The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High-Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I am your host, Justin Bader, and I'm thrilled to be joined again on Principal Center Radio today by my friend, Dr. Barbara Blackburn. Barbara is the author of 14 books and is a full-time consultant who works with schools around the country to help them with rigor and motivation for students, for staff. Just a tremendous array of resources available from Dr. Blackburn to help us improve the quality of what we're doing in schools.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_02:

Dr. Blackburn, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, thank you, Justin. It's always a pleasure to be here.

[00:47] SPEAKER_02:

Well, thank you so much. We had a great time talking about your book, Rigor in Your Classroom, a Toolkit for Teachers. And I'm excited to talk about your new book, Motivating Struggling Learners, 10 Ways to Build Student Success. Could you tell us about why you decided to write this book?

[01:03] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, my very first book was about motivation. It was Classroom Motivation from A to Z. So I think that's where my heart is because I think that motivation is so linked to everything else we do. For example, you can't get students to work at higher levels of rigor if they're already not very motivated to work at what they're doing now. It's hard to get students engaged if they're not motivated.

[01:28]

A lot of our discipline issues in schools come from either a lack of motivation or misdirected motivation. So motivation really is foundational to everything else. So after I wrote about rigor, I was getting a lot of questions from teachers about motivation and had a lot of requests to go back and do something with motivation, particularly with struggling students. And struggling students might be your at-risk students, but they also might be your high-performing student who is gifted, who struggles with perfectionism and can't seem to give that up. So it's really struggling from a very broad perspective.

[02:10] SPEAKER_02:

So, Barbara, I think this concept of motivation is a tricky one for us because we know the things we can do to, you know, kind of help students feel good about the work that they're doing and encourage them as they're working. But as we know from the work of people like Alfie Kohn, who've written about, you know, being kind of punished by rewards and punished by praise, that's not always an easy thing to get right. Where do you see us in education going wrong with trying to motivate students, with the things that we as adults do to try to help students become motivated?

[02:46] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think we overvalue extrinsic motivation, which are all of those external things we can do to motivate students. It is praise. It is grades. It is standardized testing. It is tokens. It is prizes.

[03:02]

stickers, all of those things that we do to externally motivate students. And Alfie Cotton makes some really good points about the negative aspects of that. One in particular that I agree with is that it creates this culture where students just expect to be rewarded for everything. For example, I was working with a teacher and her struggle was actually with something parents were doing. They were rewarding their child For good behavior. So he was on a checklist for every 10 minutes.

[03:36]

The teacher had to check it off. And, you know, if you need to do that to start, I don't know if that's necessarily bad. But what happened was it got out of hand and it got to the point where if she asked the student to line up for lunch, he would say, am I going to get a checkmark for this? Because his parents were paying him based on the checkmarks. And he was a second grader. Now, imagine what he's going to be like in the upper grades.

[04:02]

And so I do think that we can create this culture where students expect to be rewarded for everything. And we know that's not real life. What I did in my classroom was I used extrinsic rewards. I found that there were times that stickers worked. And they were the only thing I could do to get my kids started. But what I found was that rather than setting them up as a hoop to be jumped through, I would use them randomly and sporadically so students never knew when they were going to get a sticker.

[04:33]

So if they were just trying to do it for one time and they knew they were going to get a sticker, that would be one thing. But in my classroom, they had to work hard all the time. And sometimes they would get a sticker or sometimes they would get a smiley face. And so I really thought that method worked better. than doing it all the time. And I say that knowing that for every principal out there, he or she has multiple teachers who use extrinsic rewards all the time.

[05:05]

But it is a challenge and it doesn't build ownership with students. And you have to keep raising the stakes. I was working with another district. They want their students to read more, which was a laudable goal. And at the elementary schools, what they were doing was for every X number of books the students read, they got to get a free book. Well, the research is clear.

[05:26]

If you're going to reward, then reward based on the type of activity it is. But the problem was the students got to middle school and that wasn't good enough anymore. So the district, which I should point out, had money. The district then started giving away gift cards. And then what happened then was that when they got to the high school, the gift cards weren't enough. So and I cannot make up a story like this.

[05:53]

I have to tell you, the students names went in a lottery. And at the end of the year, they pulled a name for a car.

[06:01] SPEAKER_02:

And did it work? Because that's what we all want to know, right? If I can get away a car and get my students to read a million books, maybe that's worth it.

