[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'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Jane Pollock, PhD. Jane is president of Learning Horizon and the co-author of the ASCD bestseller, Classroom Instruction That Works, which is on my bookshelf right now. Jane works worldwide with teachers, coaches, and principals on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and supervision. Her work results in improved student achievement at the classroom and school levels. A former classroom and ESL teacher, Jane has worked as a district administrator and a senior researcher for McRell Research Laboratory, and she's the author of the new book, The I-5 Approach, Lesson Planning That Teaches Thinking and Fosters Innovation.
[00:57] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:59] SPEAKER_02:
Jane, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[01:01] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you. I appreciate being here with you.
[01:03] SPEAKER_02:
Well, it's an honor to have you because your book, Classroom Instruction That Works, has been, as I mentioned, on my shelf for many, many years. I think going back to when I was a classroom teacher and certainly I'm excited to talk with you about the I-5 approach because this idea of teaching thinking is one that I think has gained a lot of traction recently. since Common Core, since Bloom's Taxonomy got kind of an additional boost in awareness within our profession. So I wonder if we could start just by talking a little bit about what prompted you to write this book, The i5 Approach, and what kind of needs you saw in our profession that you believed you could help people with.
[01:39] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Justin, so like many of your listeners on the show, I started my career as a classroom teacher. I began teaching kindergarten and then moved into secondary teaching in a short period of time. And one of... The characteristics that I was taught about and thought I was supposed to be doing was I was supposed to be teaching students to be critical and creative thinkers.
[02:03]
And so I think that that's something that many teachers, if you ask them, will say, oh, yeah, of course, I teach students to be critical and creative thinkers. I go higher on Bloom's taxonomy. And as a classroom teacher, one of the confusions that I always had was I know I'm supposed to be doing this, but. I'm not sure I could explain it to somebody else. So it's a personal journey for me and then I find that it's a personal journey for most of the teachers out there and most of the principals who work with those teachers. We want students to be critical and creative thinkers.
[02:40] SPEAKER_02:
That's a very interesting piece of your background that you've taught both kindergarten and at the secondary level. And I know I've heard Charlotte Danielson say the same thing, that she's taught at all levels. And I think that gives you kind of a perspective on what's true about learning across the board. That's not just one age, it's not just one subject, but really things that are deeply true about learning. But I have to say, one of the things that I wanted to ask about before we get too deep into the book and how we teach these critical thinking skills is the idea of kind of a dumbing down of Bloom's taxonomy a little bit, if I could be blunt. I've noticed as I work with administrators that in a lot of observation tools, there's a preference for those higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy that just says, was this a synthesis question?
[03:24]
Okay, boom, the teacher gets credit if they've asked a synthesis question. And not really, honestly, a lot of thoughtfulness about how we supervise the teaching of critical thinking. So I wonder if you could help us just kind of get a good perspective on what that kind of thinking looks like, how it's taught, and maybe some guidelines on what we should not be doing as supervisors and as administrators.
[03:47] SPEAKER_00:
First of all, I'm going to go a little bit further back than Bloom, only to say that Bloom comes around with 34 other folks in 1956. And as part of the book that they put together, they suggest that one of the things we should be doing is teaching thinking skills. But the idea did not start with Benjamin Bloom. Documented many years earlier in 1854 is Horace Mann, who basically gives the first standardized test and says, wow, kids do great on our standardized test if we ask them things we taught them. But students don't seem to be able to answer open ended questions. They don't seem to be able to think.
[04:29]
So then when you go 100 years later and get to Bloom's taxonomy and you realize one of the things that they're suggesting in 1956, which happens before the MRI, that is the equipment that starts telling us how we make memories. In Benjamin Bloom's work, it says that, in fact, we should remember information, comprehend information, and then, as you know, and you just said, analyze, apply, synthesize, and evaluate. We'll now bump into the 21st century, and we know that actually Bloom's taxonomy might be wrong, right? So it's not a matter of dumbing down Bloom's taxonomy. In fact, it's a matter of taking Bloom's taxonomy and taking it into the 21st century and saying, holy smokes, how did we miss that? Well, we missed it because we didn't know about the neuroscience.
[05:21]
So I love Bloom's taxonomy because I thought it was a nice stepping stone. But what we know now today is if we analyze, if we synthesize, If we evaluate, if we apply, we will have a better opportunity or a better chance of remembering and comprehending. So that's kind of an interesting twist on Benjamin Bloom, I think. But I think he would be happy with that particular twist. So the second question or the second part of the question you asked was, so how do we teach the thinking? That's actually interesting.
[05:55]
The question is not do we expect the thinking, but how do we teach it? And that's what I share in the I-5 approach. There are four chapters dedicated to how do you actually teach applying? Well, you can teach the students to do a number of strategies. How do we teach association? How do we teach synthesizing?
[06:16]
And again, there are steps to them, and they are steps that can be followed by a first grader, a kindergartner, or by an 11th or 12th grader.
