve retired. They’ve left the profession, or maybe they’ve passed away. There are students we can’t find. You know, we have to have a little bit of mourning time.

And then we have to say, we did learn some things, and we need to think through what we want school to look like next. How do we honor the kids that are in front of us? How do we support our colleagues in ways that maybe we didn’t do as much in the past, but we learned how to do in the pandemic? I mean, I’ve heard stories of teachers taking meals to a single teacher who had three kids and couldn’t find time to do some cooking, and colleagues were putting together food parties. I mean, we took care of each other in very profound ways.

And then I think we have to say, you know, where is there curriculum changes we need? Are there instructional changes that we need? Do we need to change our assessments? Where do we need to go based on what we learned, to make school that much better for students?

Vicki Davis (11:22)
Well, educators, it is time to move forward. This whole concept of acceleration research is fascinating. The best place to find all of this research? Get the book Rebound. Thank you, Doug.

Douglas Fisher (11:34)
All right. It was great to talk to you again. And thank you all for listening. And thank you for the invitation.

Announcer (11:39)
Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Fab Idea Friday. Today we’re talking about AI literacy. And you don’t have to be an expert to teach it. today’s guest asked third graders how a smart speaker works. And they said that they thought that a human being looks up the answer and reads it back. Our students are creating theories of how all these technologies work. even if we’re not using screens, we need to be teaching about AI literacy.

Announcer (00:28): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:32): Today’s show is sponsored by Experience AI, the free AI literacy program from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-developed with Google DeepMind. Stay to the end. I’ll share how you can start teaching AI literacy in your classroom with confidence. No experience required.

Vicki Davis (00:49): teachers everywhere are being told do something about AI, but nobody is really handing them a lesson plan. Laura Gray taught in the classroom herself and now works with teachers across North America on Experience AI. It’s a free AI literacy program

here’s the great thing, you do not have to be a computer science teacher to use it. Laura Gray, thanks for coming on the show.

Laura Gray (01:16): Thanks for having me, Vicki

Vicki Davis (01:17): AI is such the issue of our time. You have people who just hate AI and they don’t want us to even talk about it. then people are saying, hey, AI literacy, teachers are like, what do I say? What do I not say? And I don’t want to get in trouble.

What is your approach as you try to help teachers bring AI literacy into their classroom?

Laura Gray (01:36): I just wanna say it’s scary for everyone. I have a background in computer science. I taught mathematics and computer science for several years. And this is new to me. This wasn’t in school. This wasn’t in my college experience either. I think deep down, every teacher is still teaching concepts that we find in AI literacy. we really focus on data driven programming and understanding that. But don’t know a subject area that doesn’t

strike into thinking and comprehending data and how we use data effectively and how we ethically draw predictions or conclusions from data the thing is to take a breath and realize that you’re probably already teaching things really pertinent to AI literacy already in your classroom

So for example, when you are talking through a data collection process in science class making hypotheses and predictions, AI systems are doing that too. So you can extend the reach to maybe understanding how scientists are using AI systems to develop new pharmaceuticals without actually having to be in a lab They can learn about them using these predictive systems.

I think in language arts we reach into understanding context, discernment, and verifying what we say in our research and facts. Those are critical in the world of AI, I think the first step is to understand that with AI literacy and computer science, we are still founded in the principles of critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving.

And if you are rooted in teaching those concepts through your subject area, you’re already doing part of the work. We can help or other folks can help, because there’s a lot of great content out there about how do we weave examples of AI systems that are doing this type of work into those lessons that already exist

Vicki Davis (03:20): it’s one of those things that if we don’t talk about it with our students, they’re going to make up their own mind about how they think it should be used.

let’s talk about student literacy, age eight versus age fifteen. What would be the difference in the literacy that an eight year old might have about AI and a fifteen year old might have about AI?

Laura Gray (03:41): there are definitely differences. terminology-wise, the way that you use words and vocabulary are going to very different. a 15-year-old, I can talk about anthropomorphizing and how we avoid that when we talk about AI systems. I can’t use that word with an eight-year-old. but I can reinforce the concept in different ways.

like there’s a really cool lesson that one of our learning managers, Jason, has developed that I’m so excited about. eight to twelve year olds looking at fake elf advertisements for AI tools or systems or toys. And they anthropomorphize or use human-like language for what the AI systems are doing. They’re thinking they’re being your best friend and things like that.

