Episode 87: Troubleshooting Self Pacing


Voiceover: Welcome to the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. Each week we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self-paced, and mastery-based learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other, so this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. 


My name is Zach Diamond, and I'm a middle school music teacher in Washington, DC. And of course, I'm also a Modern Classrooms implementor and mentor. And tonight I have the pleasure of being joined by Charlie Moynihan, also distinguished Modern Classrooms educator and mentor and a fifth grade teacher at Main Avenue Elementary School in Sacramento, California. Welcome, Charlie. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here. It should be fun. Yeah, it should be fun. I'm really excited. This episode will be on troubleshooting, self pacing, addressing things that can come up with our students, with our implementation of the model and of our self pacing structures. Tony Rose said something really interesting a couple of episodes ago about how we've often said that there's no wrong way to do a modern classroom. And she and I sort of decided that actually that's not true. There are some wrong ways. And so you and I, both of us being mentors and also both of us being implementers, have some experience looking at problems in modern classrooms and trying to solve them. So that's what we're going to do here tonight. I guess. Before we get started, I should let you introduce yourself. I know you're going to tell your story of how you sort of did troubleshooting in your classroom, and I'll probably respond with some of mine. And then we're going to jump into some more common general issues that have come up with self pacing and try and address them together. But first, tell us more about who you are. Charlie, tell us what you teach. Tell us how you started your Modern Classrooms journey. Tell us about yourself. Yeah, awesome. So I was like, probably a lot of other teachers thought I was doing it awesome, doing it right, doing it effective. I've been teaching fifth grade for six years. I've been total teaching for eight. I started a couple of years in third grade. I did a year in 6th grade, the rest of it in fifth. And I thought I was just awesome. What I would do, I would have group rotations for Ela and math, teach at a public school. Don't have a whole lot of time to get through things. But I thought I was doing great. I had my little station called it Moina Magic. There were five other stations, and it was just like you came to Moynamagic and magic happened and it was just so great. But everyone got the same thing. But I thought I was doing it really well. And then I always told myself, look, this is amazing. I'm taking exit tickets all the time. I'm going to upgrade them at lunch, and then in the afternoon I'll run intervention groups so no one is falling through the cracks. And that's super helpful if you're actually present you being a student. So I could receive one of those active tickets, and then if I actually had the time at lunch to grade them, then I possibly if there wasn't a dental appointment for half the kids, doctor's appointments or an assembly or fire drill, I would actually maybe be able to do some intervention groups in the afternoon. Point being, it rarely happen, but that's what I would tell people. I run my classroom. It's super data driven and efficient, but it really until I was on a walk with my dog and found I listened to a Cult of Pedagogy podcast and found the one with it was the second one. Ironically, it was about self pacing with Kareem about this modern classrooms thing, and there's no way, how could you possibly do that? And then from there I found the website, the free course, and off we went. That's how I found it and that's how I started implementing it. And as you might expect, that little short introduction to it, after doing something that I thought was great for eight years, caused quite a bit of implementation problems. But we got through it, and now a year and a half later, I don't know how I ever talk any other way. This is just the way to go, in my opinion. Yes, I feel the exact same way. And I've said that a lot. I just look back and I'm like, how did I do that? That's really interesting, though it almost sounds kind of like kind of like a protocol in the classrooms, right, where you're looking at what are essentially mastery checks in our language, right, and doing interventions based on them, and that's really interesting. You were sort of like already on the path, but not in a self paced way, and that's interesting. Well, and I think that's where I know, for me at least, I always wanted to have that balance between how do I get efficient with my time as a teacher and give every student exactly what they need. And so when I develop the rotations cool. I'm touching point with every student throughout the day on all of the critical core subjects. This is great, but I teach in a Title I school in a Title I district. Absences are a problem. Truancy is an issue. A lot of homelessness, a lot of just issues getting to school, and then if you get to school, managing your school work outside of the classroom, it's tough. So I knew it was like, I would say, okay, these rotations are super great for the 60% of the kids that showed up and were presents, but that left 40% of the students not getting my awesome teaching, my charismatic teaching, anything I was doing. And so I knew that it always ate at me, this is working, but not really. And it was efficient for me because I had the groups and I did it six times, and it was easy for me, but it didn't hit the second part of the equation, which was effective for my students. So I knew I had to figure something else out. I didn't know what I didn't