[06:07] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the students read more books, but then what's going to happen to them when they leave high school and they go to college or they go to a job where they're not going to get a car just for showing up and doing what they're supposed to do? It is interesting. I'll tell you the rest of the story about the car. A teacher that I knew came to me and said, well, you know, I was at that high school. It's really not as bad as you make it sound. And I said, OK. And she said, we didn't have to pay for the car.

[06:33]

And I thought she had totally missed the point of my story. And she said, it was donated to us by the sheriff's department. They confiscated it from a drug dealer.

[06:45] SPEAKER_02:

But it's not about the expense. It's about the effect on students long term, right?

[06:51] SPEAKER_00:

Right. And so, you know, that's another point Alfie Kahn makes. And I really agree with him. We can't keep upping the stakes. And teachers all over the nation have seen this, where they start with doing a checkmark on the paper. And then the students want more than that.

[07:07]

And then a smiley face isn't enough. And then a sticker's not enough. And then a token's not enough. And then candy's not enough. And it just keeps building and building. And we build this culture where students expect rewards.

[07:19]

And I think we we sometimes can fall into that from a school wide perspective also, where if we do too many school wide rewards, we create that same culture. So I'm not telling your listeners to never use extrinsic rewards. I use them and I found them to be effective, but I had to be very careful with them.

[07:42] SPEAKER_02:

And what have you found is an approach that helps students, you know, kind of get going but not become dependent on those rewards and maybe kind of triggers their intrinsic motivation without turning it into just kind of an extrinsic paycheck kind of mentality?

[07:59] SPEAKER_00:

Right. Well, I think that the number one thing we can do is create a climate that encourages intrinsic motivation. And I have teachers who say, well, I don't know how to do that. Well...

[08:12]

It's simple and it's not. It's simple because we know what to do. It's complex in that you have to do it and it takes more time than just giving out a token. But what I found is that intrinsic motivation is made up of two qualities, value and success. Students are more motivated when they see value in what they are doing and when they feel successful. Now, by the way, teachers are motivated by exactly the same thing.

[08:39]

They are motivated when they feel value in what they are doing and when they feel successful. So from a principal's perspective, if you're trying to put in a new initiative, a lot of time teachers will say, why do we have to do this? They're looking for the value. And then the other thing that happens is you want them to do something new. Well, they're a little worried. Am I going to be successful?

[09:00]

Because if I fail, it's very public failure. So these two characteristics work with teachers also, just as a side note. So let's go back to students. Let's talk about value first. What does it mean for students to see value in what they're doing? Well, the first way they see value is through relevance.

[09:18]

So when a student raises his or her hand and says, why do we need to learn this? Sometimes they're being flippant, but a lot of times they're really trying to find that value so that they can see why they should do it. And I think relevance can mean different things. For a high school student, it may be how they would use it in a job or how they would use it in college. For a first grader, relevance is seeing my name in a story or word problem. So relevance can look different in terms of value for different students.

[09:51]

In an ideal world, we would be able to teach something and then ask students, how is this of value? Unfortunately, a lot of our students can't do that. So we have to show them the relevance and then guide them to them seeing the relevance. Now, I have teachers all the time who say to me, that sounds great. the reality is i'm teaching what i'm teaching today because it's on the test and that's not what you want to tell a student because unless they're motivated by the test they don't care that it's on the test so there's two other ways that students can see value the second way they see value is through the activity so students are more motivated when they're doing something than if they're sitting and getting so if you can get them up and moving around if you can get them doing some hands-on learning, then they're more motivated.

[10:42]

They're also more engaged. That's why I say you can't really separate them. So that's why you'll see, for example, students who thrive in a physical education classroom who have a reputation as a troublemaker in their core classes. And it's because they're up, they're moving around, they're actively involved. You see it with students in a science classroom where they're really great during the lab activities, not so good when they're just having to sit and take notes. So the more we can do activities, the more we can do hands-on learning, then the more they see value.

[11:17]

Now, the third way to see value, because I'll have a teacher who says, you know what, I had great content, I had a great activity, and Ricky still wasn't motivated. Well, the third way that you can see value, and I would tell you this one's foundational to everything, is through the student's relationship with you. So if they have a good relationship with the teacher, if they feel like the teacher cares about them, then they're going to be more motivated than if they don't have that relationship. And we've all seen a teacher who had the student that nobody else wanted, but that teacher turned that student around. And it was likely because of the relationship they had. And, you know, we don't have to do fancy things to build a relationship.