And he has students analyze the difference between what humans can do and how we talk about what humans do and how we talk about what computers and systems and programs do. in a detective sort of way, they analyze these advertisements. They talk about what misconceptions or problems they could cause in the people they’re trying to sell to or where they might be misleading, and then they provide suggestions on edits on being appropriate and explaining what is

the system doing, what are humans doing, and avoiding blurring that line of confusion between audiences. So that’s an unplugged lesson. That might be appropriate for the eight-year-old crowd. We’re not putting an eight-year-old in a large language model used by adults. That’s not a safe practice.

Vicki Davis (05:04): The concern about anthropomorphizing AI because and that means giving human characteristics to something that’s not human.

I always teach my students, the devices we use are not a he or a she, they’re an it. AI is not thinking, it’s processing. yes, some of the AI companies actually do kind of feed into the anthropomorphization of AI because yes, some say we’re moving from the attention economy to the attachment economy. We’re becoming attached to our AIs. Some people

consider them relationships. That’s not, healthy at all. AI is a tool, a very powerful tool. It talks to us. We’ve got the Eliza effect that I talked to my 15 year olds about,

But this is really important. And I love that you’re teaching it with eight year olds with an unplugged lesson

as you work with educators and they talk to you about this, are there any common misconceptions that you think, okay, we need to be really careful with this as we teach kids?

Laura Gray (06:07): we’re still developing the research of what this does to children and young students. there’s gonna be some serious misconceptions with anthropomorphizing, especially with young students. I’ll bring my four-year-old into account. You know, we will pick up the phone and ask with a by name a question to be answered, and a female voice speaks to us. So I just asked him one day.

who is this? And he was like, There’s a lady that lives in your phone. She’s really short. And he truly believed

Vicki Davis (06:35): Hmm.

Laura Gray (06:36): there was a human being in my phone, which really caused some worry in me.

We can’t trust all of the answers. It’s not a human being. I was in a third grade classroom and I simply asked a couple third graders how a smart speaker worked. they were like, you ask a question, it records your answer.

And then it gets sent to a human who looks up the answer and speaks it back. And then it gets sent back to you. They literally

Vicki Davis (06:59): wow.

Laura Gray (07:00): thought a human being was there. And that’s not how that works. And again, it builds this false sense of trust. It displaces the accountability towards the system and not the humans that created it and put it out in the world. and it can be dangerous. I think we don’t realize as adults, because I I’ve had this talk with teachers and a lot of them kind of scoff it off.

Of that it’s not that big of a deal. some of that is healthy for young kids of anthropomorphizing and play and things like that. But I don’t think that we always realize that we understand as adults that we’re speaking in metaphor and can draw lines between systems. Sometimes we can’t. We’ve seen that as well. But children do not understand that we’re speaking in metaphor, especially when it comes to technology. And we’re in a much different place. We didn’t grow up.

With these systems and these technologies at our hands. Our children, especially the ones being born today, will have this throughout their whole lives. This will be a norm. So we have to be very careful about not having a child who has grown up with AI systems and technology and voice reading and image recognition understanding that these are systems, that they make predictions that are not always right, and that human beings ultimately should be the

decision makers and processes and they should have autonomy and agency in those processes. They shouldn’t just submit to data being stolen and used in ways that they don’t agree with.

Vicki Davis (08:23): I’m thinking of a a news article I just read today where a man was cited for going sixty-four in a forty-five at his self-driving car. And when they roll down the window, he said, It’s not my fault I wasn’t driving. we as humans are accountable for everything with every AI tool that we use.

it just seems like it’s healthy to imbue some skepticism, some willingness to question, some willingness to challenge instead of compliance with AI. And so how do we do that?

