[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
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, Dustin 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 my guests, Matt Vaudrey and John Stevens. Matt and John are educational technology coaches and former math teachers. They present regularly at professional development and conferences across the state of California. And they're here today to talk about their new book, The Classroom Chef. Sharpen your lessons, season your classes, make math meaningful.
[00:38] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:41] SPEAKER_02:
Matt and John, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks for having us. So gentlemen, where did the idea for The Classroom Chef come from? You'd been doing some work together, and how did you seize upon this idea of approaching our work as chefs?
[00:55] SPEAKER_00:
Well, it started out as a conference session, an hour-long session, and it really evolved into a full-day workshop session. Being able to take a look at a day in the life of a math teacher and breaking it up into multiple sections, from appetizers, how you start your lesson for the day, the entrees, which is the main meal or the main lesson, the side dishes or the parts of a lesson that make it pop, and the dessert, talking about it as far as the assessment is concerned.
[01:25] SPEAKER_02:
Well, John, thanks very much for kind of getting us oriented in terms of how we can see lessons the way a chef might see a meal and how we can approach them with the same creativity. And I think there is a desire among so many people in our profession to kind of go beyond what you call the processed food of what's often presented to students, especially in math. What was your approach to kind of helping people think differently about the meals they're serving to their students?
[01:52] SPEAKER_01:
Prior to John and I working together, we both had a similar trajectory as we tried to figure out the way to make our math class meaningful for our students. And we were both thoroughly distasted and disgusted by the current textbook, and I won't name it here, but it was, it felt like processed food, like it was, got a long shelf life, it's accessible to everyone, but it's just not very appetizing. So we struggled to find a way to make the curriculum more tasty, to use the metaphor, for our students. And so when we finally met together and started working together, it wasn't a huge shift. We noticed that our trajectory had been very similar prior to meeting.
[02:29] SPEAKER_02:
So you'd had similar professional experience as math teachers and then moving into your current roles as instructional coaches kind of on parallel tracks and then met up through conferences and through professional development and ultimately decided to collaborate on the book?
[02:41] SPEAKER_01:
That's true. Actually, between conferences and the book was the full-day workshop. We did that for probably two years. And maybe a year and a half ago, we were...
[02:50]
thinking it was going pretty well. And we were approached by Dave Burgess in a conversation. He said, you guys should write this down in a book. And that's how we got started in the book.
[02:58] SPEAKER_02:
Well, let's go through the whole cycle and thinking through it as a chef. Obviously, as educators, we have some preparation and some planning that we do ahead of time. And then You know, once students are there, there is the, you know, the experience that we take students through in terms of appetizers and main course and so on. So set the table for us. What happens behind the scenes in your approach that you share in The Classroom Chef?
[03:21] SPEAKER_00:
Well, hopefully behind the scenes is building a safe space for kids to take risks and a space for teachers to take risks as well. We don't want this to be a book that people pick up and say, oh, I need a cool lesson. Let me go to The Classroom Chef. It's a A different way of thinking about approaching a lesson, like in there, we talk about planning a lesson versus preparing a lesson and the clear distinction between the two. So ideally, we would love it if people can pick up this book and feel good about what they do and they're willing to take a risk because of it.
[03:56] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, I remember the first time I saw Dave Burgess present at a conference in his full pirate regalia, one of the things he said was, it's not just that there are some people who are creative and other people who are not. A lot of it is about the willingness to take a risk, the willingness to try something and take the chance that it might not work, it might bomb, we might have to try again tomorrow. But I appreciate that start with a sense of safety. you know, a safe environment for risk-taking. Why do you think that's not the norm in our profession, that we feel like we have to stick with the safe textbook, we have to stick with what people have been doing for decades, rather than trying something new?
[04:36] SPEAKER_01:
Well, with any complicated problem, there's a complicated solution and a complicated answer. No one issue is contributing to teachers feeling like they have to stick to the processed food curriculum. Some possible reasons. would be that the teacher preparation programs aren't expanding their minds to see the depth and richness of teacher communities. There's quite a bit of free ways to connect with other educators to make yourself better, make your lessons better. Not the least of which is Twitter, where John and I first met.