[06:24] SPEAKER_02:
One thing I want to point out is that you're saying how do we teach, not just how do we ask questions at that level. That's where I think as administrators we go wrong is we look at the level of questions that teachers are asking and we say, oh, well, that's good because that's a higher order question. But we don't always look at the teaching that is accompanying that questioning. And I think one of the big messages of your book, if I'm understanding correctly, is that these are things that we need to not just ask students about, but that we actually need to very purposefully teach starting at the lesson planning level.
[06:54] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And I love the fact that you're taking this from an administrative perspective because that's exactly correct. You walk into a classroom and you see a teacher ask a question that would require a comparison. So how can we compare this to this? And then you actually don't ever see a teacher say, let's go back through the steps to how do you make a comparison? Step one, step two, step three, step four.
[07:20]
Now let's work through the steps. And the great news about the I-5 approach book is the steps are Really easy, really straightforward, but we do need to go back through the steps. So we do want to see evidence of the teaching of those thinking skills. And again, they're derived from the wisdom of Bloom's taxonomy. So it's great.
[07:41] SPEAKER_02:
Well, and let's actually enumerate the I-5. What are the five I's that you include in the book?
[07:46] SPEAKER_00:
Okay, well, that takes us into what I think of as the intriguing part of the I-5 approach, and that is that the steps to thinking skills have been around. You mentioned classroom instruction that works. Prior to writing classroom instruction that works, Bob Marzano, Deb Pickering, and I were part of a different research team where we wrote a book called Dimensions of Learning. And at that time, before the internet, we were able to synthesize loads and loads of different studies and practices. And we came up with this list of thinking skills, not uncommon at the time, by the way. In the 1980s, teaching thinking was the big deal.
[08:23]
So we had this list of thinking skills, but we were not able to get those thinking skills to stick in classrooms. In other words, teachers liked these steps, but they didn't seem to be able to use them and get them to stick long term, so to speak. Then classroom instruction that works comes along. And of course, chapters two, chapter nine and chapter 10 are all about the thinking skills. So we know they work, but we still couldn't figure out why don't they stick? And that's when in the 21st century, I got my answer, which was, let's just say that it's 1980 and I'm teaching in a social studies classroom and I want the students to compare explorers.
[09:07]
Well, if they're comparing explorers, they might have two or three paragraphs of print materials. In the 21st century, if I want the students to compare explorers, we go online, type in explorers, type in European explorers, type in Portuguese explorers, and all of a sudden you have not only a huge amount of information, but I can click images and get pictures of all of those people. And if I wanted to, I could interact with somebody at, I don't know, Explorers of... America, explorers of Portugal and be live with somebody like I'm live with you right now.
[09:48]
So the idea was, oh, my gosh, the reason we were never able to teach thinking skills is kind of a Seinfeld issue. Maybe with our print materials, there was never really enough for students to think about in a classroom. add a personal device into that, and now, no matter what topic that we are teaching students, they have access to information, the first I, images, the second I, interaction, whether with the teacher, whether with the experts outside of the classroom, That's the third eye interaction. If you have all of that, you have a higher probability of being able to use your frontal lobes, your inquiry skills, sometimes called your executive functions.
[10:41]
That's the fourth eye. And the lesson that we learn from researchers in the neuroscience is the reason biologically that human beings think is to generate new ideas. And that would be the fifth eye, which is innovation. If students are using a device, they're more likely to be able to use thinking skills. And if they do both of those, they have a higher probability of learning to generate new ideas or innovate.
[11:11] SPEAKER_02:
It sounds like part of what you're saying is that our challenges around teaching thinking kind of in the first draft of that that happened in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, when we were really trying to teach thinking. thinking as a skill, we weren't giving students enough to think about. Like we were giving students two paragraphs and saying, okay, do some comparison, do some synthesis, do some analysis from these three sheets that I photocopied for you. And we need much more. And I'm thinking about what Amy does. My wife, Dr. Amy Bader writes curriculum and specifically writes PBL curriculum.
[11:43]
And often that curriculum has science as a focus. So she'll often pull in some sort of phenomena that she read about in the news or in some sort of science publication. And sometimes that can be kind of intimidating to other people because they'll think, how do you know all this stuff? How do you find all of these phenomena that lend themselves to being good grist for a PBL unit? And I don't think there's any substitute for what she does, which is to read a ton and to communicate, to network. And as you say, interact with other science educators, with practicing scientists.
[12:17]
She was on the phone last week with a paleontologist asking some questions about fossils and that access to information. really is critical for everything that she does. You know, that ability to do research, to immerse herself in a problem or in a phenomenon and, as you said, get information, get images, interact, inquire. That's what produces the kind of work that she can produce as a result of that process. So I wonder, what are some of your best examples that you've seen in the field of when teachers do that effectively in the classroom, when they give students the opportunity to use electronic devices, get on the Internet and actually do that kind of learning so that they're not limited to just, you know, the two handouts that we gave them?