Laura Gray (08:56): I’ve been using the term discernment instead of skepticism. We need to teach the skill of discernment of when is this a good use and when is this not a good use? I don’t have all the answers. I think it’s more difficult for teachers because we’re being forced into a world where things that we were naturally owning in the classroom on behalf of students, like pedagogy and cognitive load and thinking through,

How they were learning and changing the learning based on their needs is also something that students are going to have to think through now. when they start using AI tools, they definitely have to understand what they are losing by using the tools. I think every person before they start using anything that’s generative AI should ask themselves, Am I doing this? Because I don’t know how. And if the answer to that is yes.

Maybe it’s not the right use of the tool because it’s becoming a crutch. we talk a lot about UDL in teaching practices. And when we think about working with a student that is an ESOL student, speak English as their second language and they’re learning English.

UDL is not let me translate everything to their native language. That doesn’t support them, that supports them for the time being. But as soon as they leave your classroom, they’re no longer supported and you haven’t benefited them in living and and being productive in the world around them. they’re still in the same place that they were. So we also have to look at using AI and how we teach the use of AI through the same lens. What is going to benefit me in growing and learning?

And what is a crutch that I’m using it where I don’t know how to do something and when I walk away, I still don’t know how to do it. I mean, if we go back and we look at, you know, woodworking or crafts or even mathematical problems, which I know a calculator can do, we still learn to do them on our own. So we understand them deeply. and I think we have to have the same thought process, but it involves students recognizing and understanding what they’re losing by using these tools.

And that’s where we get into understanding your own metacognition, which is not easy because we know with without full development of frontal lobes that we don’t really have the discernment. I know so many times in my classroom, students would walk out like, I totally have this lesson. I’m ready to go. And then they’d get home to practice and they’d be like, I do not get this lesson. I am not ready to go.

Vicki Davis (11:15): Mm.

Laura Gray (11:16): they don’t have and they haven’t developed those skills of understanding.

what they do and don’t know well. That’s why they have teachers present. So really thinking through the process as teachers, which won’t be easy of how do we build that skill in students at a younger age and don’t just expect them to have that ability.

Vicki Davis (11:33): Laura, I love that because I love the word discernment. It’s an excellent word. and I try to teach my students about productive struggle.

So Laura, you work with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and you know, a lot of teachers say, I’m not an expert, I can’t teach this.

Laura Gray (11:50): So I’ll just take a step back. No one is an expert in AI or AI education. If anyone says they’re an expert, it’s too big

Vicki Davis (11:55): Ha ha good.

Laura Gray (11:58): of a space. It would be equivalent to me saying, I’m an expert in science. there’s so much in science that I can’t be an expert in all things science. So I will say nobody should be an expert. So don’t try to be an expert. You’re that’s an impossible task and and start small.

Our materials are really designed for non-specialist educators. So I I have a lot of experience. And let’s be honest, most computer science teachers do not have computer science backgrounds. What they have is they love to learn new things and they love to try things with students. And they’re okay with saying, I don’t have an answer to that, but we’ll figure it out. the answer to that is we come from the standpoint of we’ll provide you the resources.

You can edit them to make them localized or for your particular class and their needs, but they come from the standpoint of we assume you don’t know everything and we’re gonna support you in in trying things out and saying, I’m not exactly sure, but we’re gonna try. and so that’s that’s where our resources come from. So we do have some discovering AI that’s just I am brand new, I don’t even know how to talk about this

And we have a foundations and AI safety unit that really get at the core of just understanding some basics before you move into the the world of AI. So it it you don’t have to be a computer science teacher, you don’t have to be a programmer. this is new to all of us as well. So we really come from the standpoint of everyone can do this and we’re gonna support you any way way we can and give you all the resources so you can focus on the learning and not the building.

Vicki Davis (13:29): So when a teacher goes to experience AI and looks at all the resources, where should they start?

Laura Gray (13:37): I would say if you’re brand new, we’re gonna have discovering AI at different age bands. That’s the perfect place to start, or our foundations unit just to get in there. we have a bunch of new resources that are coming out of that are thematic. so you might gravitate towards those too.