[05:05]
Another possible reason that teachers feel constrained would be administration feeling like they want to keep the test scores up. And that's a hot topic these days, keeping test scores up and doing things to raise test scores. But it's no secret that the test scores are not helping our students become better people or better prepared for college and career. It's our hope that with the book, we can encourage teachers to take a risk and become more interested in the big picture. What can we do for our students? What skills can we build in our kids that will take them beyond school, beyond college to career, and make them better people, not just better test takers?
[05:41] SPEAKER_02:
And to get back to that idea of processed food versus fresh food, what can we do to really give kids a love of an enjoyment for what they're doing, not just getting the calories in their body, not just getting the learning into their brains for the sake of test scores or something like that, but really developing an appreciation, developing lifelong skills, developing dispositions and passion for learning that can carry them through. And I appreciate your mention of the work that you've done online to connect with each other, to connect with other educators. I was excited to see that that actually got represented in the book. This is one of the first books I've seen that actually has tweets in the book, so we're kind of coming full circle from where the book was kind of envisioned, and those tweets are actually showing up, showing how you're collaborating with each other, with other educators to kind of come up with some of these ideas for taking things in a new direction.
[06:37]
So tell us more about the preparation that we need to go through. You know, if we don't want to be too consumed with fear and with risks, you know, definitely there's a value in kind of just getting started and just trying something and saying, hey, if it doesn't work today, I'll regroup, I'll try it again tomorrow. But what are some of the preparation steps that you recommend as people start to think of their classrooms in a different way?
[06:58] SPEAKER_00:
Well, one of the things that I had to do for starting out teaching was I needed to turn in lesson plans. And those lesson plans needed to have almost a line-by-line, minute-by-minute interaction of what was going to be happening, what kind of questions were going to be a part of that lesson. And it was very confining for me, very rigid, and didn't really flow well with me. I couldn't be myself. So in helping...
[07:26]
Teachers make that transition to preparing a lesson. It's a lot of finding something that would spark the kid's interest. It may not be sending the kids, you know, sending Barbie down a zip line or growing your hair out in a mullet. It may not be as elaborate as that, although those certainly work. But finding something that can pique some curiosity, find something interesting and prepare a meal around something awesome rather than trying to map out the meal the entire way through. Find something that you can get passionate about, interesting, curious about, and go with it from there.
[08:02] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I love that as a starting point because we've been trained and conditioned in our profession to always start with an objective, with an outcome. And often those outcomes are very specific to learning targets that maybe don't get kids excited right off the bat, that we have to kind of work up to that. So you're saying often the seed within the lesson for you is something that can serve as a point of engagement and interest rather than a learning outcome.
[08:28] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely. The way to get students excited about learning is to make learning more exciting. And let's be clear, engagement gets thrown around a lot these days, getting students engaged, and there's ways to increase student engagement. And that's good, and that's helpful, and that's a means to an end. It's not the end in itself. We can't chase engagement.
[08:48]
We have to chase curiosity. We have to get students excited to learn and grow and improve and take risks. And one way that we suggest doing that in the book is to get teachers doing those same things. if we as teachers can model those skills, model those behaviors, kids are smart. They're going to pick up on that. If teachers are taking risks and failing and improving and getting better and asking for feedback, kids will start to do those things too.
[09:14] SPEAKER_02:
Absolutely. And I think one of the reasons that you guys have had such a great reception to this from your, you know, your face-to-face presentations, and similarly that Dave Burgess has had such a great response, is that it is contagious. When we see other educators willing to take a risk, and Dave actually got me up to the front of the room at, I think, ASCD or some conference and had me doing something with this complicated padlock, and it was very different from just sitting in my seat and taking notes on how to be more creative and engaging. I mean, the experience there, I think, is everything. And if we think about that kind of apprenticeship model that we're not just telling each other, we're not just saying these are the key principles of doing XYZ, but we're actually sharing that experience and getting students to share the experience. What are some of the early attempts that you made in your classroom?
[10:05]
Maybe some that worked, maybe some that didn't work. And how did that kind of kick things off for you?
