Changing the Status Quo Through Effective Research

Speaker 1 Hello, everyone. Welcome to, summit number seven for January here with the Human Restoration Project. Today, we're gonna be talking about changing the status quo by reading research. And I'm super stoked to have this conversation because it's it's very specialized. It talks about things that we can actually use. It's effective. It's just a really interesting thing once you get past the fact it's just reading research, which might sound kind of boring on its core, but we'll get to it. So this is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. If you like the work that we're doing and you appreciate, free professional development, please check out our Patreon page. There will be a link to that in the description of this video or in the show notes if you're listening to this via a podcast. Finally, if you would like to participate and join in the discussion, in the bottom left hand corner, there is a raise hand button. Just go ahead and hit that hand, and I'll invite you to unmute so that way you can talk to us, engage in the conversation, ask some questions, or anything like that. Some introductions here. I'll start. So my name is Chris McNutt. I teach graphic design at a public STEM school in Ohio, and I'm also the founder of Human Restoration Project. And what we do is stuff like this, just free professional development. We offer free resources. We do a lot of stuff, and you can learn more about that on humanrestorationproject.org. And I'll toss it over to you, Susan, to introduce yourself.

Speaker 2 Hi. Thanks. Okay. So I teach developmental psychology at Williams College, and I direct our program in teaching. That's a program for all undergraduates at Williams who are interested in education. Some of them wanna be teachers, some of them just wanna study education the way they would wanna study history or chemistry, and and for many, it's a it's a combination of those two things. I've taught all ages from three on up. I'm a cofounder of an experimental school. What else can I say about myself? I've written quite a few books about, education and about child development. I think that's it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I'm I'm stoked that you're here to join us because I I think that you're underselling those books. They're really well written, and they're super cool. Thank you. And I I think that they're, like, a huge benefit to progressive ed, and plus they're really research heavy. Hence, these questions surrounding research. Because to me, that's that's a huge thing that we're missing within a lot of school communities is a focus on research and what research matters versus what research doesn't matter. Or another way to word that would be what research is valuable for what it is that we're trying to do. So we have three questions here and I'll just briefly showcase this then go back to our normal video view. But essentially what we're looking at here is figuring out how we actually go about doing research, figuring out what misconceptions there are surrounding research, because I see that all the time, and then trying to figure out how can educators actually utilize this stuff? How can they go about finding it? How can they go about, actually putting it into practice? So let's just jump right into this first question, Susan. I'll toss it over to you to kind of briefly explain why it matters to know the research that backs education in general.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah. I'll start actually just telling a little of my own history because it's so related to this question. So I was a teacher before I was a researcher. To be totally honest, when I was a kid, I ran a summer camp for little children when I was in my teens. And like a lot of people who teach, I didn't to begin with, I didn't give it a lot of thought. I just knew I loved kids, and I had a knack for it. Like a lot of teachers, it was just a feeling I had that I was good with kids, that I knew how to make make up fun activities for them or help them do things, and I like to be around them. And anything more kind of elaborate or, for in terms of formal education regarding teaching never occurred to me. And then I went to college, and I totally fell in love with developmental psychology, and all I wanted to do was be a researcher. And I studied sort of complicated things, early word acquisition and how children learn to participate in conversations, and how concepts first are acquired in the first few years of life and stuff like that. And even then, I really didn't think that my work with kids and my work as a researcher had anything to do with each other. I went on teaching while I was in college in New York City in public and independent schools, mostly just as a way of making money. And I didn't think those two worlds connected until I began to realize that I knew all this cool stuff as a researcher that that wasn't making its way into his classrooms. And when I was in schools working with other teachers, I saw that they often didn't know the most interesting or most relevant research that would help their teaching. And it began I began to realize that those two worlds were just too far apart from one another. So that's the and I've spent my grown up life trying to bring those two worlds together, trying to help make the most interesting research accessible to teachers and help teachers figure out what kinds of research would be helpful to them and how to make it useful in their classrooms. That's the the personal piece of this. More broadly, would say there are two reasons why teachers should know what the good research is all about. The most important thing is is it it empowers you as a teacher. It's the best tool you could possibly get. I promise you that you could go to six workshops on continuing ed days and learn how to make a cool aquarium or how to do a great lesson plan on a certain book or some how to set up a project in your classroom, and it wouldn't wouldn't get you a tenth of as far it's not even good English, but it wouldn't get you nearly as far as if you understood how children think, how they learn, how they develop, how they get from being a three year old psychologically to being a 12 year old, what they go through during adolescence. Learning those things would be so much more useful and powerful than learning three more, you know, lesson plans. So the most important reason for learning the research is it is the best tool you can have as a teacher to to make your classroom a wonderful place and to help you reach students and and help them thrive and learn. The second reason is also really important, which is if you are trying to do things in an interesting way in your classroom that isn't just following all the rules of your school or if you're trying to something new or you have a different idea about how to do things, which I think is certainly true of you, Chris, and you, Nick, that you need to be able to explain why your practices are a good idea. It's not enough to say, trust me, I know it's better to let the kids make up a play than their diagram sentences. You have to be able to say why that's so. And often, great practices that look unusual unexpected and make administrators or parents uneasy, they if they understood that that the research totally backs up the certain approach, whatever it is, we could get into specifics later, then they're comfortable with it, and they're willing to trust it, and they're willing to let you have a chance to reach your kids in a different way or set up your classroom in a different way. So the second reason is that it it makes you much stronger as an advocate for your own way of doing things in your classroom.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I wanna I mean, all that stuff definitely hearkens true for a lot of what we believe in. I think it's astonishing for people to figure out how much the obvious stuff that you would think that helps students ends up helping them in research. I mean by that is things like play or having the ability to choose things they want to do and not just like cramming and memorizing things. All those things obviously help and therefore the research supports that. However, what's interesting is I want to dissect that word relevant research because I don't know if you're familiar with the quote unquote research Ed movement, But they're nonprofit social media heavy group that believes in quote unquote research and education. And what they state is that we need to go more towards direct instruction, more towards very worksheet heavy by the book style research because it shows that it increases a student's quote unquote knowledge. And I think a lot of people that tend to read research might get a little confused or have some misconceptions surrounding what it means to learn, which I know it's like a huge question. But I'm curious, like, how do you how do you differ what research matters versus what doesn't matter when it comes to looking at increasing knowledge, quote unquote. Right. Okay. So it's lucky we have plenty of time because that's it's complicated to answer that question. First of all,

