[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, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Michael Toth. Michael is the founder of Learning Sciences International and the author of numerous books, including Teacher Evaluation That Makes a Difference, which he co-authored with Robert Marzano. Michael's mission is to partner with educators and school districts to draw on the most current research and best practices in K-12 education in order to steadily improve student achievement and restore the joy of teaching and learning to all classrooms. And we're here today to talk about his book, Who Moved My Standards? Joyful Teaching in an Age of Change, A Soaring Tale.
[00:49] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:51] SPEAKER_01:
Michael, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:53] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much.
[00:54] SPEAKER_01:
What did you see happening in our profession that prompted you to write this fable of change, which, you know, is kind of a different format. We're used to very kind of how-to and technical books in our profession, but you chose to kind of tell a story of what you saw happening and needing to happen in our field. I wonder if you could tell us about kind of where that came from.
[01:14] SPEAKER_02:
Well, that came from our work out of our Center for Applied Research. We visit schools across the country. And as I have been walking schools and talking with teachers and visiting classrooms and principals, what we've noticed is that teachers and principals working harder than ever. And we're seeing a lot of teacher fatigue. We're seeing higher numbers of teachers dropping out of the profession. They say things to us like these students today are harder and harder to engage every year.
[01:45]
The profession gets a little harder. And we really wanted to speak to that because our goal and objective is to bring the joy of teaching back to teachers. And at the end of the day, teaching will always be hard, but there's a difference between being tired but energized and just fatigued and exhausted. So we have worked with schools through our demonstration schools for rigor projects. to create 21st century classrooms. And it's not what people think.
[02:13]
It is not a heavy technology, heavy interactive whiteboards and all of that. It is really a shift of methodology from who's doing the most talking, the teacher or the student? Who's doing the most thinking and work today, the teacher or the student? How do we move classrooms more team-based where students can develop 21st century skills? And it's really this concept of student autonomy and teamwork.
[02:43] SPEAKER_01:
And what do you think is behind, you know, either the lack of joy or at least the lack of being energized by the work that's challenging our profession at the moment?
[02:52] SPEAKER_02:
Well, if I can speak candidly, I think there's some misguided school improvement and reform movements of higher stakes accountability and testing coming down on teachers, but not with a parallel support on how to get students to rise to that level. And that then defaults to the teacher having to feel like we must teach harder. And that's actually not going to get us much in the way of gains. The other thing we see is this concept of reform through purchase of programs. And if that doesn't work, we buy another program. And that will of switching out programs just wears out and fatigues the faculty and the leadership over time.
[03:33]
And the reality is, we believe true reform comes from within. And when we work with teachers around this to plan group tasks that meet the level of the academic standards, including the level of thinking embedded in the standard, what we find is teachers' creativity comes back. They have to step back and let the students engage in something called productive struggle. This is very hard because as caring educators, they want to rescue when students struggle. Students learn and develop their brain through this concept of productive struggle, and they have to struggle with the content somewhat. And they need to engage with their peers in problem solving in new team structures, which is different than how we you and I might have experienced groups.
[04:25]
Typically, we experienced group learning, and I hated it when I was in school, both at the university and high school level, because it was very low structure. We got a task and essentially the smart kids did all the work and everybody else got the credit. We're talking about a completely re-envisioned way of students grouping together with clear roles, high engagement. They own each other's learning. They mentor and peer coach each other. And when we see this, we're seeing ELL students, students with disabilities, as well as academically talented students, all elevate more than what a typical direct instruction classroom could have driven.
[05:08]
And so there's this paradox, we're actually asking teachers to step back, not quite work as hard so their students can blossom. And that's a big mental shift. And that's why I wrote the parable of the book to try to get that concept across, and then explain and unpack it in the second half of the book.
[05:30] SPEAKER_01:
I wonder if we could talk a bit about that parable format. What do you hope that teachers and educational leaders experience as they go through that story?