They specialize in anywhere from creativity to science to critical thinking and are are meant to be more woven into the day-to-day of either a classroom period in a different subject area or like an advisement class as well. We have some schools that are deciding that they want to do a foundational AI unit for all of seventh grade in their advisory that the students go to once a week, which is really great because all of those teachers are new to teaching this.

And they’re working together, they’re using some of the resources and talking about what they’re doing in the classroom, what they’re learning, the conversations that they’re having with students and it’s almost like a book study. They’re like, we’re doing this together and we’re all learning together, which is great as well. I just look around, whatever gauges your interest is a great starting point. I don’t think we have anything up there that would say like you have to have computer science background or you need to really know this to get started.

Vicki Davis (14:46): this is just a great resource for us as we’re all struggling with how do we teach kids about it?

the other advantage you have is that I believe you have many languages correct?

Laura Gray (14:57): Yeah, I believe it’s twenty two right now.

I think the other big thing for us is localization is really important. So we don’t just think through language and turn of phrase translations. we really think through context in the local country and and setting. So for example, we do update resources that are built for US classrooms, thinking about

All of the different things that our US teachers have to work through, whether it be a rural versus city area. Agriculture is a lot more predominant in our rural area. So we do have adaptations to our lessons for those communities. But also thinking through classrooms where in their states there’s legislation when we mention climate change to discuss alternate views and ways to address that and things like that. So we really think through context for teachers. We work with

I believe over 40 partners across different countries to understand feedback from teachers because we lead with with teachers’ thoughts and voice first when we adapt and and update lessons really focus on hearing from teachers what’s working in their classroom and the adaptations that they make. We just edited a bunch of materials and that all was sourced from teachers saying, you know, I changed the context to this and it really worked with students. And we were like, we love that. Keep that information coming.

We believe in the educator in the classroom, that they

Are the number one asset to students, and so we develop as humans lessons for other humans.

Vicki Davis (16:21): we’ve been talking with Laura Gray from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. about the free experience AI curriculum that you can download and use with your classes. Laura, thanks for coming on the show.

Vicki Davis (16:35): Experience AI,

Vicki Davis (16:36): co-developed

Vicki Davis (16:36): by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored today’s show. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program downloaded more than a million times worldwide. It provides teachers with ready-to-teach lessons, with slides, lesson plans, worksheets, and an excellent free AI glossary that I highly recommend downloading first.

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

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

Announcer (17:40): Thank you for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter.

Vicki Davis (17:46): See you later, educator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vicki Davis (00:04)
As we’re counting down our top 10 episodes of all time for the 10 Minute Teacher, today we’re coming in at number six with How to Teach Writing with Digital Media, with Dr. Sarah Levine. This one received 25,026 downloads.

Vicki Davis (00:24)
Today we’re talking with Dr. Sarah Levine. She’s assistant professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She has spent 10 years in secondary English, and now her research focuses on teaching and learning of literary interpretation and writing in under-resourced urban high schools. And so, Sarah, we are talking today about using digital media to teach writing. And isn’t writing a challenge right now as we’re going back to school in fall 2021?

Sarah Levine (00:59)
Yes, it’s a challenge. It’s always been a challenge. It’s such a difficult thing to teach, in part, I think, because — as any teacher in the classroom knows — half the time your kids are wondering why it is that they have to write anything. Especially if you just had a discussion about something and now you’re supposed to write about that thing. And the kids are wondering why, we just talked about it. Or, who’s going to read this besides you, the teacher? And I think that’s where things get really challenging.

Vicki Davis (01:30)
They can. And I always talk about, we don’t want wastebasket work. We want to publish for an authentic audience when we can.

Sarah Levine (01:35)
Yeah, I completely agree. And it can be really hard to create those authentic audiences. It takes a lot of work sometimes. For example, let’s say you wanna have a trial, you wanna put a character on trial, you wanna bring somebody in who’s gonna act as a judge, somebody who isn’t you. Or let’s say you wanna publish a review on Amazon. Or let’s say you want to have a poetry slam. All of those things take a lot of work and coordination.

And one of the things I’ve been working on — both when I was an English teacher at the high school level and also here now at Stanford — is using audio. That is, especially podcasting, but it’s really even simpler than podcasting. It really is just recording on your phone. Using audio as a way to create authentic writing with authentic audiences.