Speaker 2 because there there are two pieces. One is deciding what kind of knowledge you want about children and learning, and and here, what I mean by that is I think that there's a big tendency in in schools and school settings to look for the piece of research that backs up the certain practice you're doing or the I'll give you a very concrete example. If if you've been in the last few years reading, sort of books about education, then you've read the word mindset like a million times. Carol Dweck's World Mindset. And the the tendency amongst teachers and educators is to quickly look to the end of the book or the end of the article and find the intervention that you can do to give kids a growth mindset. And and then if you're looking to sort of like this group you're talking about to to show why that's a good those interventions are good to do, you quickly look for the result that shows that it, quote, unquote, works. And the mistake of that is understanding research usually isn't just grab picking and choosing a piece, a study here and a study there, and using the technique that's advocated at the end of the study. It's understanding what the research tells you about the way that children's minds work and the way that they interact, the way their social development unfolds, and the way in which their thoughts change as they get older. And I know that sounds vague and broad, but if you wonder if you have a bigger picture of what the research has told us about how children grow and learn and develop, then you can be more what would the word be? You can be a little savvier in figuring out which study is worth paying attention to. So for instance, in the example you just gave, we know that kids who simply memorize information may do well on a test the week that they need to do well on a test for the school to to look good in terms of, you know, state reports, but we also know that it has very little long term impact on them intellectually. And and much more more equally important, it doesn't do anything to make them want to go on learning. And we also know from research that having getting kids to want to go on learning is the single most powerful thing that can happen to them in school because, you know, if if learning's to do you any good, you have to go on doing it after you're 18. If you stop doing all your learning at 18, you know, you'd be dead in the water. So so cramming kids with facts not only doesn't really change the way they think, but it also doesn't work in the long run if in the course of doing that, you didn't get you didn't help them wanna go on learning or help them learn how to be independent learners to learn on their own. You'd have to have some understanding of what it means to grow intellectually to even know that that kind of research isn't useful for you as a teacher. I guess what I'm I that's a long winded way of saying that I think that one of the things I would wish that, you know, people would get from this podcast or from some of the things that I've written is that reading research is not about finding out the newest technique and the test scores that prove that it works. It's about finding out what researchers have learned about what children's minds are like and how they change as they grow and what kinds of influences really matter to them, which influences or practices hurt them and which help them. But you have to have a bigger picture in the first place. And, you know, the only thing I can think of is, like, nutrition research. If you if you follow what to eat and what not to eat, you're always saying, you know, butter's good, butter's bad, whole milk's good, whole milk's bad, carbs are good, carbs are bad. You just as anybody listening knows, you go crazy. Every few weeks, you change how you eat. If you understand something about how the body works, you can make better judgments about which nutrition advice, which specific studies are helpful because they make because you you're fitting them into a bigger framework.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's that's a fantastic example, and it it makes me think a lot about the fact that, you know, a a key piece of education should be motivation. As in if we teach kids that learning sucks, that it's like this very memorization based, just really not fun thing to do. It's no wonder that we see like a declining reading rates, like a lot of adults don't ever read. That's right. Or we see a decline in, well, there's a little bit of a rise right now, but usually there's been a decline in civic participation in government and voting. Things that if taught correctly and what I mean by correctly is if taught in a way where it makes things interesting and they matter people see relevance in it and they see it as a fun engaging activity, it would only make sense that people continue to do that well into their adult life, which is what you were just saying. And I think too for the teachers perspective, knowing the research helps us a lot in ensuring that we stay motivated. Because if I constantly feel like I'm doing something wrong because I'm trying something that's kind of against the norm, at least in a very traditional school, and I don't have that research to back what it is that I'm doing, I'm gonna constantly feel like I'm the one in the wrong. Because a lot of times it is you versus, you know, like a 100 people. There aren't a lot of people doing this type of work still.