know, and we can't get better until we know more things. And that's when I found the podcast. It was Serendipitous, actually. And now I started rolling with it. Yeah, it's like in a perfect world. It's an ideal system, but right. We don't teach in a perfect world. Here we are. So I guess I'm curious, when you heard the podcast, did you start implementing the next day? How did that go for you? How did you get into it from there? Yeah, it's so funny because I listen to this podcast actually quite a bit, and going through the free course, there's a whole bunch of recommendations because educators are like students. We all have different bandwidth of what we can handle and what we can tolerate. But the common prevailing suggestion that I found is if you're going from No Modern Classrooms project to full MCP, you might want to just start with, like, one core content area. So just do ela or just do math. And I went all out, man. So I heard the podcast on a Thursday afternoon, and the context of this was during the school closures. Our school was going back to a hybrid learning environment. So my 30 kids got split into two groups, and half of them would come two days a week, and then they would switch. And so that Thursday, I heard the podcast, went home that evening look, and saw a free course. And I'll be honest with you, I was like, there's no way. Okay, well, there's a free course, and it's not going to be very good or it's not really free and it's going to be great. There's nothing free that is really effective. At least it has been my experience. But I tore through that thing in one night on Friday, and then that weekend, I transitioned everything. Wow. Almost to the detriment of my marriage, actually. It was a rough weekend, but again, when you see something you didn't know exist but is out there, because I've heard self pacing. I've heard of a lot of these things. Mastery, grading. I've heard a lot of it, but not tied into a way that flowed and all made sense. When it all clicked and I went through the free course, I was just like, I cannot do anything different. This is it. So I went that whole weekend. It took me forever to figure out how to do simple things like, what are my guidance notes? Going to look like? How am I going to use a stylist? I don't have a touchscreen. I mean, that whole weekend, it was crazy, but I got off the ground. And that Monday, the group A that started off hybrid learning, they were in a full self paced environment. And so that it was crazy, but there's just no other way. I couldn't not do it once I realized that it was possible to do it. So this is the origin story of the 72 hours that you were emailing me about? Yeah, this is it. It was crazy and like I said, almost detrimental to the marriage. My wife was like, what are you doing? Because I was a good teacher. Eight years in the game, things were going well. Why am I changing everything? She couldn't understand that, but now she gets it because I'm much less stressed and students are doing a lot better. So we made it through. Yeah, that's such a cool story. I mean, can you tell me more about that Monday? You mentioned the hybrid students were fully self paced, but how did it go? What was it like? What happened? How did the students respond? Yeah, so the first thing I mentioned that it took forever. The biggest hang up during those 72 hours was, what are my guided notes going to look like? MCP does a phenomenal job on the website. There's exemplars, there's examples, downloads that you can use. But I just had to make it difficult because nothing was really fitting what I wanted my classroom to look like. So I ended up creating the guided notes on my own and then what I call roadmaps. So that's just the game board, I think is a common terminology. How do the students access the lessons? And the first thing that was on our classrooms are set up where they have three TVs and that's where we project our presentations. And whatnot I just said, we are on topic nine. You are in control. One lesson a day, however long it takes you, and I am here. That's what I had on my presentation. And the students were like, what? And I said, Yeah, I'll be here if you need me. I'll be meeting with you, a couple of you, because I know you were, because we kind of came in mid topic and mid unit for math and Ela, respectively. And it took them a little while because they've been in school, a traditional school environment for six years. And so I was expecting them to transition completely in one day. I was like, come on, guys, I switched around. In 72 hours, you all would be fine. And now there were a lot of questions and it turned into the big, and I'm sure we'll talk about these, and I would imagine they are plagues of quite a few early implementers. Okay, well, I'm just going to sit here and hang out then. But then some students were like, wait, I can do three math lessons today if I master them. Yeah, everything is ready for you. I think they were shocked. They didn't believe when I told them that I've already taught them everything. They just haven't learned it yet. You just got to go Google Classroom. It's all there, all my videos, everything. It was just overwhelming for them. And it took a little while to get the can down the road, but they ended up, man, loving it. My class this year is just eating it up, so it ended up working out. Okay. That's so cool. That's so cool. Let's get into the Troubleshooting then. I mean, I guess, like that day you mentioned those kids who just didn't do anything. What else did you see? What did you find that you needed to troubleshoot? Since that really is the topic of this episode, right? What needed troubleshooting right off the bat? Yeah. So I sort of split it into two. When I was thinking about hopping on with you today, Zach, I split it into two different things. Sort