And one of the interesting things that I’ve been kind of looking into lately is how, for a lot of kids, you don’t need a gigantic audience for something to be important. Sometimes just one person really is enough. For example, I’ve been working on these little things called audio gifts. So this is a memory that a kid might have about someone special in their lives. And they’re going to tell the story of that memory and give that memory as a gift to whoever that person is in their life.

And we have been finding, in the research that we’ve been doing, that kids care just as much about making that gift work for that one person as they do as if they were going to be published on public radio, or on a commercial radio station with a ton of people listening.

Vicki Davis (03:20)
What a fascinating idea. So as they’re preparing their audio gift, are they — I assume — writing and preparing that script to prepare to read it? Is there a process involved?

Sarah Levine (03:33)
Yeah, there is a process. And so there’s lots of ways you can go about kind of scaffolding for this final product. One way to start is simply by having kids listen to a bunch — let’s say five or 10 different audio stories, especially if they’re done by kids. And I can give you a couple of links where you can listen to, for free, stories written by high school students.

So the first thing you might want to do is have your students listen to a bunch of those stories and then compare them to one another. Ask the students to start building criteria. Which stories did they like the best? Which seemed most effective to them? Which moved them the most? And then, how did those stories do that? And what students will come to, when they’ve listened to, let’s say, five different stories and said, oh, I really like that third one — because I could really see it, I could see what they were talking about, I could feel what they were feeling — what they’ll get to is that the language that the students are using when they’re producing these pieces is what makes those pieces effective.

And when you think about writing for radio or writing for audio, you’ve got some really good built-in principles for good writing. Like, for example, when you’re writing for radio, first of all, your story has to mean something. It can’t be, like you say, just waste paper basket writing. It has to be a story that is specific. It needs concrete images and detailed examples, because people won’t have anything to look at. It’s not a movie. You’ve got to make that movie with your words. It has to be a piece where you’re not wasting words. It has to be a piece that has strong verbs. It has to be a piece without cliches.

So these are all things we want students to be doing anyway. It’s just that when you’re writing for audio, every one of those rules becomes more important. So as your kids listen to these different pieces, they can begin, with your help, to kind of develop these criteria. Like, oh, they had really strong verbs. Or, I could really see what they were talking about when they used that image.

And then you want to set up a couple of lessons where they’re practicing, for example, using strong verbs. Where they’re practicing getting rid of — first figuring out what cliches are, and then trying to get rid of them. Like a lesson where you say, you know, “I had blank in my stomach,” and everybody says butterflies. That’s a cliche. So now we’re not going to use that cliche anymore. We’re gonna try to come up with other ways to help express nervousness that don’t have to do with butterflies in the stomach.

Then the second part of the lesson is having kids think about different memories that are important to them, and important to one other person, living or dead, that they can remember and re-describe on tape. And then prepare that script, as you’re talking about, to give to that special person. Like, my aunt — you know, I remember that day when we… and describe that memory so that we can hear it and see it and taste it and touch it just like you did.

And then, once they’ve done writing their script, then they can practice recording on a smartphone, for example. And then they’re giving that little clip of sound to that one person. They’re sharing it with that one person. And that’s where the stakes are. That’s what makes it authentic.

Vicki Davis (07:11)
I love it. In particular — it’s an older book now — the first book I co-authored, with another person, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds, we talked about connecting with many different audiences. And one thing that we said in the book is that connecting with multiple ages — the generation behind you, the generation in front of you — multiple ages actually adds more meaning to everything, but it also adds meaning to your life as you make those connections with multiple ages. So I absolutely love that. Now, do you have any examples of projects that students have done that really stick out in your mind?

Sarah Levine (07:45)
Yeah, I got a couple that really have stayed with me. One is, a kid was remembering this time that she went to Chuck E. Cheese with her mom when she was little. And she remembered how they went in and she got a bunch of tokens, and how she played these different games with her mom, and the sounds of Chuck E. Cheese. And in fact, this kid went back to Chuck E. Cheese and recorded some of that sound and put it in the background of her piece. And how they ate pizza together.