Speaker 2 It makes it more fun to teach. I had an example the other day. A first grade teacher was telling me she was wonderful classroom. She's a wonderful teacher. But she was telling me and she was telling me that she was doing an activity with her kids. It's a very community minded school, and they were gonna do the kids were gonna do a little project on the difference between tattling and reporting. And she wanted them to understand something about, you know, that reporting is good. That's when you tell something worrisome that happened in the class because you want your friends to be safe or, you know, you're worried that something hurtful has happened to somebody. And tattling, obviously, is the bad thing where you're rushing around telling the teacher every time you saw another kid, I don't know what, chewing their pencil or whatever. And as she told me about the activity, I was thinking, well, that's fun. That's nice. But what what do kids need to develop that would make that more than just a quick little lesson about what you should do and what you shouldn't do? And, you know, I'm a developmental psychologist, so I thought, oh, they need to they need to build up their their inclination and their skill at expected taking. So and and that's what's really key in trying to help kids think about something like when to tattle and when to report, you know, what's tattling, what's reporting. So I made a very simple suggestion to her. I said, don't you have each each kid who's sitting there in the circle tell one time when they tattled and one time when someone tattled about them? And it was such a simple little activity. She could do it instantly. She did it that morning. It took fifteen minutes. The kids loved it because who doesn't wanna tell stories about the time you did the bad thing and the time someone did the bad thing to you? And she but she what she what she needed that she didn't have was a broader developmental perspective that would let her be creative in thinking about how to reach her educational goal. And when you don't know the research and you don't have that bigger picture about development, you're always just following rules. You're doing what the lesson book says or what the head of your school or the state says in terms of curriculum. If you understand something about what what kids are really like and how development unfolds, you're the sky's the limit in terms of thinking of fun curricular ideas to to meet their needs. Yeah. And and something that you brought up earlier that that heavily relates to that is that

Speaker 1 fad trap that we sometimes get stuck in as educators. When we have a tendency to kind of reinvent the wheel over and over again in different forms. So when I think of like experiential learning, there's seriously probably 30 or 40 different frameworks and acronyms that are essentially experiential learning. We've just rewritten it, in my opinion, at many points for people to make money because I can resell a lot of curriculum materials if I reinvent the framework. But going along with that too though, it has a tendency I think for people to ignore that practice or to write off that practice even though at its core it is a good practice. What I mean by that is that if you take experiential learning that's been well documented to be beneficial. It's been around for literally centuries. It's like a really old practice. But yet, if you're a veteran educator or even someone new to the field that works in a certain environment and someone comes around and says, we're going to start doing inquiry based learning. And there's like a 50 slide thing on the value of inquiry based learning, which is almost the exact same thing. I might just go like, well, that's not going to work. I'm just going keep doing what I'm doing because it's going to be gone in a year anyway. It has a tendency to jade us even though the underlying idea might be good. At times, I feel like a lot of people are missing the point because we're either trying to tie test scores to something that works inherently as in that we shouldn't necessarily looking at the test score component of it. We should be looking at everything else and that increases test scores. That's great. But two, by understanding and reading research, it also helps us ensure that we can diagnose those things as they come up. As in when I see the slideshow, I'm like, oh, it's actually this, but it's being packaged curriculum. What are your thoughts? I know you wrote like an entire book on this essentially. But what are your thoughts on the kind of that corporate influence when it comes to research? Because there are a lot of, I guess, test prep companies that highly benefit from the fact that they can read research in a certain way in order to prop up their financial gain.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, can you tell me what you mean by that last part?

Speaker 1 So being able to kind of selectively read research as a corporation to sell a curriculum package or to sell a keynote speech. Because I feel like you can't talk about effective researching without we're gonna dive into a bunch of different topics here without talking about like neoliberalism or talking about like the the capitalistic influence on everything it is that we do in our daily lives. So so I now I'm gonna just

Speaker 2 I don't know if this is gonna answer your question, but one of the tricky things you've already said this, Chris, is that, you know, if everyone can find a study that shows the thing they wanted to show because, you know, I have to say this, and this is gonna make me sound like I'm betraying my own field of science. But but there's a there's a lot of good research out there, but there's a lot of bad research too. And one of the reason teachers should have more be offered more time and encouragement to read the research itself is so they can begin to make distinctions for themselves about what's the good research and what's the bad research. And because there's a lot of research that gets cited by money hungry corporations or publishing houses or the places selling these, you know, canned curriculum that are citing research that's just badly done. And it's worth noting, and I was going to give another example later, that that there's a difference between research that simply tests what it's called an intervention or a practice and research that we call it, you know, basic science that seeks to understand the way that the human organism thinks and learns and changes over time. And it's really important that that there's no reason why teachers can't know that as well as in any other sign any scientist that they should be looking for basic research, that there's so much that we're still learning about how children think, how they experience the world, which x factor you know, which aspects of their daily lives really shape them, which things can change and which can't. I'll give you an example. Shyness is something which doesn't change much. So all the teachers who write in all the reports, I wish that, you know, Jimmy would be a little less shy. Jimmy's not gonna be a little less shy. And if you read research on on personality and temperament, you'll see that it's quite quite stable. Sometimes that's a good thing. Like, a kid who's got a pretty easygoing temperament is probably gonna stay that way, and thank god that means that you can't screw it up much with whatever you do. But by the same token, the kid who's shy or is nervous in crowds is probably gonna be that way no matter what. The reason I bring that up is it would be better for teachers to have access to research that shows those basic characteristics of children and their lives over time and less time looking at the sort of often shitty research whoops. Sorry. No. That's fine. Okay. Yeah. The less well done research that's looking at the little technique that makes kids unshy, which is not based on any real model of of of human development and is often not worth paying much, you know, not worth paying much attention to. So that was a digression. Your point, I'm gonna say something totally different too, which is that given that you can find research to support anything, it's not all equally good research, but you can find it. It doesn't mean it was well done or that it's worth paying attention to, but it's out there and it can be cited. The real question the other question that that research alone can't answer is what are your values about education? What do you and, quote, for teachers who are listening to this, you have to keep asking yourself, why am I doing this? What is it I really want these kids to end up with that I can have an impact on? And that's a a big piece of it. So I always say to teachers, you know, what do you want for your students by the end of the year? And they'll say, I want them to love learning, or I want them to be eager for information, or I want them to feel good about themselves, or I want them to know a lot, or whatever it is they they want. And the next question I always ask is, which of those things do you think you can have an impact on? Because teachers can't have an impact on everything. I mean, thank God, because what a burden that would be, but, you can only have an impact on certain things. And so before you begin figuring out how to have an impact on those things, which things you are gonna influence in a child's life or a teenager's life if you're a high school teacher, you have to decide what is it you really seek. And this goes back, Chris, to your question. If you seek a high test score and that's your main goal as a teacher, you might approach things one way. If your real goal is to go back to something you said, Chris, to help students sort of attain a really sturdy, long lasting love of learning. You're gonna do things in a different way in your classroom, and you have to decide that first. Then you can say to yourself, so if that's so important to me, what will I do in this classroom to ensure that kids leave this year? In June, they love learning a little more than they did in September.