[12:05]

We just have to be nice and show that we care. Another thing we have to show, and I've seen this shift much more recently in the last, I'd say in the last 10 years, is the issue of respect. If your listeners are like I was, you know, I grew up, knowing that you respect the teacher and the principal. That's just a given. Unfortunately, we've got a shift now where that is not always the case. And my husband and I had a foster son a few years back, and he had grown up in a rough household that had been on the streets for almost a year by the time that we got him.

[12:46]

And one of the things that was just foundational to his beliefs was you don't give respect until you get respect. So we get him enrolled in school. He starts having problems with three out of the four teachers. And what my husband discovers is that with the three teachers, he's just basically disrespecting them, cussing them out every day. I go to the fourth teacher that he's not having problems with and said, what did you do? And she said, I didn't do anything.

[13:16]

Well, it turns out here's what happened. The first day he's at school is in the middle of the school year. We all know what happens when we get a new kid in the middle of the school year. First three teachers, when he comes in, they went, another student? Okay, just find a seat. I'll get you a book in a little bit.

[13:33]

And they made it clear that they really didn't want him there. The fourth teacher said, I'm really glad you're here. Come on in. Number one rule you need to know in our alternative high school is you got to leave your phone at the door. Just put it in the box. You're going to be able to get it when you come back.

[13:46]

You know, as soon as you leave, you can grab it back. I'm really happy you're here. I want you to find whatever seats empty. but I'm going to immediately come over and help you. I'm really glad you're here. She showed him respect.

[13:57]

So he showed her respect. And so I think that's a dynamic that we have to deal with now that we did not have to deal with a few years back.

[14:07] SPEAKER_02:

That we as adults have to go first and not wait for students to just kind of come in deferentially.

[14:12] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So the good news is that when it comes to helping students value their learning, then we've got some ways we can show the relevance. We can do engaging activities and we can build that relationship. So those are things we can impact to build intrinsic motivation. Now the other factor in the equation is success.

[14:34]

Students are more motivated when they feel successful and the challenge there is that we all have students in our buildings who have never felt successful academically. So you have a student who the teacher calls on him and he cracks a joke instead of answering her and everybody laughs. Well, he doesn't feel successful academically. And rather than saying, I don't know, he cracks the joke because he feels successful with his peers. So success is really driving that. And there's yeah.

[15:08]

And so there's a couple of things we can do. We need to make sure that there are opportunities for students to feel successful. We need to build in some guaranteed ways that they cannot fail. And I'm not saying always because there's a place for students to have to struggle. But particularly for students who this is their issue, we do need to ensure that there's some ways they can be successful early on so they can build on that success. So one of the things that I used was to ask a question for which there is no wrong answer.

[15:40]

Now, the mistake we make is sometimes we ask a very broad question, like, who is your favorite character in the book? And students are frozen. They don't know what to answer. So you can use a closed question that is still one that guarantees success, like, Who is your favorite character in the book, Harry or Hermione in the Harry Potter books? So either choice they make is correct. And then you ask them to explain why.

[16:10]

So you guarantee their success. Another strategy I really recommend to teachers is chunking. And your listeners may be thinking, well, my teachers do that. They chunk. I think we do that better at the younger grades than we do at the older grades. Because one of the things I tend to hear the further up the teachers are teaching in terms of grade level is, well, my students don't need me to break it down that much.

[16:37]

They're old enough. They should be able to do this. So they give them five steps they're all supposed to do, and they don't repeat them. They just give them the five steps and expect students to follow them. My question back to them is this. How many of you have ever used Google Maps or GPS?

[16:55]

Yes. And you're going somewhere new. How would you like it if it gave you all the directions at once and never repeated them? You know, we want them one at a time. Sometimes we need to do that. And so strategies like that are not that hard to implement, but they really do ensure success.

[17:14]

So the value and success equation is what I find really makes a difference with intrinsic motivation. And so there are ways that we can encourage it. And again, for principals, it's the same way with your teachers. You know, pay attention to their value, pay attention to helping them feel successful.

[17:30] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And you did a great principal thing there with your foster son when you went to, you know, not necessarily the three teachers that he wasn't getting along with, but when you went to the teacher who was succeeding and you said, what did you do? What's working for you so well? Right. And I think if we would do the same thing as administrators, not necessarily just go and try to help out everybody who's struggling, but go to the people who are getting it right, who figured it out and saying, hey, what's behind this? What have you figured out that works?

[18:00]

Because I think for every student we have... who's, you know, who's not making it. And I've, I've sat in hundreds of these, uh, you know, student intervention team meetings or IEP meetings or meetings with the counselor. And, you know, a student is failing five or six or seven classes, but there's always one teacher that they've connected with.