of the programmatic troubleshooting, things like my guided notes, things like the Roadmap, things like Google Classroom connectivity, and then the people, the people side. So I might have had everything dialed in and ready to go. That was the program side, but the people weren't ready for it. And then it came to find out that my programming wasn't good. So I think that very first week and actually the first month, the two biggest issues I had, one being from the program side, as I've termed it, and then I'll get to the people side, was from the program side, ensuring that everything was connected. That when they went to the roadmap. That's what I called it. And they clicked on nine one, dividing fractions. That that actually went to the right video, that the video was edited correctly, that it all was all synced. Because there are many times where something just as simple as my ability to connect these lessons that I'm used to doing. Not ad hoc or off the top of my head, but okay, like, it's Tuesday. I look at the pacing guide. I'm doing dividing fractions. Let's go, everyone. Get out your notebooks and roll. That all had to be done beforehand, and a lot of syncing up and technology knowledge had to happen so that by Monday, they were ready to go. The biggest issue, the biggest troubleshooting I had to figure out, and I just think it was because I was just new, was getting into the rhythm of recording the video, making the video make sense, not losing my warmth, right. Not losing who I am as a teacher even though I'm on a video, and then making sure the students could access it. And then from a people side. What I noticed initially was my students were just shocked. And then they're shocked turned into, well, if you're not going to stand here and hold my hand the whole time. I'm going to just sit here and I let them. That very first topic. I just said, fine, I put up the pacing tracker. You see where you're at. If you're comfortable with that, that's your choice. And it's crazy. Everything changed after our first unit assessment because the students that were on pace and were supporting each other did well and those that chose not to did not. And it created this little self accountability within the team and they started rocking. So I think those are the first two issues that I encountered was technology management and then getting the students to change their mindset on how they approach their own learning. Yeah, totally. The phrase that I often use to describe that is failing forward. Right. It's almost like it is an intervention to not intervene in a way and let them see what happens. Especially if the stakes aren't that high. Right. If it's just like a little test for your class or something, it's not like even a big standardized test. Then these are fifth graders. It's not like they're getting ready for college or anything. Exactly. It's a good time to learn. Like if I just sit here and don't do what I'm asked, don't fulfill my responsibilities in this class, well, I'll learn what happens. And what about like, what have you started to see or what have you seen as kids became more accustomed and sort of warmed up to the self pacing that you have still tried to troubleshoot or still needs troubleshooting? What do you think more like on the long term? Yeah, I think the beautiful thing about the MCP is so simple, even though it takes a little while to get up and rolling, but from a student facing side, it's not that challenging. You come in, maybe you have a paper based classroom, so you probably have you being an implementer. You have a system set up where the students know where to go to get the sheets. They know where your video is, they understand the expectations. But I think just as people are people, there are some lessons and some units of study that are just more digestible with a self paced and some that aren't. And I think what I continually have to fine tune, and I've heard this from other mentors and the mentees that I've worked with, math seems to be a little simpler to understand from an MCP perspective. Like, okay, we're dividing fractions. That's like a specific skill, right, that has a clear beginning and clear ending, whereas main idea, same point or theme. It is a concrete skill. But having the students flush out their understanding and knowledge produce effective writing in this environment, in this style, I routinely have to come back to the board and well, okay, that video explaining topic sentences or engaging intros, something was up with it because all of this writing is flat and since we've in a large part, although it happens organically, remove the lecture. Let's look at Tyreque's sentence and decipher it. Okay, well, what did you think? Okay, that's not really happening. Whole group, although it can, but predominantly we're doing this independently or in small groups, I really have to stay on my whole class, progress in things that typically take longer than a math lesson. So developing an essay, doing a research project, I'm constantly trying to fine tune the ways that the students receive the direct instruction in a way that does not create a lot of quote unquote reteaching that just turns into, I'm back to my old eight years of teaching ways that is not serving everyone in the ways they need to be served. Right. But I like how that's a very pedagogical answer. It goes to improving the teaching. Improving the learning really troubleshooting in the sense of improving as a teacher, which is not so much a self pacing thing as it is like, how can I most help you to understand this content, which I also think speaks to the way that modern classrooms tend to just feel more content oriented. We take away, like you said, modern classrooms can be very simple if they're implemented efficiently. And so we take away all the sort of extraneous stuff, the