Speaker 1 That's a fantastic point. I think that pedagogical framework, I mean, that that makes all the difference. And I wish that teacher training programs really emphasize that even more. I'm not sure if my experience is universal, but for the most part, teacher training for me was very rote and how to write a lesson plan more than it was why is it that you teach and how do you incorporate those values in the teaching. And I appreciate your example too of the introverted kid because that was me. If you want to talk about like, not feeling good at school, nothing feels worse than like every single teacher telling you that there's something implied wrong with you because you don't talk to people very often. What a terrible feeling. You know, it's interesting. One of the kinds of research I was gonna talk about today is research on the value of a sense of security,

Speaker 2 and and that covers a lot of different things. If you're not secure about where your next meal is coming from or you're not secure that your home feel is safe, that's one thing. If your walk to school or your bus ride to school is not safe because of the neighborhoods you go through or the other people you encounter, that's another kind of insecurity. But there's also a security like that you have a secure relationship either with the people in your home life, but also with a teacher, that there's someone at school that you feel you can count on and that you know you have, you know, unconditional regard from. It's very powerful. And research shows that you can't really learn without it. And the reason is learning involves paying attention to uncertainty. And, you know, I as you know, Chris, I do research. I wrote a book on curiosity. Curiosity involves sort of relishing a moment of uncertainty and then wanting to reduce the uncertainty by so you're uncertain about, you know, what's under that rock or how do cells divide or what happens when you multiply three numbers. All of those are examples of moments when you feel if you don't know the answer, what you feel is uncertainty, and what you want the student to do is like that feeling enough to go out and try to resolve the uncertainty by getting the answer. And every teacher listening to this knows what it looks like when a student experiences uncertainty and then shuts it down because it feels so bad to them. They don't want to get the answer. They don't want to resolve the uncertainty. They just want to move away from the feeling, And that's what it looks like when a kid doesn't like learning. But if you don't know the research that shows how important, how pivotal a sense of security is in pursuing and being what did you call it before? Inquiry based learning and paying attention to your own curiosity, your own sense of the things you don't know the answer to. If you don't know how important that security is, you don't know what to do to encourage your kids to like learning. And so if you know the research about the role of security and secure attachment and the sense of safety, you'll do different things as a teacher. You'll say, okay. The first thing I have to do is make sure that the kids in my classroom have some sense of safety and security and well-being so that when they come across something they don't know the answer to, they'll enjoy it and wanna get the answer rather than shutting down. So that was circuitous to what I just said, but it's a a way of talking about how if you know what your real goal is and then you know something about research, you you know, what what you need to know about the kids in your room and what makes them thrive. When you put those two things together, then you can do almost anything. You can try anything in the classroom because you have the the building blocks to figure out what, you know, what activities to do or how to structure the room or whatever.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah. And that and what you're saying too rings true, and I don't wanna go too far down, this rabbit hole, but it it is something to be said that there is some responsibility on teachers to share that research as well for social or political reasons because a teacher can only do so much with inside their classroom. If you have kids coming to school who are impoverished or live in a very inequitable society. Right. It's very, very difficult as a teacher to solve those issues. If we had a little more support for those students at home, then you would see, I mean, drastic changes within school and so many opportunities to young people. Absolutely. And so I I don't wanna I don't wanna go too far down that because that's like a whole other discussion around surrounding political movements and change.