[18:17]

There's always one class where they're making it. And, you know, I think if we could learn from each other and share strategies across departments And and really figure out what it is that's connected with that student, because, you know, it may not be that every one of these is in place in every classroom. You know, there may be a student that really connects with a certain teacher, but is still failing or is doing their work in another class, but is also having other kinds of problems. I think the more we can kind of get on the same page about what works for that student, I think that's that's so powerful.

[18:49] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and a really important point related to that, when I was working on my dissertation, I interviewed several superintendents. And one of the superintendents talked to me about tacit knowledge because he was doing exactly what you said. He had leadership teams from the district going in and talking with and observing their teachers who were getting the most growth out of students. And he said the problem they found was that they would go ask the teacher what they were doing differently, and the teacher would say, well, I just care about the kids. No, it's because I care about the kids. Well, you could go to your worst teacher and say, how do you feel about your kids?

[19:29]

And they'll say, oh, I care about my kids. So everybody says the same thing. So what he found was that they had to really do a lot of questions to dig into to get at some of those behaviors because that was this teacher. I mean, she said, I don't know what I did. I just liked him and I wanted him in my classroom. So I had to really do some digging to find out what she was doing that was different from the other teachers.

[19:57] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And I think whenever we think about an effective strategy that's that's kind of widely known in our profession, everyone thinks, well, yeah, I do that. Of course, you know, I encourage my students. I set them up for success. I use scaffolding. I, you know, I give them encouraging feedback.

[20:14]

And I think one of the things that we need to take away from this as school leaders is that we've got to be a lot more specific about. And we're doing a project called the Professional Collaboration Challenge at the Principal Center where we're encouraging people to video themselves and to share that video with colleagues for feedback and actually see themselves in practice. And one of the things that's difficult about that, but also very, very rewarding about that is that you see beyond your own blind spots and you think, okay, I thought I was doing a really good job of this. And for me, Barbara, one thing that they might find kind of funny is I always think I'm smiling more than I am. I am people say, Justin, why don't you smile more? And I think I smile all the time.

[20:55]

What are you talking about? But when we don't have that, you know, that honest feedback from other people, we really can, you know, can just have perceptions that are, you know, that are kind of off in terms of, you know, maybe how how well we're connecting with students or how often we're providing, you know, positive feedback versus negative feedback. And I wanted to ask one thing about praise, because that's another one that seems to be related to relationships, related to helping students feel successful. But it also seems like we could go overboard with it. And as a parent, sometimes there's a time and a place for encouraging and praising every little detail. thing your kid does, but other times, uh, you know, they're, they're kind of onto you and they, they start to realize, wait a minute, why are you praising me for something that, that was easy and that I should do anyway?

[21:40]

Um, so how do we, how do we manage that with students? What are some strategies from your book that we can apply?

[21:45] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a really important point because praise is a type of extrinsic motivation, but I also have found that praise is very important, particularly for struggling students. Um, but there are some characteristics of effective praise. And one of them is it has to be sincere and appropriate. If it's not, they will see that a mile away and will not appreciate it. So if you're just always telling them they're doing a good job when they know they're not doing a good job, you can forget it. You lose all your credibility and anything else you do in the future goes away.

[22:21]

Now, another thing that praise needs to be is positive. And you might be thinking, well, of course, praise is positive. But I've seen teachers use sarcasm. and sort of couch it as praise, well, that was a really good try, when what they really mean is, are you kidding me? You can't even get it done? And so we have to really watch what our praise sounds like.

[22:45]

And I do think it's important because a lot of times all students here is negative. And I would even say this is true again for your top students, Because a lot of times, anything they do that's not perfect, they are reprimanded by their parents. I had that happen with one of my students. Her mother said, if you make anything less than the best grade in class, don't come home. So they can hear a lot of negativity. So the praise can balance the negativity.

[23:15]

And there's some studies out in the special needs literature that shows, the number varies depending on the researcher, but what it shows is that for every one positive comment a student with special needs hears during the day, they hear between eight and 20 negatives.

[23:31] SPEAKER_02:

Wow, which we absolutely need to flip.

[23:34] SPEAKER_00:

Right, and our brains are wired to remember the negative longer than the positive so you can see the impact of that. So we have to be positive to counter some of that. Now, with praise, we should do a couple of things. For example, we need to promote independence. We don't want to praise them So that then every time we turn around, they're bringing us their paper saying, did I do this right? So what we want to do is ask the question, well, what do you think?