[05:39] SPEAKER_02:
The reason I chose a parable to start with is I was so conscious of not blaming teachers for our current situation. It is not their fault. Our teacher preparation institutions have prepared for traditional instruction. That's what they experienced in their K-12 education. It's what professors modeled for us. And it is likely how they were inducted into the profession.
[06:08]
And it is the easiest way to control a classroom. So typically, that's how new teachers are inducted. It is what the vast majority of research and federal-funded research is around studying a traditional model of instruction and how to tweak it. If you look at the vast number of of research-based strategies. It's really around that general methodology. And we're saying for 21st century teaching and learning, that won't work anymore because the world changed.
[06:40]
Model served us. It served us really well through the agricultural period. It served really well through the industrial period. But now that the world has absolutely transformed into yet another level, that method isn't working for us. Because in the method, the general method is control students, keep them compliant. If they're not in rows, they're in something we call furniture groups, which is students grouped together but doing individual work, typically practice.
[07:13]
So it has the appearance of a group, but it's really not. And what we're finding is teachers feel like the tyranny, they have to cover more content, can't go deep with it, when it's actually what we're finding is the opposite result. If we set up complex learning tasks for more sophisticated student groups under the new research that we're doing, we're finding that students elevate more, learn more. The rate of learning accelerates. Teachers have more creativity in their lessons. It is less prescriptive.
[07:48]
They really actually start cultivating team structures as a learning vehicle for students And it's a different pedagogy. It's a different way of managing a class. It's a different way of doing lesson planning. But every group of teachers that we have taken through this process have told us they will never go back to the way they were doing things traditionally because this has brought their creativity back. It's brought their joy back. But most importantly, they have seen students elevate to levels of evidence that they hadn't seen before.
[08:22] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And let's talk about that aspect of evidence, because I know the book includes a rubric that you call SOAR, Students' Opportunities for Achieving Rigor. And it sounds like a lot of that is based in the shift that you've seen take place in our economy from kind of an industrial age model that our current system is built on to one that matches kind of the new economy, the new skills that students need to have. So I wonder if you could unpack that rubric a little bit for us and tell us what the SOAR rubric is all about.
[08:47] SPEAKER_02:
Sure, so there's three levels in the rubric and it's strictly a student evidences rubric. The first one is what a student evidences in traditional, what we would call old economy classroom environments look like. Typically students are working isolated under teacher direction. They would do more independent practice than group collaboration as an example. I can really describe that as the teachers working much harder than the students, the teachers pushing the students to learn. And that's mostly when we audit classrooms across the country what we see.
[09:26]
Again, it's not wrong. It is teachers doing exactly what they've been trained to do, and it has worked in the past. It's just getting increasingly to get that model to work under these new academic standards and what our new economy is. The next level of the rubric is really moving more student-centered. And we will see this in some pockets of schools, particularly suburban schools that don't have discipline issues and typically will do more experimentation. But it's more episodic than systematic.
[10:02]
We will see pockets of it. Teachers might experiment with it. We'll see some project work or whatnot. But it is not what we call the dominant core instruction that students are experiencing. The last rubric is the highest level where we have really the new economy skills live. And this is the difference between going from a group, student group to a student academic team.
[10:26]
And a team has all the benefits that we would see as an example in a high caliber sports team where there are specific roles. There are different talents. Students understand they have different talents. They go strengths-based instead of weakness-based. They work together, and you have an accountability person on a team as an example. We have a facilitator, and this isn't more of the mind-numbing group work where it's just like a task timer and stuff like that.
[10:58]
Everybody gets an opportunity to speak. It's much richer than that. It really mirrors the real world, and we're seeing this in early elementary grades, the high school being able to take on these processes. They're a little different. obviously. And what we have found that students get comfortable with it, which doesn't take very long, that they seize their ownership of their learning when we allow them to.
[11:24]
So in a traditional instruction program, we talk a lot about ownership in K-12, student ownership rather. But what we see is that as long as the teacher is dominantly doing the talking, directing, it really isn't an opportunity for ownership. If you really examine it, particularly impacts I think low socioeconomic status students because they don't necessarily have the home structure that advantage students do that will require a level of ownership or at least the parents will honor. So what we're finding though is when we make these shifts across that rubric level to the no economy type of teaming, we're seeing students in high functioning, high proficiency schools and students in lower proficiency schools equally seizing that.
