Tier I Supports for Executive Functioning

[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 welcome back to Principal Center Radio my friend Mitch Weathers. Mitch is a high school teacher, adjunct college professor, and the creator and founder of Organized Binder. Mitch designed Organized Binder to help all students achieve. And together with the Organized Binder team, he now helps teachers, parents, schools, districts, and colleges implement the system both nationally and internationally.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_01:

Mitch, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thanks for having me, Justin. I'm excited to be here. Well, I'm excited to speak with you because you're really doing some cutting-edge work in what we would call the Tier 1 level of RTI in settings where often that Tier 1 instructional support is often neglected, specifically at the high school and community college level. So when we first spoke, when we first met, you were working primarily with middle schools and high schools. But over the last couple of years, I understand you've really expanded into the community college system and are working in a variety of settings to provide a level of support that students benefit massively from, but often are not getting.

[01:23]

in those settings. So to kick things off, I wonder if you could share with us a little bit of your thinking about what students need in that kind of tier one instructional support level and how Organized Binder is designed to provide that type of support. So, I mean, yeah, what we like to say about Organized Binder is that it's a tool. It's content agnostic. And what we found is it's used at any grade level. And you said that accurately.

[01:49]

Middle school, high school is kind of where we started and have expanded down into elementary and up into the college level. And when you look at the specifically at the high school and college level and even a little bit in middle school, but less so, I'm going to overgeneralize here, but we tend to be content experts. If you're a high school science teacher, then you have a specific science credential and not just science generally. You're a chemistry credential or a biology credential. And when you get as you kind of progress upward through the grades and certainly at the college level, community college, it's been really interesting work because you have everybody is a content expert, master's and Ph.D. in a very specific field.

[02:30]

or topic of study or whatever. And many of them have never gone to ed school. In other words, they don't really know how to teach. They know the content really well. And so it's been a really neat kind of marriage of the two where you have, people at the high school and college level, certainly at the college level that want to be better practitioners and really have never had exposure. Now that's not certainly everybody.

[02:55]

And what Organized Binder does is it comes in and offers a very predictable classroom routine, like to call them rituals. And it just gives a mechanism for the instructor or the teacher to, here's a very explicit way in which we're going to start class that allows for some certain things to happen. And then we transition throughout class. And this is how we end class. So just give some really basic structures, but embedded in those routines are the non-cognitive and executive functioning skills that are the hallmarks of successful learners. So we're giving students daily exposure to goal setting and reflective learning and metacognition Basic stuff, like how do I keep a calendar and manage my time when I have five classes and I work and whatever else.

[03:42]

Yeah, and I'm thinking about the seriousness with which we take pedagogy, with which we take instructional technique. We spend a lot of time and money on professional development in K-12 in order to teach more effectively. And at the college level, that's kind of a newer idea. The idea that you should do anything other than, you know, shovel the content in the general direction of kids is still kind of progressive, still kind of cutting edge in a lot of places. But I think we also are a little bit slow, both in K-12 and at the college level, into recognizing that some of those kind of non-cognitive, what we might call study skills or organizational skills are not just something that we should expect kids to show up with, So you're talking about, you know, getting organized, talking about the kind of the components of the organized binder, and people will sometimes, I'll mention organized binder, and people will say, well, what's organized binder?

[04:37]

And, you know, the really nice thing about it is it's an organized binder. Like it's... If you think you've got the concept, you've probably got the concept. And then the details, of course, are much more specific and helpful than the title.

[04:48]

But really, I think there's such power in that simplicity of getting everyone in the school on the adult side to handle things the same way. And certainly at the community college level, I remember I took a couple of classes at a community college over the summer and. You know, if higher ed in general is not very sensitive to students' needs, community college, even though community colleges are serving generally our academically neediest post-secondary students, there's a very high degree of, I think, casualness toward students and their success. Like I remember showing up for my first test in a, I think I was taking a chemistry class and a calculus class. I showed up for the first test and everybody had their own Scantrons. And I said, oh, I didn't get a Scantron.

