Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: January 27, 2020"Mullen: For me, the last decade of teaching has created a lot of great memories, single moments, snippits of random days where a student did or said something that really struck me, made me think about what I’m doing as a teacher, what they were doing as a student, and what we were all really trying to do together in that classroom." - Greg Mullen"What I had come to realize is that the reason this whole idea of self-directed learning seems so overwhelming is that the current systems are not created to place ownership of learning on the students." - Greg Mullen"It’s been a long journey for me and I am hoping that this episode highlights the importance of shifting not only the practices and methods in schools today but, more importantly, in shifting the philosophies and visions of how we approach the education system not just for teachers and admin in the schools, but for teacher candidates, teacher mentors, instructional coaches, and even families, students, and communities." - Greg MullenInterview: Starr Sackstein, https://www.mssackstein.com/"It has always been my belief that you should do the projects that you expect your students to do..." - Starr Sackstein"The best person to be creating the test are the people who are doing the teaching, so we, you know, we know what we taught, we know what students were supposed to have learned and what they should be able to do, and since all of our curriculum isn’t aligned nationally like from room to room it’s not often exactly the same…" - Starr Sackstein"And the students that are in our schools now really do have rich contexts that they can draw on to connect to different themes and ideas and characters that are happening in literature, and we have to give them the space to ask those questions, dig into those topics that they think are important..." - Starr Sackstein

Exploring the Core Podcast

A Self-Directed Learning Environment

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: December 20, 2019"This social and emotional approach to identifying a student’s strengths allows me to highlight which competencies I will need to incorporate into my classroom management." - Greg Mullen"The need for an inclusive classroom environment, in my opinion, begins with a developmental mindset that looks at how each individual student is developing..." - Greg Mullen"[A Developmental Mindset] is an awareness that a classroom full of students around the same age may actually be working through a wide range of certain social, emotional, and even cognitive and psychosocial stages of human development." - Greg MullenInterview: Meg Bristow, Special Education Coordinator"I don’t consider myself the expert, I consider us all experts, and so kind of figuring out what teachers already know about kids and what they’re bringing into the classroom that we can utilize to support different students - so that’s kind of fun. That creativity is really what I love about this job." - Meg Bristow"I mean, to me, it’s less of a placement option and more of just a belief that everyone belongs regardless of their perceived need or ability... it’s the idea that everyone does belong and can contribute maybe in different ways." - Meg Bristow"So the kids with the services and IEPs are getting that service but so is everyone else in the classroom and they can all practice together and reinforce throughout the day versus just this one kid getting one-on-one instruction thirty-minutes a week. So, ya, a great use of resources and it [inclusion] really just makes sense." - Meg Bristow 

Academic & Behavioral Inclusion

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: January 13, 2020"Change can get pretty complicated and at times quite uncomfortable so an organized framework can be very helpful." - Greg Mullen"What I mean is, when challenges arise from changes to a system, even though a role may be contractually defined by a general set of expectations, boundaries and responsibilities often overlap." - Greg Mullen"As more schools embark on this evolution of system change of our education system, I am excited to see, hear, and experience school and community improvements, especially as we improve our ability to identify with a developmental mindset the desired changes we want in our communities of students, teachers, administrators, and families." - Greg MullenInterview: Nikki Roorda, https://www.johnstoncsd.org/departments/teaching-learning/pol/"I think Iowa has been very fortunate in the fact that we’ve had our eye on social-emotional learning for the past several years, and just with the apex of it being this release of our social-emotional learning standard last month, and as a result I think across the country social-emotional learning is becoming more and more prevalent, so I have seen in my current position of companies offering their services to help social-emotional learning not only at the student level but also at the adult level within our district to help support those folks." - Nikki Roorda"The Portrait of a Learner was developed a few years ago and it really tried to identify what are those 21st century skills and executive skills that students need to be successful in a post-secondary endeavour, whether that is college or career, and how we interact with each other as human beings, and I’m really proud of that work." - Nikki Roorda"...there’s value in getting out and vetting within your local community their values and perceptions and that way it’s everybody’s document. " - Nikki Roorda