Speaker 2 It's true, but it's also important one. You know, I think it's so easy to feel beleaguered as a teacher and to feel like you're being asked to do all these things that feel almost impossible to do. And part of the reason they feel impossible to do is because of the things you just alluded to, that that we've put all of society's problems on the shoulders of teachers. You know, you take these kids who live in a tough setting or are the targets of, you know, bigotry and inequity, and you you should make them wanna learn and make them good at learning and make them behave and make them have high aspirations and, you know, one thing after another, and it it's not a reasonable set of expectations. And so one thing well, yet another reason why it's important to know the research is so the teachers can be realistic and fair with themselves about what they can and can't achieve.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. And speaking to that point too that you stated about the idea of having a sense of safety or a sense of connection with the teacher in the room. I think it's important that we understand too that the way that you develop that relationship tends to be by being very authentic and very welcoming and very friendly, not by trying to manipulate like your social ability in order to connect with every single student. Right. I think kids see right through that. And and what goes along with that too is recognizing that you're probably not going to connect with every single student. Like, I would rather have a very authentic relationship with the kids that know that I'm being authentic with them and have another teacher have an authentic relationship with the kids that just don't we just we just don't share that connection because there's different types of people.

Speaker 2 I totally agree with that.

Speaker 1 Well, I go back for one more time? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Go I just want to get something.

Speaker 2 I just wanna encourage anybody who liked what we were just talking about a few minutes ago. I love the idea of starting the year by making a little note on which kids in your class like learning and which don't, and pay attention to what what clues are telling you that. Like, how are you deciding that? And then and then decide what you as the teacher are gonna do to get all the kids to move the needle just a little bit from where they are, and then take their temperature again in three months and then in six months because it's not it wouldn't be an impossible thing to measure in your classroom, and it would change everything if you kept a record of it and thought this is my real goal. And every kid could move a little bit. The kid who already likes learning could like it even more or could get even better at fulfilling their, you know, their curiosity or their hunger for learning, and the kid who seems to shut down totally and have no interest in learning, if you could get them to like it just a little bit, you'd have done a lot. So I just want to plant that seed.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think that's a really important point because if you get bogged down and staring at the grade book when it comes to certain students Yeah. You you turn them into a number. I think it misses out on a lot of the hope and change that you feel when you see students embrace that like actually, this week. So I've been teaching photography recently. So we won a photography tour. The downtown's like a mile from where I work. And I have a student who has not been doing well pretty much in any class. She's really struggling. But outside downtown taking pictures and that kind of stuff, it was like one of the most drastic transformations I've ever seen of a student really engaged in learning. And even though it sounds kind of bad, even though that might not necessarily change what that grade book might look like at the end of the year, even though we're mostly gradeless, we still have to report a grade. We've at least identified something that we can we can be proud of. We can share with her that we can maybe find other ways to engage in like a more active outside approach if that's what it is or maybe it's something else. But it's something. Yeah. And when you reflect on those things, I mean, that makes a huge difference. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Definitely, if you reflect on it and make it a deliberate goal. Like, it's not just that some kids like learning and some don't. I can do something to help the ones who don't seem to like it a little more. And, you know, engagement is one of these other things that the research is so clear about, the power of engagement, really being immersed in something. And not every kid can be engaged in everything they learn, but if every kid has something in the day that they find really challenging and engaging, like that young person found photography to be, it changes their experience of school.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Let's let's let's shift into, like, the meat of the discussion. This is something that we were talking about kind of a little bit before we went, on the recording, which is how do you actually go about finding the research? Because it's one thing to say like read the research, but it's, I mean, it's kind of the Wild West out there. Yeah. It's very hard to find because not only do you have to, you know, not only do define the research, you also define the research that's effective. Then a normal research article is fairly long. Teachers have limited time. It's not necessarily supported through professional development to do independent research, even though I think it should be.

Speaker 2 Okay. Like, idea of, like, self sustaining professional development. So go ahead. I have some concrete ideas. The first you just alluded to. I think every teacher should try to push their school for their next professional development to drop all the workshops on how to, you know, all those things that you learn in those workshops, how to use a new kind of whiteboard in your room, blah blah, and learn how to read research that's relevant to your work as a professional. A lot of the research is in education journals, but but I'm gonna say, and I'm biased about this because I'm a psychologist, I'm a developmental psychologist, a lot of the best research is in psych psychology journals, and I'm gonna say something more about that in a minute. But one cool thing that you just gave me the idea of, why not spend a professional development day each reading one research article in an area that interests you, and then reporting it to your little team that you're in a group with for professional development day and learning together how to be discerning consumers of research. For one thing, many, teachers should be able to should know that because they're teaching students how to be discerning consumers of information. So you should everyone should be able to do it for themselves and understanding yeah. I mean, get the science teachers in your school to lead the to lead that seminar. They know that a good piece of research should have a clear hypothesis and have a method for testing the hypothesis that's well thought through and that the the measures should match what the questions were? I mean, some of it is stuff that everybody should know because that's what everybody should be teaching their students. So one thing is to push a little harder for that to be part of professional development. That's I just think I didn't think of that until you said what you said, but but I think that would be so much more effective and far reaching in terms of how it would help teachers in their daily practice.