[10:10] SPEAKER_00:
Well, first of all, one of them that I mentioned in there is September 11th. My kids, my first year teaching, I was really excited, wanted to talk about September 11th, and my kids didn't care. And it wasn't that they didn't care because they knew about it and it wasn't interesting. They just didn't know about the feeling of watching those towers fall. So the next year, I, on a whim, got in touch with Lowe's, the local hardware store, and asked him if I could get a whole bunch of two by fours and some plywood. And sure enough, we built scale models of the twin towers.
[10:47]
And there was meaning to that. Like the kids were coming in for about seven weeks after the lesson to work on building an 11 foot tower out of two by fours and aluminum foil. And just having that meaning, having that opportunity for a kid to come in and take ownership of that was really powerful and something that I will certainly never forget. Hopefully they never will either.
[11:13] SPEAKER_01:
Matt? Absolutely. And the designing of those lessons didn't occur in a vacuum. John and I were both squeezed by the stress of having rough and hard to swallow curriculum. And we both and we express this in the book. We've both been standing in front of our class, giving a lesson and feeling this sucks.
[11:35]
If I'm bored, they're certainly bored. And there's got to be a better way to do this. And that's what drove us to improve and to get better is having things fail often and grandly. Probably hundreds, maybe thousands of failed lessons between us drove us to improve and get better and take risks.
[11:51] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, well, and I think there's a great point there that, you know, sometimes the more creative the lesson, the more spectacularly and obviously it can fail. But I think one of the greatest failures is just a boring lesson that nobody is really getting anything out. So, I think if we can kind of balance those risks against each other and say, hey, this is a little bit less crazy than it might seem to try some things. You got to tell me what Zipline Barbie is. We got to get into Zipline Barbie.
[12:20] SPEAKER_00:
So, Barbie Zipline was my attempt to talk about the distance formula. And it was first started by Matt. He had done it with his students. And I had a group of sophomores. We were about to do the distance formula. And I wanted them to understand that it was applicable and also relatable to Pythagorean theorem.
[12:40]
So there was a lot of math that went involved. But ultimately what happened is the kids determined what was the safest yet most fun hypotenuse for which somebody could go from start to finish and they would have a lot of fun and they also wouldn't die, which is a really important part of zip lining. And so the kids figured all that stuff out and then we took Barbie dolls and shoes and stuffed alligators and whatever the kids could put onto a carabiner and a pulley and we sent it down fishing line and the kids absolutely loved it. I had teachers coming up and asking me, what are you doing in your class, Stevens? Why are my kids asking to go see your kids in your classroom? Well, I'm not in the classroom today.
[13:28]
We're outside ziplining.
[13:30] SPEAKER_02:
What were your thoughts before you actually carried out that lesson? When you looked at the textbook and thought, okay, Pythagorean theorem, I've taught this before. Sometimes the lesson from the textbook falls flat. What was your thought process as you tried to envision something different?
[13:46] SPEAKER_00:
My thought process was I heard Matt talk about it at a conference, and I want to do that. So, Matt, go ahead and walk them through what you did.
[13:56] SPEAKER_01:
Thanks. A lot of these lessons where it's going out and doing something, they start first in the book. And any teacher, specifically a math teacher who's cracked a textbook, finds these word problems where they're attempting to warp mathematics around a context that doesn't make any sense. And there's a zipline problem in most algebra textbooks that I've read. It's like, oh, so-and-so is getting a zip line. They're going to do this.
[14:20]
And it obscures a pretty cool idea with a bunch of words and data. And getting students to ask questions like, well, what's important here? Does the height matter? Does the type of string matter? And actually building a zip line. There's a teacher that we met on Twitter that took this idea, and had her students write a business plan for their Barbie zipline company.
[14:42]
And they want to make sure it's safe, but still fun. And they actually had them write a business proposal about the process they went through to find a safe but fun zipline, the safety regulations they put into place. They got really into it, and they would not have done that if it was one word problem in a textbook.