Changing the System

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: January 6, 2020"[Grades] They’ve become the bills and coins for buying passage to the next grade level, participation in sports, extracurricular activities, even college admission." - Greg Mullen"The amount of work that a student must go through for such an explanation of an academic concept is like a three-dollar price tag for something that a student is likely used to getting for one-dollar down the street." - Greg Mullen"The critical question here becomes: What must the student give their teacher in order to receive a grade that is valued equal to our expectations for that student moving forward?  This is where we get at the heart of redefining the value of what a grade is worth." - Greg Mullen"What I am proposing is that we recognize the value of improving ourselves more than we value the rewards we receive for completing tasks intended for self-improvement. " - Greg MullenInterview: Matt Townsley, http://mctownsley.net/"What happens over time is... as the [grading] system improves... [students] start to realize there once again is value in completing that [homework] practice." - Matt Townsley"I really do believe that when schools implement standards-based grading, that there’s more of a co-ownership in the learning process." - Matt Townsley"Sometimes I’ll ask teachers I work with, “hey, do you believe kids learn the same way on the same day?” and everyone says, “no way!” Well, that’s because anyone in the classroom knows that students do indeed learn differently. " - Matt Townsley"I think one [benefit of standards-based learning] is clarity of understanding. " - Matt TownsleyShow Less

Gaming the System

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: December 30, 2019"In a previous episode, I spoke to the development of SEL and the competencies created by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. In this episode, I’d like to build on what we know and dive into SEL programs available to schools today." - Greg Mullen"This in-depth study explores 15 SEL programs, comparing them with 12 practical elements, and (the best part) does not claim any one program to be superior to the other fourteen programs; rather, each program is highlighted as addressing particular competencies, many of which are common across all of the sampled programs." - Greg Mullen"The first big takeaway from this study is that all fourteen SEL programs share at least some of these elements. Of the fourteen SEL programs, four of the programs share eleven of the twelve elements." - Greg MullenInterview: Dr. Jennifer Rogers, https://rogerstrainingsolutions.com/"...and that is the paradigm change that we are going to have to think about in the future. How do we gear up those that are already in the field to understand that this is the new lens we have to look out of, and how do we use that same lens and provide that for our pre-service teachers who are learning what it’s like to be a teacher now." - Jennifer Rogers"...it’s a process to transition from [a traditional] model into what we’re understanding about the brain and the way we learn and about growth mindset, and all of those great things that are coming out of science. If we can really just look at the trauma lens, from the late 1990s when that [ACEs] study initially started, and now thirty years later, about what does that look like - and not everyone is necessarily on board with that either. So all of these practices and understanding takes generations of teachers to become regularly practiced in the building." - Jennifer Rogers"If we know that everybody understands the WHY [of adopting SEL] and we have a community understanding of what SEL is and what our role is in that SEL, our next logical step is to consider a framework." - Jennifer Rogers