And she wanted to share this memory with her mom because now that she’s a teenager, they’ve been fighting. They fight, you know, a lot. And she wanted to just kind of share this memory with her mom to tell her, I’m still here. I’m still your kid. You haven’t lost me, you know. And I’ll come back around.

And then another great one was a kid who wrote about remembering how her aunt, who was living with her, was working so hard. And one night her aunt came home from work and she was just crying because she missed her kids who were at home in Mexico. And this writer, this student writer, wanted to let her aunt know how much she loved her, and that if she could do anything in the world for her aunt, she would bring her kids over on the airplane and she would set them up in first class and she would bring them so that they, you know, walked right into the Chicago airport and they could hug each other and see each other again.

It’s just, you know, these kind of little pieces of memories that allow someone that you care about to know that you love them and that you see them.

Vicki Davis (09:21)
Wow. And so I assume — I mean, you can even text these or email these after you create your product. And you hate to even call it a product, because it truly is a gift, isn’t it?

Sarah Levine (09:31)
Yeah, that’s why I like this particular approach. And we often would do these around the holidays, but you really can do them anytime. But the idea is, I’m creating this memory for you. So I really want it to be right, and I want it to represent that memory correctly. And it’s easier for kids, you know, to care about that than it is like, OK, I guess I’m going to revise my essay on The Great Gatsby — even though that’s important.

Even though that’s important too, this is something that still allows students to use strong writing skills, to refine their writing, to practice important, useful word choice — but something that they also can give to somebody outside of school that they care about.

Vicki Davis (10:11)
Well, and when they’ve learned to remove the cliches, learned to use stronger verbs, and learned all of these skills to create this audio gift — then that does carry forward to their Great Gatsby essay, doesn’t it?

Sarah Levine (10:24)
Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things. So one of them is, obviously writing an essay about Great Gatsby is a different kind of writing. But I think what it does, if you’re going to write another narrative like your college essay, for example — well, then all of those skills apply. Choosing a story that’s meaningful, finding a particular moment to write about, using strong verbs. All of those things apply.

And I think it also applies to reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, or The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and saying, oh, let’s check out his verbs. He’s clearly trying something here with those verbs. I’m just going to check them out and see what they do, what kind of work they do.

Vicki Davis (11:07)
Okay, so Sarah, so you have teachers that are sold. They’re ready to go. Where do they start?

Sarah Levine (11:13)
I would start by going to a website called prx.org. And I’ll actually give you a couple of links that will take you specifically to some of these audio gifts that I was just talking about, and have teachers listen to a couple of those just to get a feel for what they’re like. Choose a couple that they might want their own students to listen to.

And then begin developing probably a three- to four-week writing unit, depending on your time, that goes from listening to stories, to having kids build criteria for what makes a good story, to having kids decide for themselves what kind of moments, what kind of gifts do I think I might want to write about, to having kids kind of lay those out and pick the one they think might be the best, to having them outline the story, to having them work on the verbs, to having them cut it down, edit it — and then to begin recording.

And practicing recording is also a whole thing, because, you know, you can sound really stilted and unnatural. So you got to learn to speak to the person you’re talking to as if they were, like, a real live, honest-to-God person.

Vicki Davis (12:23)
Well, and I’m sitting here thinking, I can use it to teach Adobe Audition, which is an editing software that I use for my own podcast. So I could even incorporate that with writing, because all of our classes have to teach writing.

Sarah Levine (12:34)
Oh, yeah. And I mean, if you really want to dive in, you know, get the kids working on something like audacity.com, which is free, or another editing software, and they can spend a week putting in music, putting in sound, editing. It’s a whole other set of skills.

Vicki Davis (12:50)
Love this idea. So, Dr. Sarah Levine from Stanford Graduate School of Education — thank you for this gift of audio gifts. This is fantastic. I’ve literally never heard of this idea, but it’s just so transformational. And then having multiple literacies involved, and multiple modes of communication, does add meaning. And I love this. So thank you for this best practice.

Sarah Levine (13:18)
Oh, yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for talking with me.

Announcer (13:21)
Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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