[05:31]

They're like, oh yeah, you got to buy them at the bookstore. I said, yeah, I have to bring my own scantron. And I thought, I can do that. And I can remember to do that. And I have some study skills here. But how many kids are just saying, nope, this is not for me when they show up with that kind of, you know, and receive that kind of lack of support when they get into the classroom.

[05:50]

So I want to talk, if we could, about the cognitive load that all of that stuff places on kids. And talk to me about your thinking about students' cognitive load and what we can do as a tier one support to help them. Now, if you look and just take a quick glance at any tier one diagram or PDF, first thing you're going to see is classroom instruction. And I think we have to be careful to differentiate that classroom instruction is not necessarily only content delivery. Classroom instruction is much more than that. And I think we can make that mistake of like, well, I teach this.

[06:30]

Yeah, it's my classroom instruction. Well, how is your classroom really a tier one support? And if you look at that through the lens, I have historically taught students with disabilities mainstreaming into my classrooms. And I teach the Title I school that's 50, 60% second language learners. And it's really obvious if you're working with those students, and I would argue any students, and not unlike even just navigating the community college space for the first time. that students can spend a significant amount of cognitive energy just getting through the school day or getting through the class period, whatever the setting, or both.

[07:12]

And if you work with those students in the morning and you see them in the afternoon, there can be a fatigue that they have And I've always said this is I don't think they're fatigued by how much they're taking in all day. They're just like, I got to go home and rest. There's this navigating because if I'm picking up 60% of what's being said and I'm reading about the same, there's just a lot of cognitive energy I'm employing to get through. And so I am really passionate about implementing Organized Binder as a system that creates a predictable um procedure for students and if it's if it's implemented as intended you take a predictable uh resource or tool and if teachers and educators if instructors can commit to implementing it consistently then they create dependable environments

[08:07]

So I know what's gonna happen, and that person is consistently doing this thing, and so when I show up, I just, I can let my guard down. It crashes effective filter, and I can just kind of focus in on what we're actually trying to learn, because I know what to do. And again, embedded in that routine, or knowing what to do to be successful, is exposure to all of these skills. The first thing that happens in a classroom that's using an organized binder within seconds is, We're going back to whatever the content or the standard was or the goal was from the previous day's lesson. And what that allows for me as a learner, it's kind of like a safety net. If I got confused last class, if I was stuck on the homework or whatever it is, I know that this instructor, every time I show up, is going to craft some kind of prompt.

[08:55]

It's going to take us back to where we were and help me clear up those misconceptions. And on the instructor side, what that means is you have to be prepared for every lesson. So how are what we call a kickoff prompt? What is your kickoff prompt? How is it aligned to the standard of the goal from the previous day? And at the end of class, we have a reflective metacognitive practice.

[09:16]

There's a prompt there too. And so you start with, okay, where were we? And then where are we going? And if we get there, what's that prompt going to look like? And all that pre-planning simply makes for better instruction, which makes for more successful students. But it's all embedded, and it's much easier to kind of demonstrate through training and getting your hands on the systems, seeing it.

[09:39]

But when I can predict what I need to do, I show up, I'm on this page. We transition to here. When I get these things, they go here. I know where to access them. I no longer use that cognitive energy to navigate the day or the class period. And I think we see that process happening in reverse as students transition from elementary school, where they have typically just one teacher for most or all of the day, into having six or eight teachers in middle school.

[10:08]

We see that process of going from a high degree of certainty, a high degree of clarity. By October, kids know exactly what to expect from their teacher in fifth grade. They know exactly where to put their papers. They know exactly how to ask to go to the restroom. All of these things are so predictable. A few weeks or a few months into the school year, and then the rest of the year, we can capitalize on that routine.

[10:30]

But at the secondary level, when kids have six, seven, eight teachers, even in the best case scenario where those teachers are very consistent and do a very good job of teaching routines and procedures within their class, simply having... so many different sets of expectations to fulfill and satisfy and so many different procedures to go through. You know, where do I put my work? How do I turn my work in?