[24:03]

And then once they tell us, say, you know what, your thinking was great. You were able to tell me why you were right. So just keep doing that. As opposed to just saying, you're right, great job. And then they come back to us every single time. So we really want to promote that independence.

[24:19]

We also want to promote trust. progress and effort. So there was a study Carol Dweck came out with it a few years back. There was a big New York Times article about it that showed that if you praise students for their ability all the time, you're so smart, you're the smartest student in the room, you're the smartest child on the block, you know. And I find that parents sometimes do this more than teachers do. But if you always praise for ability, then over time their effort goes down because they start to believe, well, I'm so smart.

[24:57]

I don't have to work at it. Right. And because the effort goes down over time, their achievement goes down. Now, if on the other hand you praise for effort, I can tell you worked hard at this and that's why you were successful. Then over time, their effort will increase and their achievement will increase. And so it's very important.

[25:19]

I'm not saying you can never praise a child for ability. But you better be balancing it with a lot of praise on effort because that's what makes a difference.

[25:27] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think we've heard more and more in the last couple of years about those kind of non-cognitive aspects of school success, whether it's grit or the growth mindset or whatever we choose to focus on there.

[25:41] SPEAKER_00:

Right.

[25:41] SPEAKER_02:

And our role as educators in terms of helping kind of empower students, helping students develop the habits that they need for success, those are things that we've kind of known for a long time. But one thing I appreciate about really all of your books is the way that you take something that we might know that we're supposed to do all of those things, but seeing what it actually looks like and actually being able to kind of align what we're doing with those descriptors that you include, I think is incredibly powerful because as I said, we often think we're doing better than we are and we don't understand the differences between what I've been doing and what would really be effective or what my neighbor down the hallway is doing that's different from what I'm doing to connect with students.

[26:30] SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you for that, Justin. I think it comes just from years of working with teachers. I get so much of my writing out of my workshops with teachers. The questions they ask me and the answers I give them, that really comes together to make my books.

[26:44] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is Motivating Struggling Learners, 10 Ways to Build Student Success. And this is a great resource for classroom teachers and also I would say for any instructional leader who is supporting teachers in working with their struggling learners. So Barbara, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.

[27:02] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you very much.

[27:03] SPEAKER_02:

Have a great day.

[27:05] SPEAKER_01:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[27:09] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Blackburn? One thing that's on my mind is our responsibility as instructional leaders to help everyone in the school, every adult, take responsibility for the students that we serve. And I think especially as our students get older, We want students to develop responsibility. We want students to develop intrinsic motivation. But there's never a time when there's not something we can do about that, when we don't have an influence.

[27:41]

And we want to take advantage of that influence throughout the progression of having students take on more and more responsibility for their own learning. So if you're not sure what to do with a particular student, if you have a kid who you just feel like isn't making the progress that they need to, isn't taking responsibility when they need to, I think that's a time when we need to look at ourselves and see if we're doing everything that we know to do for that particular student. And in Dr. Blackburn's book, in almost any book that you read, it's not that the strategy is one you've never heard of before. And you'll read about the growth mindset. You'll read about grit and things that have become massive topics of conversation in education in recent years.

[28:23]

But I think what really matters is what it looks like in practice. So one tool that I want to recommend to you, in addition to Dr. Blackburn's book, is an instructional framework that's very specific about what professional practice looks like. And if you use a framework like Charlotte Danielson's framework for teaching, you know how powerful it is to be able to provide feedback to teachers that gives specific leveled comments about their practice that says, if your practice is at an exemplary level, here's what that looks like. If your practice is at kind of a proficient level, here's what that looks like. And if you want to move to the exemplary level, here's what you need to do.

[29:02]

I think the more we can use those tools, rather than just kind of search our brains and try to pick out something to say, the more we can use those tools to provide specific feedback to help people move forward, the more successful we're going to be as instructional leaders. And that's something we emphasize quite a bit in the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, is helping your staff identify those next steps for growth and being in classrooms enough to to be able to provide that support, to be able to ask those questions, and to have the context that you need to make the right comment at the right time. If you haven't yet taken the 21-Day Instructional Leadership Challenge to get into classrooms and provide evidence-rich feedback to teachers, I want to encourage you to sign up for that at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com. That's a free program, and it will get you going on those habits for high-performance instructional leaders.

[29:53]

And if you have taken the challenge and you're ready to commit to a more intense experience year-long professional development program, I want to encourage you to check out the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network at principalcenter.com slash network.

[30:06] Announcer:

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