Speaker 1 And I wanna interrupt you really quickly. Yeah. Because there's a question here talking about what you just were talking about from Monica in the chat here. She asked if you recommend any specific

Speaker 2 psychology journals that you would trust. Oh, I'm just gonna say that. That was gonna be my next part of my answer. Go go ahead. Thank you, Monica. So yeah. So I that's the other thing. So we everybody in the sciences in every field in science, there are the sort of top tier journals, and they're the best ones to read because they are peer reviewed. So every no article gets published if other researchers didn't read the research without knowing the name of the scientists, so it's not about who you like and who you're friends with. It's just about whether you think the research is good, and it's worth looking at those top tier journals. So educational psychology put out by APA, American Psychological Association is a very good journal. Child development is a very good journal. I know less about these days, haven't been reading much in about adolescent development. There used to be a good adolescent journal of adolescent development, but there's plenty on an adolescent in the child development. That's the well, that's what it's called the journal, child development. So those are two that I think are really good, educational psychology and child development. Because of Google Scholar, you all know that you can type in a search word and come up with any number of articles. But, you know, my mom is 95, and she's incredibly savvy, and she actually started schools in her life. And, you know, she and I talk about education all the time. She's a very well read woman and very astute. But even so, she's always saying to me, well, I found it on Google. Now I know she's 95, and probably your listeners are not 95. But the reason I tell that is it it worries me that she still doesn't get that just because it popped up when she did a Google search doesn't mean it's a reputable source. So look for studies that were done at well known universities, and look for journals, articles that were published, you know, in if if not educational psychology or child development, other, you know, highly regarded journal. The Merrill Palmer Quarterly is another one that's very good. There's a very good journal called Cognitive Development. It's put out by the Jean Piaget Society. Now a lot of this is sort of pitched towards elementary preschool and elementary school, but but some of it's about adolescence. There's a weird paucity of research on adolescent development. There's just not enough that's done in that area in my view. Maybe we'll see a revival of that. But those are the the journals that I think are are really are really good. And and so and but also you could do a Google you could go into Google Scholar and look and see what articles come up, but then pay attention to where they were published and, whether the people who did the research, you know, whether they're at, you know, reputable institutions. And that's not about snob factor. That's about making sure that that the research was done in a, you know, in a rigorous way and and, an honest and reliable way. And then pay attention to how the research was done because you would want your students to pay attention to that, so why shouldn't all of us pay attention to that? You know, whether they were the subjects were chosen in a smart way, whether the question is an interesting reasonable one, and whether the measures make sense to you.

Speaker 1 It's beneficial for teachers to have that list on hand because there is not, at least as far as I know, not a place where you can find all that information. That's what we were just talking about a few minutes ago. But I mean, it's difficult

Speaker 2 know. This conversation to try to start something like that because I think it's shocking there isn't. I did for for people who teach elementary school, I wrote a book that came out last year about child development for teachers, but it's mostly about elementary school. So for those of you who are high school teachers, it still might be interesting to you because it sort of frames the basic process of of development, and it makes the distinction between learning and development that's interesting no matter what age you teach. But for any elementary school teachers who are listening, that book might be helpful to them because it synthesizes a lot of what I consider to be the best research, and it kind of pops the bubbles that the burst the bubble about research that, as you said, is faddish but not really very good or useful.

Speaker 1 And to that point to have allowing teachers time at work or acknowledging the work of research through professional development. Yeah, it's interesting to note that when you do a practice like that where you have teachers going out and doing kind of independent or group study and sharing it out and working on their own, you're mirroring the exact same techniques that you would want to see in a classroom with students. What I mean by that is that we have a tendency to like we're all people who study education, but yet the way that teachers tend to be taught is incredibly backwards. A lot of like 50 to 60 slides with just three bullet points on them and just reading off for hours on end. And as a result, obviously you're not going to learn as much as if you were passionate about the idea that you're pursuing, that you're working in groups, that you get to move around, that you're respected as an individual. Because a lot times, it's the meaning to do PD. It feels like you're being treated So like you're it's no wonder if you're a student in a classroom listening to a sixty minute PowerPoint about something or if you're a teacher listening to a sixty minute PowerPoint about something else, even if it's in your field, it's no wonder people become demotivated and don't wanna do, this kind of stuff, because that's what we know as teachers.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, it's interesting when I a few years ago, I took a year sabbatical, and I worked as the director of learning and teaching for a public school system. And I was in charge among other things of the PD. And the for the first PD day that I had for the district, I had I got rid of all the workshops and the seminars and the PowerPoints you were just referring to and the kind of cool neat activities, and instead I had them each observe another teacher in the school system, and the only rule was you couldn't observe someone in your own grade level or your own field if you were a high school teacher. So if you're an English teacher, you couldn't observe another high school English teacher, and if you were a third grade teacher, you couldn't observe another third grade teacher. You had to observe someone in another area. And and basically, we devoted that year to doing observations like that and then sharing our insights, and eventually we built it into doing small studies together, collecting data to answer various empirical questions. And at first, the teachers were very resistant, I have to say. They they didn't get how that was gonna quickly show up as having an effect in their classroom, And I was trying to do what we're trying to do in this conversation right now, which is change the way teachers thought about what would help make them better teachers. And over time, they got to love it because who as the teacher, who wouldn't like the chance to really watch kids in action in somebody else's classroom and be be the one watching rather than the one doing and begin to kind of draw your own conclusions about any number of things, whether there are gender differences in the classroom or whether there are certain parts of the classroom that seem more active than other parts or what it looks like when kids are concentrating. I mean, there are a million interesting questions a teacher could ask and use observations as a means of answering that question, but you can't do that if you don't actually practice it. And so it PD is a wonderful place to make some of these shifts, and that just involves getting your school to agree to do it differently. I mean, because I I I've never heard a teacher say what you just said, but I bet you're right that it often feels demeaning in those PDs.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I've I've rarely gone to a PD that I've enjoyed. I mean, sounds really bad. I've been teaching for six years and maybe two have felt meaningful.