[10:50]

What do I do when I get my work back? Does it go in the trash can? Like all these different things, you know, coupled with the, you know, the general sense of this is secondary school. So it goes on your permanent record and everything counts and you're not going to get into college if you don't, you know, all of those things that kind of weigh on kids, I think really add up to, What for us as adults should be a very high bar in ensuring tier one instruction is in place that, you know, that we're supporting kids at a level that we might as, you know, probably people who are successful in school ourselves that we might feel is unnecessary. And I wonder what some of the reactions have been, especially at the college level, where there's perhaps more of an attitude that, you know, the content is all that matters. All these kind of extra supports are just coddling kids.

[11:35]

Like, what kind of reactions do you hear from people when you're helping them kind of get that mindset of universal support? Yeah, that's a great question. And I, in all transparency, was fairly anxious when I was invited. It was the first college, the community college that adopted the system. I was...

[11:52]

Thinking their response would be, or at least for the instructors, this is very K-12. This is a K-12 thing. And even in the high school space, you'll get that sometimes. And the idea is like students should figure this out on their own. And I get that. There's an empathy I have for the content expert because it's like, hey, I'm hired to teach biology.

[12:11]

This is what I do. And commonly you'll hear, well, I don't have time for that. And at the college level, overwhelmingly, there's some caveats, and I'll tell you those in a moment, but most people have said, you know, like, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what my students need. And because in one of the designs of Organized Binder, it's a really light time footprint on the classroom. So you can still do whatever you do, but we're going to employ some of these techniques that are really going to help kind of boost or amplify your students. But I have.

[12:42]

I was one in particular. I was at a college myself, and we have a couple college trainers now working with an English department. And everybody but the chair, I'll never forget this, the English chair, and she taught English Comp 1B, or what it was like the final English composition course, like in the sequence. You know, so she has high-achieving students and students who got there and, you know, Everyone was just really jiving with the system. And wow, I could see how this would be useful. And the whole idea of creating a portfolio of everything we've done all semester in English 1A so that when I get to 1B, I have it.

[13:19]

And wow, it was just going well. And she just... had that mindset of like, we should not be teaching our students this. I get it.

[13:27]

She said, this is just something they need to figure out on their own. They all need to figure it out for themselves because it looks different for everybody. And I do understand that, but not to sound cliche. And I said, but if you've never had someone model any of this, how are you supposed to figure it out? Like if you, if you never had, I mean, I tell a story in every training that I give that when I was in seventh grade, my dad gave me one of those old leather bound day runners that had a calendar in there and the little plastic ruler. And of course he didn't tell me what to do with it or anything.

[13:58] SPEAKER_00:

Um,

[13:58] SPEAKER_01:

But I looked back on that years later and said, but it signaled something to me that, hey, this is something you need to be able to do. And just that little exposure may have, I can't definitively say, but may have had an impact on me when it came time that I actually did need to keep some kind of calendar. I can't say for sure. But if no one had ever talked to me about that skill or task, I was less likely to employ it. So my response to her, as it's been to all of the people at the college level who might say something like that, If not you, then who? They're sitting in your room.

[14:35]

The stats of graduation rates and success rates, they're inviting us in for a reason. They're not knocking the ball out of the park. And so if you acknowledge that, then what? We can always just say, well, they should be able to. But what if we could just...

[14:50]

give them some examples, give them some exposure, model it with them and just keep doing what you're doing. So there is that element. And I just kind of, you know, you just have to embrace it and say, okay, well, for the 95% of you sitting in the room, This sounds like a really good fit. And by the way, it's gonna help you be a much more effective practitioner. And Justin, there's college students coming up to professors after class and saying, thank you for just slowing down for a couple minutes at the beginning and just reviewing where we were and talking about what we're doing today. Like it just really helps me kind of get set for what we're gonna do instead of just launching into what's next.