[14:57] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, and then, so just to follow up, since writing the book, we have a teacher in our district who who wanted to do Barbie zipline. She had seen what we had done last year at one of the other high schools and she's taking it in the direction of angle of depression. So it's introducing some trigonometry concepts and she's actually gone ziplining. So she contacted three different zipline locations and got their dimensions. And so she posed the question to the students after they finished ziplining said, okay, now based on what you've learned, which of these would be the safest yet most fun? So taking it into that extra level of real world and applicable, meaningful and interesting, it was really cool to see her take it to that level.
[15:43] SPEAKER_02:
Well, and I think one thing that's important to highlight here is that the book is not a collection of 1,001 ways to take word problems and make them much more complicated to actually teach in your classroom. I think what we're highlighting here, and I think is so exciting about this, is that the approach that you're modeling to looking at your curriculum, looking at the lessons that Otherwise, you would be teaching kind of more or less in a canned fashion and saying, what's the element here that's really going to grab students' attention and get them deep into the learning? And that it's not just Matt and John have all these great ideas that you should try yourself, but the approach that even if you teach a different grade level, even if the you know, the Barbie zip line doesn't fit within your curriculum. The way of thinking about curriculum and about how we make it exciting to students and how we make it more exciting to ourselves, honestly, too, because as you said, I love your comment earlier that, you know, if we're bored, certainly the kids are going to be bored.
[16:42] SPEAKER_01:
I totally agree. The concepts in the book are less about giving someone a fish, more about teaching people to fish, because a lot of the textbook is here's a bunch of fish and they're not very appetizing fish. But we've been kind of impressed and surprised to see that not just secondary math teachers are reading the book and appreciating it. We get tweets and Voxer messages from people that are third grade teachers, English teachers, social studies teachers, a variety. Obviously, most of them are math because that's the people that we reach most on Twitter. But we've been impressed to see that people are resonating with the concepts in the book beyond just secondary math.
[17:17]
It's been very encouraging.
[17:18] SPEAKER_02:
Well, John, let me ask, what do you think is one of the most important messages for our audience of administrators? We have primarily administrators listening to Principal Center Radio. What message do we as leaders need to send to our staff to help people feel comfortable taking risks?
[17:34] SPEAKER_00:
As far as the school leaders are concerned, we've already hit on it, but talking about lesson plans versus lesson preparation and really supporting their staff is You know, giving them that safe space to take a risk and going in and encouraging them to do so and letting them letting them know that it's OK to have a really bad lesson because you've done a lot of really cool stuff in the interim. And you know what? This one didn't go very well. But because of it, your students are more willing to come in and try something new. They see it in you. They're willing to try it themselves.
[18:10] SPEAKER_02:
So I'm wondering, how do we know that it's working? What kind of mechanisms did you build in to kind of self-assess and to get some input from your students on how well your approaches are working? If we're going to get away from just following the textbook chapter by chapter and really take a risk to try something else, we want to make sure that that's working for our students, that that's achieving the goals that we have in mind. Tell us about the teacher report card that you developed.
[18:37] SPEAKER_01:
The teacher report card that we mentioned in the book is a way to get students feedback, not just on how that lesson went, but also how's the class going? How do you feel in the class? Do I make you feel like you belong here? Do I listen to your voice? And we get some pretty honest and fairly painful feedback that we wouldn't have gotten if we didn't ask our kids. The thesis of that chapter is that students have a voice.
[19:02]
We've got to listen to them. We have to give them an avenue and a means where they can say what they're feeling. When we go to a restaurant, we check Yelp before we get there. And people have, they have a voice. They can say how it's going to them. And that affects how it goes from that point on.
[19:18]
Teachers don't have that kind of feedback loop unless they actually ask for it. And we provide links on there where people can make their own Google form. There's a downloadable one if you want to do it on paper. And there's some stinging feedback. I've gotten a few that really made me lose sleep at night. And that's good because it drove me to be a better teacher.
[19:38] SPEAKER_00:
Just to echo what Matt had said, in some cases, the teacher report card was that affirmation of, OK, yes, I'm doing a good job of appreciating all my students. And I'm doing a good job of of bringing humor into the classroom. I'm not doing a good job of making all students feel like they're important, for example, was one of them. And that was a very tough one to swallow. And it was only like three kids out of the 175. But like Matt said, losing sleep, that means that those three kids missed out on something and I didn't do a good enough job and that was a tough pill to swallow but a necessary one if I wanted to improve.