Speaker 2 If you could have your dream PD, what would it be?

Speaker 1 My dream PD would be something that's gonna sound so self promotional because that's something that we're working on an human restoration project to do, but it's the reason why I think it's important, which is allowing teachers to choose their own path on what is they want to do and then working with administration to come up with that plan and there's some acting on it. Like being able to go out with a team of one, two, three other people and say, Okay, here's what I want to look into. Let's learn more about it, gather all that information, make some kind of report on it, then share it out. Very simple. It could be as simple as reading about it or going to visit other schools, but having free rein on what schools we pick or even something else thinking about when you're talking about observing other teachers. Something that was very beneficial to me when I was in college was they had us do the shadow a student challenge or, you know, whatever you want to call it, where you just follow a student period to period at a high school. And I don't want to sound cynical because I'm not blaming teachers, but it really lets you remember what it was like to be in high school. Because I think we sometimes forget when we become teachers what it was like, or we like to see ourselves as doing it a lot better than what it was like. But I mean, was rough. Like, doesn't feel good. Like, if you have like a a bathroom policy where it's like, you can only go once a day or like in your three minute break between periods. Like, there's these Yeah. Like small things that we forget about from when we were in school and just how controlling it was and how little opportunity we had to make choices that nowadays I don't even like like, it doesn't cross my mind that these policies exist and it helps us to rethink about the structure of school because if I don't like it now, it must be really bad when at least now I have a choice. Like, if if I have a restrictive policy, I can go somewhere else and, you know, I can make that decision, but as a student, I can't. You're stuck. So yeah. Yeah. So from a PD standpoint, I think it would be beneficial for teachers to be exposed to a lot of different things, have the opportunity to take with that and run with it and then share that information out with others in a way where it's incredibly independent. Because there's also a respect issue there as well. Know, teachers are supposed to be at least, you know, very well trained in reading, writing and reading research. That's literally the entire degree for the most part. And we don't really get a huge opportunity to do those things outside of when we're in college. So by giving teachers those skills and the ability to enact on them, not only are you respecting them, but you're letting them maintain that practice that way they can use it in the future. You're still learning when you're a teacher.

Speaker 2 Because the whole idea of those professional development days is to build in sort of to make teachers you know how all schools have these mission statements that say lifelong learners? But then when you think about it, this schools don't even do their part to help their teachers be lifelong learners. So if you thought of I'm just building on what you said. If you thought of professional development or even if you get time as a team, let's say a grade level team or a subject area team to work together more that should be thought of as a time to be, you know, to be scholars, to be learners, to would the you you referred to the college atmosphere. It should be that. And what it ends up being instead of these little quick fixes, there's something to fill up that professional development day or teach you the new technique or give you, you know, some new skill you you needed. Instead of using it as a time to create a community of of learners and thinkers amongst the teachers.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think to that some of that is just kind of recognizing the value of independent PD as a way to recognize things like what we're doing right now. So like for example, if you're listening to this right now, there's a form on our website that is like a certificate like you would get at a traditional, like at the end of a traditional PD session that says like reflect on one side, the other side has like my signature and says that you did this activity. Yes, it's not the traditional, like you go sit in a room for without 30 other people and you know, you get your little printed off certificate that says that you did it. It's not like that. It is virtual. But it should just have just as much power and influence because you're making the decision to do it. So you go download that, print it off, show your admin this YouTube video and say, hey, like this is a real thing that you can do. And and Nick just linked it there in chat too. The series, think, goes though for, like, listening to podcasts or reading a book, like, literally just checking out a book from the library from a reputable author and reading it and doing a book report as that's like old school as that sounds, know, that kind of stuff matters.

Speaker 2 When I was doing that thing when the school system, we we gave teachers stipends to form book clubs with each other. And the books they read didn't have to even be about education. It was so much That's really cool. The teachers loved it, and they loved the chance to talk to one another about things they were reading. They had to agree. I forget how we did it, but they agreed on the books, and they read three books over a certain period of time. And maybe two of them we wanted to be a better education, but or psychology, but one could be something else altogether because why not? And, it that was one of the most powerful things we did. And and it's just what you're saying. It gay it just supported teachers, you know, their their need and their right to spend time with each other talking about interesting things.

Speaker 1 I I like that point that you bring up too about stipends because even though teaching isn't about the money, I think there is value in financially rewarding someone for going that extra mile, especially if there isn't time being given to do these things at the workplace. Because we were actually talking about this on the phone, I think the other day, like maybe last month, the month before, but you were talking about the LinkedIn founder and that idea of being paid for connections or something like that. Was basically the value of extrinsic motivation to get someone to start doing something. Because I think there are a lot of teachers out there that maybe like I've never really thought that they want to do these things or maybe they forgot that they want to do these things. Or if you told me like, hey, I'll give you a $102,100 bucks to go do this. That might spark curiosity that is more lifelong, after you start doing it.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And it means that the administration or the community or wherever the money is coming from is making it clear. They're putting their money where their mouth is. They're saying we value you as teachers, and we're gonna we're gonna show that that that we value it when you are really professional, when you're thoughtful, when you're curious, when you wanna share ideas with each other. So it's also it's not only an incentive for the teachers when they get the money, but it it strengthens the, overall kind of commitment of the educational organization to that to teachers doing their very best.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And and really quick too, I wanna, there's a question. When you were talking about the book that you had written that was great for elementary ed educators, what was the title of that book?