[15:32]

So there's that pushback and that's okay. It almost reminds me of kind of an athlete's routine for warming up. You know, they don't just like hop out of a car and jump straight onto the field or the court when it's game day. I mean, there's a routine to it. And if we think about, you know, students going through the school day or college students coming to class, maybe coming straight from a job or whatever, dealing with family or whatever's going on in their lives, like that same kind of warmup routine, a quick one, you know, not one that takes half the class, but a quick one that kind of gets them focused, gets them oriented as to what we're doing today, gets them in that, that kind of learning mode, you know, and, They might still be thinking about something that's on Instagram or whatever they were talking with someone about just before class. And that kind of routine, I think, is so easy to implement, but so powerful for kids just to get them in that mode of learning.

[16:21]

It also helps, especially in the digital era where I've seen everything. Personally, I'm not on Snapchat at all with my students already. Everything's just so quick. It creates this. I don't have words for it. But what I do know is powerful for those students is we put your phones away.

[16:37]

We're going to sit down and we're going to connect what we're doing now to what we did last time and where we're going here. And every day, if we're making those connections, we draw this connection through the whole semester or the whole unit or even the whole school year because we're constantly connecting. connecting everything we do what we did yesterday or last time i saw you was actually quite critical for where we are now even if it's not a perfectly sequential course like a mathematical course or something just pausing for a moment like you're saying that warm-up drawing the connections kind of i like to say it's getting students feet on the ground. There's something about that connectedness that really resonates, I would say, with human nature that we kind of need that. And then for the just straight up delivery and connection or learning of content, that connectedness, I think, is really important.

[17:29]

Yeah, well, and let's talk, if we could, about some of the specifics. I've got one of your binders here on my desk, and I wonder if we could just walk through very quickly, like starting from the beginning of a class period, what are some of the pages that students would experience that they would use at the beginning of class, that they would use during class, that they would use at the end of class, and then maybe periodically over a period, you know, maybe not every day. I know some of the pages are used maybe every couple of days or every couple of weeks. Can we talk about some of the specifics in the organized binder system? Yeah, sure. There's an elementary, there's a middle high school, and there's a community college version.

[18:01]

And they're all the same except for one part of it is some passes that obviously are not at the community college. But everything in this system, if you were to see it, they're all color-coded, and it's alphabetized A through H. And that's all stuff that if you want to visit the website and just kind of click around, you can see it. That's one of the binders. But what we start, we start on something called the weekly lifeline. Everything's color-coded, so this is a white – it's page B, they get one of those per week.

[18:29]

And in a K-12 setting, teachers get a class set. And in that class set, there's going to be semester one bundles for students in semester two. They're boxed separately. They would hand out that semester one bundle. And there would be 18 of those B pages or weekly lifelines. And it's always probably a little bit more than you actually need.

[18:51]

Nothing drives me more crazy as a classroom teacher and getting a class set of something. I'm really excited. And there's 32. I have like 35 students working. I have 32 and I get two new students or whatever. So our class sets are 40.

[19:03]

And we just want to make sure there's enough resources there for everybody. But what it is, is in anyone who's implementing, they have access to their school's dashboard. So all system files are hosted digitally. So if you use a document camera, everything we do with Organized Binder is done with the students. And it really is just the first two or three minutes, four minutes of class, the last two or three minutes. But if you are doing digital presentations, so you're using PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides or something, you can grab that stuff off the dashboard.

[19:33]

But that would be projected for students as they walk into class, this B page, this weekly lifeline, which really is a way where we're going to have that prompt at the beginning of class, which we call the kickoff prompt and then the learning log at the end. We begin an in-class on that page. It's kind of this rhythmic routine. And what would happen is students are walking into class and that B page is projected. They see it as they walk in and it's a nonverbal visual cue that, oh yeah, this is how we start class. In order to be on time in class, I just simply have to be in my assigned seat with my binder open to that page.