Selecting an SEL Program

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.comEpisode Release Date: December 22, 2019Mullen: "This first step being introduced in this episode is part of a larger shift that we must recognize as more than just a grading policy. This standards-based approach will change the way we address what skills, which plans, how we motivate, and create the incentives involved in teaching and learning."Mullen: "This kind of skill alignment across grade levels will improve instruction and assessment of such a third grade fraction standard. When you begin defining what is proficient, and you look at your assessments for these specific standards, you’ll need to consider whether it’s more important that your students communicate a rationale for that understanding or if answering a multiple-choice quiz gets you what you need."Mullen: "What the standards are doing here is allowing teachers to do what they intuitively know they have to do to help a student learn a skill by reviewing a student’s prior knowledge and connecting that to current academic expectations; but we are now doing so with an intention that allows us to reflect and record exactly which skills our students have mastered, identify where in that skill’s development students are stuck, so that students, their teachers, and their families can help them work through related skills that may additionally support concepts behind what they’re learning."Interview: Karin Hess, https://www.karin-hess.com/Hess: "A problem in the beginning was, that you could assess the standard once, the student did well, and you said they mastered that standard. We know that wasn’t true - if that were true, sports teams who could show that they could pass a ball, they’ll do it perfectly because you’ve mastered it, but there are a lot of conditions on how you pass a ball, when you pass a ball, so I think with the standards-based being what you have to learn, it’s how do you have to demonstrate it.  "Hess: "A school has to be really thoughtful and I think the first thing they have to look at with standards-based grading is, are they still using a hundred-point scale to determine a percent? Because that’s a scale where 60 of the points describe failure and 40 of the points describe some learning is taking place."Hess: "Before the common core, every state was developing standards and most states would use bloom’s taxonomy to describe what the students were doing at each grade level. I was working with a state committee in 2003 / 2004, and I suggested to them, because I had come across Webb’s work and this work was only really being used in alignment studies."Hess: "The matrix was the best way to show that you could have analysis light, or analysis deep. Evaluation light, which I call an “ug” - an unsubstantial generalization, an opinion that has no support for it, which is something I had a professor write on our papers and handed them back, and if we made claims and didn’t support them, he called them “ugs”. Kids understand an “ug”!"Hess' Cognitive Rigor Matrix Resources:https://www.karin-hess.com/cognitive-rigor-and-dok

A Standards-Based Approach

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode Release Date: December 10, 2019What makes social-emotional learning so important in today’s schools - haven’t we always addressed the social and emotional development in students? It’s this kind of question I get from parents and educators more often than I’d like to admit, but the answer is buried in the historical development of cognitive and psychological theories in the last century. "I begin this historical briefing at the start of the 20th century.""Consider the political unrest at the time.""Think about that first half of the 20th century, all the discoveries and cultural development related to psychology. Consider how those ideas impacted policy and media in the second half of the 20th century. It took nearly the entire one-hundred year span for these ideas to be integrated into our society as common knowledge."Interview: Clark McKown, http://xsel-labs.com/"...there are ways in which these organizations that speak to and serve multiple districts are trying to help them pull together resources given that there is one-stop shop.""I do think that states that have adopted some form of standards have a leg up because... they have a common framework to be working from... [and] give the educators in those states a lot in terms of how they should proceed and towards what aim.""Because we're focused on the measurement part with school districts, what I want to be able to do is help our partners link what they learn about their students from our assessment to what they plan to teach. "

A Century of SEL

Podcast and Episode Copyright 2019 Exploring the Core LLC* www.ExploringTheCore.com * #ExploringTheCore *Episode transcripts available at www.ExploringTheCore.com Episode Release Date: December 10, 2019"Standards are tools, and like any other tool, they must be used with intention." - Greg Mullen"It's not that standards don't belong in classrooms. It's that the skills and knowledge included in academic standards likely already exist in those teachers’ classrooms." - Greg Mullen"Let me be clear: As I describe the value and importance of standards, it is imperative to note that without a solid understanding of how standards develop skills in and across grade levels, teachers will struggle to assist their colleagues in identifying ways to help students with particular gaps in learning." - Greg MullenInterview: Ken O'Connor, https://www.oconnorgrading.com/"You can't do competency-based without doing standards-based, but you can be standards-based without being competency-based." - Ken O'Connor"I think, yes, often [grades] have, in a sense, a greater impact on the way students behave than the way they learn..." - Ken O'Connor"...what we really want to develop in students is responsibility, and responsibility is doing what you should be doing when you have a choice; compliance in a sense is doing what you should do, or what you must do, when you don't really have a choice." - Ken O'Connor

Academic Standards

Needless to say, our education system in this country is as complicated as one would imagine, but not so much that it can't be analyzed, understood, and improved upon. Like any system, it's a matter of recognizing the value of a system by the value of its parts. That's exactly what I hope to do with this podcast - exploring aspects of our education system in order to celebrate what is being improved upon in order to highlight what might still need to be addressed; recognizing the shadows by celebrating the light. Join me in my journey as I continue exploring the core of who we are and how we learn as students, humans, and citizens. #ExploringTheCore

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Exploring the Core Podcast

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