Speaker 2 It's called The Children You Teach. And I think the subtitle it's embarrassing that I can't remember, but I think it's something like using a developmental framework in the classroom. Sure. Cool. And it's time to just write it.

Speaker 1 And I'm in chat there. So there's that. Cool. Nick's on it. Nick's also linked a bunch of it. You're on it, man. Influencer or not, he's ready to go. Really, pushing through. So we only have like five minutes left and I kind of deviated this conversation from just reading research to a lot of other different things. But in our last five minutes that we have, is there anything else that you want to say on this subject that you think is incredibly important that everyone really needs to know Oh my god. That we've missed?

Speaker 2 No. We've talked about mean, I have made a list of some of the places where reading the research in a superficial way got people into trouble, but I don't wanna end well, I said mindset. So the mindset research is interesting because the real research is really fabulous, Carol Dweck's original research. And the idea that a kid's mindset can has a huge influence on what they'll learn and how long they'll go on learning, that's really great. But when when it all got turned into quick interventions that would change everybody's mindset forever and got sort of filtered down into schools in a kind of superficial way, it it undermined the value of the original research, and it was the wrong way to take that research. So what was interesting paradigm and some beautiful original empirical work got sort of overly digested and kind of distorted in a way that I think is not has not been at all useful. Another example is, I have never gone to a school where someone didn't talk to me about learning styles, but there's absolutely no research to support the idea that there are different learning styles in any in any important way, which is not to say that kids don't learn in different ways and that every, you know, people are individuals, but there's no body of research that shows that there's this, you know, fundamental thing called learning styles or that attending to them has some measurable impact. And that's an example of where teachers were were susceptible to kind of shoddy interpretation of shoddy research because they didn't have access to the research themselves. On a plus note, because I don't want to end in a negative way, there's all this cool research out there the teachers would love to read about, like this fabulous work showing the way in which your hand gestures can augment and, sort of, exponentially increase the power of teaching math. And it's something people spontaneously do, use their hands to gesture. And it turns out with just a little awareness of how that plays out in natural settings, it can be this powerful weapon in the classroom. Weapon in a good way. I don't mean weapon. I mean, powerful tool. So or the research on conversation. I'll end with that because it's my favorite topic in the world. If teachers knew more about all the incredibly beautiful research on the way in which conversations are the cornerstone of intellectual development, it would be so liberating for them because half the time that they were doing some tedious onerous activity with kids that was supposed to help kids become readers or become critical thinkers, they could skip that and just have some really great conversations with the kids. And if they knew the risk research, not only could they do it, but they could they could justify it and explain it to skeptical administrators and parents.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. It's the same thing that we've done recently with there was a thing that Alfie Cohn published, want to say last year, maybe it was 2018, starting this idea of a why sheet, which is like a really simplified double sided sheet of paper where you explain the practice that you're doing so that parents and administrators don't freak out when you try to change the system that has all that research in there. So we shifted to a portfolio system instead of giving grades. Even though it's required by the state to give grades, there isn't a formal grade until the end of the year. We've gotten virtually rid of all homework, but if you just like walk in day one on your syllabus, there's no grades and no homework that might not come across very well to some people that have grown up in a traditional system, but they just yeah.

Speaker 2 So well, so let's let end on one more practical suggestion. Another use of PD would for would be for teams of teachers who are like minded to sit together and build a white sheet for themselves on a certain practice.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And It'd be a fun thing. Listening to the go ahead.

Speaker 2 Well, that's it. It would just that would be a cool thing to do and really build community amongst teachers. And you'd each have to come up with one piece of research or one idea from from, you know, psychology and educational research that would you could use on the why sheet, and then you all could use that why sheet.

Speaker 1 Sure. And the shameless self promotion, there's two of those on Human Restoration Project's website as well as Very cool. I've linked on our website to the International School of Uganda. They actually came together and did this in PD. So they actually took that exact idea that you're talking about. And they published, I want to say, like five or six of these. And they're all really well done, like play authentic, like relationships in the classroom. There's there's a bunch of them. They all talk about just different cup like pillars of their school, but showcase the research surrounding it. It's really interesting. Let

Speaker 2 me end then with one last piece of advice for teachers. If you read those why sheets thing, Chris, you and Nick put up on the thing, fine. But every teacher should at least track down one of the studies cited in the why sheet and read the study itself.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And let us know if it's bad, so we could change it, because there's no no promises. So, yeah. Thank you again, Susan, for, joining us today. I love having these conversations because I think that there are just so many teachers out there that feel like they're stuck in a rut. And it really does refill our glass or refill our cup, I mean, to have conversations like this and to listen into them. I get messages all the time, like emails, like probably weekly from people that say, being able to listen and read this stuff really reminds me on why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place because you can get trapped really quick if you aren't around other individuals who are thinking the same as equity as you or that value seems like things or haven't forgotten. So I appreciate you having this conversation with us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Even if they don't agree with you, they can talk to you.

Speaker 1 Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll we'll call it there and wrap things up. And, again, I sincerely appreciate your time. For anyone listening, this will be available on YouTube, so you could watch the video version or on our podcast.