[20:05]

And the page in front of it is gold. It's the goal setting, the one behind it's green. So if I am in a class of 30, I have 29 visual reminders all around me and what's in front of me in the classroom. Everything is where I'm supposed to be. And so what it does is it increases the ability for everybody to be a part of the class community. And when the class begins, whatever that looks like, we are talking about the high school level, say the bell rings.

[20:31]

This is all embedded in our training. The teacher shows a prompt that usually is where that's that going back to. OK, here was the research is clear. If I can make hyper explicit the goal or the standard of my lesson each day, students are more likely to get it. So the challenge for us in our training is, OK, so let's pretend it's Monday. All your students are coming in.

[20:52]

How explicit were you on Friday? And if you were, can you distill that standard or goal down into a prompt that's aimed at clearing up misconceptions for students? It's like a safety net for them. And we do that every single day. Students come in at B pages up. Oh, yeah, I need to be in my seat here.

[21:07]

And you could be chatting, getting ready. But when the bell rings, I can be up in front of the class. It is a management or teacher component where I'm looking around and I see 30 binders. Are you on page B or are you not? And the point is I want all of us to engage together academically the moment the class begins. In most classrooms, if you visit them, and I'm not talking about a self-contained class because it's a little different if I have you for six hours or more, but if I have you for 50 minutes, every second matters.

[21:34]

Some take one, two, three minutes just to kind of get going, but we can exploit that time for really useful reasons. Let me jump in there if I could. I think there's a really key RTI tier one concept there that's easy to miss because as adults, we tend to want to take responsibility for everything that we do that's a support for students. We want to say, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I'm doing these other things. But often, especially as kids get older, they don't want to depend on us. as adults to tell them, get out your binder.

[22:02]

Let me sit next to you. Let me hold your pen. You know, we don't need to hold the pencil for the kids and just being able to look around and see, okay, what's everybody else doing? Like the enormous amount of embarrassment that that saves a kid, you know, and we know a lot of students at the high school level would much rather get kicked out of class than be embarrassed because they don't know what to do. They would much rather act up, then say, excuse me, teacher, I don't know what page we're on. Like, given the choice, they'll take a hike every day of the week.

[22:29]

So just being able to look around and say, oh, we're on the gold page, or oh, we're on the B page, without asking anybody, just looking around, figuring it out, I think is so powerful, versus everybody's at their desk, they've got some sort of random sheet of paper from their notebook or whatever, That, you know, is indecipherable. Just that routine of, oh, yeah, OK, now we're moving on to the green page or whatever. That color coding, you know, we think of color coding as an elementary thing or as a thing that, you know, hyper organized people do just to be annoying to those of us who aren't as organized. But really, it is a universal tier one support that we should not be overlooking. And, you know, color paper is not that expensive. No.

[23:06]

And by the way, the design of this system, any of them that are pages that are higher use, which the system in total is about 50 pieces of paper for the entire school. And you're not a teacher. You might think that's a lot. That's that's not a lot of paper in most settings. Almost all that's white. So most of those color coding papers are one sheet of paper for the entire school year.

[23:28]

And you hit on something. One of the things I love, I say and try to say in every training that I give is that classroom management is more about clarity than it is about authority. Students know what to do and they can do it. they're more likely to do it, and it gives you the opportunity to praise them. And if it's not related to content mastery, so too often success in the modern classroom is linked entirely to content mastery such that if I'm struggling with the content, I might be more apt to act up and disengage or pull back if you employ a system that says, hey, not only are you required and held accountable to engage, but you can engage. And when you do, I'm going to acknowledge it.

[24:12]

And I call them victories. And I want to celebrate those victories. And this system allows me to pack as many celebrated victories into the first two minutes of class as humanly possible because I'm trying to change that paradigm. And it might be that I'm walking around. It's like, hey, you got your binder open. I'm present.