[13:00] SPEAKER_00:
First of all, I love your example of Amy, because that's exactly what we do in what I'm going to call the real world. In fact, I kind of give a similar example of that in the beginning of the book, because I said I started to look at my own habits and those are my habits. I do a lot of reading and then all of a sudden I click on a picture. What does that look like? Oh, I get it now. And then I do try to interact with others.
[13:22]
So same thing. And so it makes a lot of sense. So what does it look like in a classroom? Well, Justin, you just gave me the opportunity to let you know that that's one of the things I love about the book was ASCD supported me in being able to have four of the chapters in the book. For example, if we take the chapter on association, basically in each one of the chapters, we have a classroom teacher and they're all real teachers. They're teachers I've worked with at one point or another.
[13:52]
So in the comparison, which is one of the thinking skills, there's an example here about a third grade teacher who is teaching Jan Brett, who is an author study. And it goes on to describe how in the past they would have read one or two books, and now they actually go to Jan Brett's website. And not only do they use the website as a support to the book they're reading, but then they also interact with Jan Brett herself by sending her emails. In that same chapter, then, the other example that's used there is a high school physics example, where Ian Mulligan, a high school physics teacher, actually had always just shown this one example of kinetic energy and whatnot. And so in this particular case, by going online, he's able to have students see lots and lots of examples, plus the images.
[14:43]
They get to interact with scientists and then they get a better understanding of the distinction and value of knowing about potential and kinetic energy. So as you go through each one of the chapters for every single one of the thinking skills, there's also an example that ranges from a preschool example in Honduras. to a high school example in an art classroom in Wisconsin. So I think that the teachers will like those. As principals, often we need those vignettes or we need those illustrations. So when we go into the classroom, we can say, as you mentioned, I'm kind of seeing the problem part, but I'm not seeing the steps, or I'm seeing the problem part, but I'm not seeing the students use devices to get more information, to get the images, or to increase the interaction.
[15:31] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Jane, I love the approach. I love the timeliness that as we are working through some of the challenges of making our curriculum more rigorous and more relevant, working through maybe some technology initiatives. In a lot of cases, we have the hardware. We have the bandwidth. We can do this now. And we're facing some challenges around making learning more relevant, more personalized for students.
[15:52]
What are some ways that you hope schools will use your book? What are ways that you hope teachers will use the i5 approach? What are ways that you hope administrators will pick up and run with these ideas?
[16:02] SPEAKER_00:
Well, the book starts with Veronica, a teacher. And Veronica is a science teacher and, like many teachers, is in a school where she's being told she has to start using technology. So she's teaching her regular lessons, but she's told she has to incorporate technology. One of the frustrations, I think, that many administrators and teachers feel is there always seem to be these bandwagons. There always seems to be one more thing we're supposed to be doing. So I think what the I-5 approach does is it brings together what a teacher does five and six times a day, which is plan and deliver instruction.
[16:40]
But it brings together a couple of the biggest initiatives and says, wow, in every daily lesson plan, you can address technology as a way to teach the thinking skills. And so I really encourage any principal who's out there who has a technology initiative to be able to say, do you know what? Think about when you're working with classroom teachers, when you're in the classroom as a coach or when a classroom teacher is designing a lesson and they've been given both the opportunity to. Use technology, but also teach thinking. Try putting those two together with the I-5 approach. So one of the things I've been able to do is I find that the tech coaches in most of the schools are the ones who really come in and love the training because they say, oh, my gosh, this finally gives me a conversation starter with classroom teachers.
[17:39]
You can take any lesson any day and apply the I-5 approach to that lesson.
[17:44] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I love the integration there between teaching the thinking skills, teaching the content, and using the technology. Sometimes those are unmanageable if we treat them as separate issues, but I love the integration there.
[17:56] SPEAKER_00:
I do too.
[17:56] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Jane, if people want to learn more about your work, more about the training that you provide, where's the best place for people to get in touch with you online?
[18:03] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I have a website, and it's www.learninghorizon.net.
[18:11] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Jane, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[18:13] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.
[18:17] SPEAKER_01:
And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.
[18:44] SPEAKER_02:
So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Jane Pollock about lesson planning and about teaching thinking? One thing that really stands out to me is the importance of design and particularly the importance of designing curriculum and lessons that actually teach the thinking skills that we want our students to develop. We need to give students not just the opportunity to use and apply those skills, but we need to give students the opportunity to learn those skills from our instruction. And the reality is most curriculum is not designed to teach those skills. So I wanna let you know about an opportunity that we have coming up called the Project-Based Learning Curriculum Developer Certification Program. This is taught by Dr. Amy Bader, who has developed all kinds of project-based learning curriculum for schools around the world.
[19:36]
And she is the iron chef of developing curriculum and of helping teachers develop curriculum that meets their specific needs. This is an intensive online program that teachers will walk away from with a completed project-based learning unit. You can learn more at amybader.com slash certification.
[19:56] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