[12:17]
And what we're finding in the lower Title I type schools is teachers are afraid of losing control of the classroom, but that has not happened. In fact, what we find, discipline incidents go down because the kids aren't bored anymore. They're allowed to move and burn off some of that energy in the group work. So the benefits from it have been astounding to us. And the teachers have been the biggest fans of this process after it's completed. It is hard work though.
[12:48]
And there's no denying that shifting your pedagogy and your mental model and your instructional profile, that takes an investment from teachers. And that's part of the argument I make. It will take more work to initially change, but then you enjoy the benefits of student ownership and engagement for the rest of your career. So it is an investment. in oneself and one's own practice, but it pays off for the rest of the career.
[13:15] SPEAKER_01:
So Michael, a lot of what you talk about in Who Moved My Standards is about this mental shift that we have to go through as educators and particularly as leaders to help people kind of get their minds around a new way of teaching and a new way of thinking about rigor that's not just more content, that's not just harder content, but that reflects the way the world has changed and the way the economy has changed. And I wonder if you could help us think through as leaders, what is that shift and what shift do we need to kind of mentally help our teachers make in thinking about rigor?
[13:51] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, and I think you're quite correct. We would call it a transformation, second order change type of a leap, meaning that In order to do it, you can't tweak your current mental model of instruction. You actually have to be willing to abandon practices and take on new practices. But the benefits of it are absolutely huge. And we're beginning to post some of the research. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of research yet in this area because we're researching what's possible.
[14:25]
Most federal research and state research is Research is what is. So this is a little bit of a different process. But we find that teachers need a lot of leadership, principal leadership support to do this. They need to give them space and collaboration, make a challenge around a vision. And that's kind of the secret behind this. This is a completely different way to envision how classrooms operate and what the teaching and learning process is like.
[14:55]
And we can have a mental model vision of a kind of quiet and orderly classroom where we can have a mental model vision of a high rigor, high engaged, noisy classroom that appears chaotic until you walk into it and you listen and the kids are absolutely on task. But they're in lively debate. And that's very, very cool about this. And this is why principals have to support that change. and allow that noise and actually cultivate that process. I would argue that we need to redefine college and career ready and rigor.
[15:33]
Rigor right now is largely defined as coverage of content and giving harder questions or problems to kids. That really does not meet the definition of career and college ready. What we have to think about, and it's kind of embedded in the new standards if you really dissect them as part of the shifts. Rigor is the intersection of complexity and student autonomy. So you need a complex task. We used to think of these as activities, but it's actually more sophisticated.
[16:13]
It's a task that produces evidence of the standard. But it is a complex group task. And autonomy means that the teacher has to step back but create a structure to release to the students. And the kids have to figure this out. They have to work through this. They have to struggle with it.
[16:32]
I would layer onto that that that task should be applied to the real world. That is super engaging to students. They love to have context for learning and not ask this question, well, why am I learning this? Well, when will I ever use it? We actually allow them to connect it or we facilitate that as educators. And then they take on professional roles.
[16:56]
And I think this is really important in this highest functioning team. They're taking on a mindset of a scientist, a historian, a poet, as they're attacking this real world applied problem. And what you'll see is you're addressing an entire cluster of standards. not an individual standard. This is why you can go slower and deeper and actually cover more standards at the correct levels.
[17:26] SPEAKER_01:
Right, and it sounds like a whole different model from going through a long textbook and trying to hit standard after standard and unit after unit. And really, it sounds like we're talking about project-based learning. It sounds like a lot of what schools are trying to achieve with project-based learning is the type of rigor that you're talking about. Do you see a lot of schools that are attempting this type of rigor and this approach to rigor using project-based learning or other models?