[20:21]
We get feedback from our administrators who come in once, twice, a handful of times throughout the course of the year and I get it. Administrators have a lot of work to do. Why not ask the 175 customers that we have walking through our doors every single day what they think of our job and how we can improve it.
[20:41] SPEAKER_01:
Yep. And if one of the questions we ask in the book, if students weren't legally required to attend your class, would they still? And it's not a popular idea, but teachers that are asking students for their feedback to become a better teacher, those are the teachers that you want in your classroom. As an administrator, those are the teachers that you want to shower praise on and affirm those behaviors in. to show that other teachers can do that too.
[21:05] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Matt and John, it's been exciting to speak with you about The Classroom Chef, sharpen your lessons, season your classes, make math meaningful. If people would like to connect with you online, especially on Twitter, where I know a lot of the thinking behind this book took place, where can they find you online?
[21:22] SPEAKER_00:
Well, they can find us as The Classroom Chef on Twitter at Classroom Chef. They can also go to classroomchef.com. They can follow me on Twitter at jstephens009 and email me at stephens009 at gmail.com.
[21:42] SPEAKER_01:
And I'm on Twitter at Mr. Vaudrey and mattvaudrey at gmail.com. Also, the website is mrvaudrey.com.
[21:49] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Matt and John, thank you so much for joining us on Principal Center Radio.
[21:52] SPEAKER_00:
Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[21:58] SPEAKER_02:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation about the classroom chef with John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey? One thing that sticks in my mind is the idea of risk-taking and that often as leaders, we've created an environment where people are a little hesitant to take risks because they want to be at their best. And if I think about the design of many of our evaluation systems, historically, we've placed a lot of value on what happens during one or two formal observations during the course of the school year. And in a lot of systems, we actually rate teachers with a point system with a rubric on what happens in those specific lessons. And it's no surprise that in a lot of cases, teachers are fearful, teachers are hesitant to try new things that they haven't tried before. And it may be that we do want to see teachers at their best, and we do want to see a lesson that they've thoroughly prepared for.
[22:51]
But on a day-to-day basis, we want teachers to take risks. So a couple of the things that you can do in your school that I want to recommend from the 21 Day Challenge and from our webinars and courses on teacher evaluation are, first of all, make sure that you're in classrooms often enough that those formal observations aren't the main source of information you have about what your teachers are up to. You want to be in classrooms on a biweekly basis for each teacher. You want to be in maybe three or so classrooms every day. And when you do that, rather than visit once, twice, three times a year, you can get into classrooms 15, 16, 18 times a year and have a great perspective on how engaged students are, what kinds of activities are typical in the classroom versus put on as kind of a special occasion for you when you visit. So get into classrooms and make that a habit.
[23:41]
If I can help, check out the 21-day Instructional Leadership Challenge at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com. And if you feel that your evaluation system is a bit of a challenge, a bit of a problem, one thing I want to encourage you to do is take some steps to move away from evaluating the lesson itself. and zoom back a little bit and make your evaluation about the teacher's overall practice. I think another thing we can really do to encourage teachers to take risks is to say very clearly to them, I'm not here to evaluate the lesson. You should have some lessons that bomb.
[24:14]
And if you don't have lessons that really fall flat and fail, it means you're probably not taking enough risks. So we want success most of the time, but we also want teachers to take those risks, to try new things, to really reach out and engage their students. And we've got to create the safety for that. If we feel like teachers are reacting fearfully and resorting to things that they know are more safe and reliable, that's on us. That's a leadership responsibility to create that sense of safety. So let your teachers know when you're in the classroom, you're not there to evaluate the lesson and to give them points for it.
[24:47]
You're there to help them grow. And when you are conducting an evaluation, your focus is on their overall practice, big picture, not necessarily their success or failure in one particular lesson. For more information on teacher evaluation and conducting high-impact evaluations in less time, check out our Principal Center professional membership, which includes a number of different webinars and trainings on teacher evaluation. You can find out more at principalcenter.com slash join.
[25:15] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