[24:32]

And that's, again, this is all part of our trainings. But you can really take a situation that may have gone off the rails in terms of management and completely flip it and engage students who are struggling with the content in a way that you can actually start getting at the misconceptions and change so it really is and i can tell you that really it's really fun for i've had a number of superintendents or admin site admin over the school leaders over the years visit other schools using organized binder one of the things that i commonly hear is you know we'll be doing walkthroughs and standing in the back of the room We'll leave the room and be like, wow, the teacher didn't have to tell the students to do anything. The page was up. They did the prompt. They had this really interesting discussion or reteach or whatever happened. However, the teacher needed to use it.

[25:21]

And then they just transitioned to their agenda and talked about the standard of the day and the goal of this lesson and how we're getting there and whether that's hard. And then they went to the table of contents and here's how we're going to manage all the stuff we create or give them today. And then they just started class. And once it becomes ritualized, it really is powerful. And another tidbit that was interesting for me, I have a four-year-old and an eight-year-old daughter. And when my oldest daughter started kindergarten, we ended up at a Waldorf school, a public Waldorf school.

[25:51]

And really interesting. I didn't know all that much about it. One of the takeaways, once I started to get to know what they do, I was just fascinated. And I met with a teacher and they call it rhythm and routine, that there's a rhythm to the day. And they start in kindergarten, they start with a circle and have a song. But it's the same rhythm.

[26:13]

Every day and every week. And I realized that's organized binder. It's in an academic setting, but there's a rhythm and we just gravitate towards that, especially once I can do it. And I don't have to have my teacher give me a pencil or I'm on my own and I'm going to get on you. If you don't have your binder or your pencil, you should be able to do this stuff. I'm thinking about Danielson's levels of performance.

[26:37]

For each domain, you've got unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and then distinguished, or whatever the level four is called. And often, if you look at the different domains in that rubric, the difference between proficient and distinguished really is that student ownership. And we think of that as something that very few people can ever attain in their career. Like most of your best teachers in any given school are not at a level four in everything. They're at a level three. And handing over ownership like that or handing over the routine to students is both a matter of teaching skill.

[27:09]

and a matter of structure. And I think it's encouraging to see that happening, that once that structure has been taught and provided to students, that they really can run a lot of that themselves. And I think about Harry Wong's book, The First Days of School, the legendary book that every teacher gets a copy of. I think I got three copies of Harry Wong's book when I became a teacher, from different people. You get it as a graduation present from the university, and then your mom gets it for you. So one of the stories Harry Wong tells in the first days of school is about the day that a teacher who was using his system wasn't there.

[27:43]

He was out sick or something, and a sub was supposed to come and teach the class that day, but for whatever reason, the sub never made it to the classroom. So the kids were there by themselves, all day and the routines and the procedures were so dialed in in that classroom. They'd been taught so well, there were structures, you know, kids knew where the attendance form was and they knew to pin it outside the door so that someone, you know, this was back in the days of paper attendance, someone could come by and get the attendance form and their work was posted, you know, what they were supposed to work on was posted and they knew where to turn it in. And they ran the class the whole day just on the strength of those procedures with no teacher present. And if there ever was a litmus test for having solid routines and procedures in place, that was it. I think that was actually written up in a newspaper and somebody sent the article to Harry Wong and he put it in later editions of his book.

[28:32]

But to me, that's kind of the high watermark for what's possible when we provide that clarity. And as you said, clarity... Really is the key. It's not that, you know, the majority of kids are defiant and don't want to do their work.

[28:44]

It's that often we just are not super clear with them about what that work is and what our expectations are. And all of that confusion back to our kind of opening topic really creates a cognitive. tax on students. And that has the biggest effect on our students who are dealing with the most in their personal lives and who are struggling the most academically, and maybe who have the lowest reading level, like all of those little taxes. If you had stress at home, if you, if you really struggled to decode what you're reading, if you're not sure what the teacher's going on to all those taxes really add up to academic failure for way too many kids for way too many students, especially when you get into the higher grades and the community college level. So You may look at it as a high school teacher.

[29:28]

You have your little window into that student's world each day or each week. But it's cumulative. It snowballs on students. And that's where the historic academic failure has so many implications that trying to unpack that in the little window I get, you know, every day or once a week is important work. And I am a believer until we take as seriously the teaching of skills and habits and mindsets As we do content, we're going to continue to flatline. We're not going to move the needle for a lot of students.