[17:51] SPEAKER_02:
Our traditional way to think about it, you're correct, is project-based or inquiry-based learning. However, those are pretty sophisticated and challenging to scale models. We're more around getting students to live in the analysis level thinking with even daily lesson tasks. So this can be done in very short periods of time. It's a lot to do to set up a project-based lesson. It usually spans quite a few lessons, typically a unit or a block.
[18:27]
And that's great for a capstone piece, but we're really talking about something that everyday teachers in every subject, I don't care what it is, phys ed, art, science, core academics areas, can engage in these techniques and get students started with this. And really, we have to think about these shorter 15, 20 minute, 10 minute tasks still can be real-world applied, can still build in a sequence as we release the kids. They can do smaller aspects of evidence without large projects, but those can build into a larger project if a teacher takes a little longer range in their planning.
[19:12] SPEAKER_01:
So it sounds like for a school that has either attempted project-based learning or is moving in that direction but is finding it to be a very confusing and challenging shift, which I think it is for a lot of schools, it sounds like your rubric for rigor is a great kind of tool to start with rather than just a destination or, you know, we'll do project-based learning first and then we'll figure out how to make it rigorous later. It sounds like the fundamental starting point is understanding those shifts in rigor from kind of the old economy to the new economy demands on where we need to get students in the course of their education.
[19:48] SPEAKER_02:
That's correct. Who Moved My Standards is meant to start the conversation, encourage teachers, challenge in a positive way our mental model and how the economy has changed in an uplifting way. It is not a detailed how-to book. It is not a big research-based book. The other books I've been involved in are much more researchy. It is designed to be more of a theme book, something that can open the school year.
[20:15]
We're finding teachers engaging in PLCs around the rubric, attempting to put the processes together and having a lot of fun with it. That's why we put together kind of a school opening theme kit and some other things we were asked to do. There's a free study guide that goes with this that you can use it with PLCs. It is a simple read, but with very, very powerful and meaty concepts, particularly at the end of the book. So we just encourage people to enjoy it and get the conversation started. I'm doing a number of keynotes on visioning around old and new economy skills.
[20:54]
And this is just a nice way that they can take off and start taking just one aspect of the rubric, because it's pretty meaty, and just try one aspect and add another, and take their time with it. The important thing is that we get there. There's not a race. Yet every unit, we should get another step further to the new economy skills.
[21:18] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is Who Moved My Standards? Joyful Teaching in an Age of Change. Michael, if people want to learn more about your work with Learning Sciences International or your speaking and consulting, where's the best place for them to find you online?
[21:31] SPEAKER_02:
If they go to learningsciences.com and then they can type into the search either SOAR or Who Moved My Standards? And they'll see resources, including the free resources we talked about.
[21:43] SPEAKER_01:
Michael, what do you think is a good step for leaders to take? Or what would you like to see leaders doing to move schools in the right direction?
[21:51] SPEAKER_02:
From a school leader perspective, I've envisioned and had school leaders to use the SOAR rubric and actually walk around not looking at teachers, looking at students. And so that they had a gauge to provide vision and challenge to the professional learning communities and challenge their teachers in a good way, in a very positive way about moving. Because this really has to be a teacher led and leader supported initiative.
[22:25] SPEAKER_00:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[22:29] SPEAKER_01:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Michael Toth about the change in rigor that we need to make as educators, that we need to make real for our students if they are going to have the skills that they need to be college and career ready in the new economy? I want to encourage you to check out Michael's SOAR rubric, and you can find that on Amazon or in the book that we discussed today. And if your school is in the midst of a shift to something like a one-to-one initiative, to project-based learning, or standards-based grading, or some shift that is requiring a lot of educators in terms of thinking differently, I want to encourage you to check out Michael's book, Who Moved My Standards? And to check out his rubric, for what rigor really looks like, because we are defining rigor differently in the new economy.
[23:23]
We are looking at a different set of skills, a different way of having students work together. And chances are that a lot of those issues are intertwined together in your various change initiatives. So I wanna encourage you to check that out. You can go to learningsciences.com or you can look on Amazon for the SOAR quick reference guide, as well as Michael's book, Who Moved My Standards.
[23:44] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