[30:04]

Now, there are students that they're going to pick it up as they go. Yeah. But I love that an AP director at a high school one time was talking to him. And you think like AP classes, and there's a lot of AP teachers that use Organized Binder, and it's great. And you'll have some students like, I don't need this. I got all these skills.

[30:22]

And his point was like, well, it's not going to hurt them. It's not damaging anybody. It's having a little more exposure. Even if you have a way of keeping your calendar or doing that, it's definitely not going to hurt them. But you're right about the Harry Wong story. My take on this with Organized Binder, if you really have it dialed in, The way you can really measure that when you have a sub, and not even on how students do with the lesson, the content, but behaviorally.

[30:52]

They just know what to do. And what, you know, what a lot of teachers say, and they've written back over the years saying, it's fun if I know I'm going to be out like a predicted student. They say, I just do the whole lesson. I pre kind of preempt it the day before. And so my lesson plan to the sub is they already know what to do and they explain it all. But they have it.

[31:14]

The agenda is filled out. They know what they're going to do. They know the transitions. They have this, this and this and this. And it like you said, it just runs itself. And for the students, especially the students.

[31:25]

Never had that agency, that student empowerment and agency. Think about what that means. Like, wow, I'm I'm a student like I'm actually doing this thing. And again, I'm going to go back to I'm not overly concerned about the grade at that point, because if we can get you there. I can promise you your grades are going to start to go up. It's the content that's kind of, for lack of better expression, kind of like tier two.

[31:50]

And that's, I think, back to what we were saying at the beginning, that tier one is classroom instruction can be misinterpreted as delivery of content. And there's some people that are fantastic content delivery experts, but that's not classroom instruction necessarily. Well, Mitch, thanks so much for joining me again. If people want to learn more about your work, read some case studies about Organized Binder, get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online? Well, just you can always go to the website under news. You can look at all kinds of stuff or go to impact and you'll see like case studies and data and laundry list of testimonials goes on and on and on.

[32:30]

But fun stuff to read. But I'm just at Mitch at Organized Binder. We do have a Facebook page. the contacts there but yeah direct email if you want to talk to me if you want to go general just go to the contact page on the website um that'll drop into a more general email inbox and then it kind of gets sorted out um but if you don't remember mitch at organized binder you can do that and like i would love anybody wants to chat about this

[32:58] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[33:03] SPEAKER_01:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Mitch Weathers about tier one supports for students? You know, it almost strikes me as an operating system, right? I think we get very excited about flashy technology. The principal center was actually started in response to the surge in interest to the iPad among administrators and schools. And a lot of our early trainings were on how to use the iPad. And I think we get caught up in things that seem cutting edge and high tech, and we forget how powerful it is to have an incredibly smooth and easy to use operating system.

[33:40]

And of course that's true for computers. The success of Microsoft is built on having a good operating system for computers. And probably all of us would be hard pressed to name today who actually made those computers, but it's the operating system that really allowed them to take off. And I think the same is true when it comes to teaching and learning, that we get caught up in the device, whether it's an iPad or an Android tablet or a Chromebook. Chromebooks are really big these days. But what ultimately needs to happen is that we need to have a way to reach our students, to keep them organized, to keep them on track, to communicate to them clear expectations about what they're supposed to do and what they're supposed to learn and what the standards are and all that.

[34:19]

And really, it is baked into the operating system that Mitch has created in Organized Binder. So this has helped tons and tons of schools and community colleges. And I want to encourage you to check out some of those case studies. If you go to organizedbinder.com, you can read a lot of those, hear from some students, hear what they say at the end of the semester using Organized Binder. I really want to encourage you to check this out.

[34:42]

Mitch is a super nice guy, super helpful, and we'd be happy to talk about your situation. So check that out at organizedbinder.com.

[34:50] Announcer:

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