structure of being in a class, and you have a very simple progression that you just follow through the lessons. And so the discussions become less about what do I do? Where do I go to find the work? And more, can you explain to me what theme is? Can you explain to me how to divide by fractions or what have you? Right. And I think that one of the things, if you look at the Modern Classrooms website or you bother to read any of the data that comes out, one of the points is that there are so many teachers that report feeling less stressed because they have more of an opportunity to build relationships and work with their students more consistently. It's not just the first two weeks of school are going to play a bunch of get to know you games and then, okay, I think I already know you now we're going to work for the next seven to eight weeks, or whatever it is. But I think that it's like with this structure, there's more time for us as educators to critically look at the pedagogical delivery, the curriculum design, rather than being pigeonholed and stuck in a pacing guide where we got to get through and just kick off a lesson a day. Well, okay, the students, they're on their way. They're cruising through it. It may not be perfect. I have more time, I have more ability, more bandwidth to more critically think about how it's being delivered. And I think that is a huge it's not like one of those fun, cute data points, but it's a huge benefit in a modern classroom to have the ability, while the plane is flying, to look at the delivery and the pedagogical approach while the students are receiving it. I just think that's a huge benefit. Yes, there's the building of the student relationships. Yes, there's the efficiency of looking at assessments, et cetera, et cetera. That's all good, but the work, the actual delivery of the work gets a lot more highlighting because you really see if you have students on all different paces and you have students that are on perhaps all different lessons, you really get to find out the weak points and the strengths of your lesson delivery. And I just think if you're just crushing through lessons on a daily basis in a non modern classroom, you might feel that it's not good, but you may not be able to pinpoint what was it because of the drama at recess that this lesson is not so great. Is it? Because I just got observed by my principal and that made me nervous. You don't really know. But it's in a modern classroom, you know, because you have the time to troubleshoot and look through the different parts of the process because you've already mapped it out. I just wanted to point that out. I think that's a huge benefit. I mean, that's really interesting. It's like no individual event or on a particular day like the principal observation or something at recess that doesn't affect the lessons uniformly because kids are doing them on different days. And so you really get to see the lesson for what it actually is. That's really interesting. And I also like that you mentioned the data showing that modern classrooms teachers report being less stressed. I think that those content based discussions, that real teaching, that's the rewarding part of being a teacher. It's not certainly not disciplining children. It's not helping them find their work. It's talking to them about concepts that you're trying to teach them. And that's where you get those AHA moments that are so fun for the kids and for the teachers to be like, I'm doing this right, right. So, yeah, talking about those issues that you saw on the first day and in the long term, I guess, the more pedagogical ones, what did you do? How did you change up your modern classroom to facilitate better self pacing? Where are you at now? How have you adjusted your implementation of the model to facilitate self pacing better based on what you learned? That didn't go so well. Yeah, so one of the things that was a problem that I didn't realize has to do with my roadmaps and they'll be linked so listeners can check them out and hopefully find use of them. But I wanted at the beginning, I wanted everything to be at their fingertips. The must do, the should do, and the Aspire to do all there. So what I did for every math lesson, for example, was have a little box that had everything for them to click on that took them wherever they needed to go. This particular box and it was color coded, blue is a must do, yellow should do, etc. But what I found was a ton of questions because you got to remember I was implementing this during the pandemic. And so even when we came back to hybrid, I only had half of my students and then the amount of those half that routinely came wasn't consistent. So while everything was available to them and there was a unit zero where they could, at their homes learn how to maneuver through our new classroom, there's something to be said about being able to walk students through the process in person. And so it just became very overwhelming to have so many options available to them at one time. And so as you ask how have I worked through that and how does it exist now? The roadmap still looks very much the same but I've just removed some overt choices. I've made it in and out. Instead of cheesecake factor, I guess would be a good example. I've taken away the choices and not so much in the you are now limited to what you can do. But just visually it's not as intimidating. And that brings me to because what would happen is the students wouldn't be able to get through all their work because they thought that they needed to check off every box for every lesson. Some students don't need the should do, everyone needs the must do, et cetera. So what it would do would cause problems on the progress tracker. Because what I was taught during the free course and listening to the podcast was the progress tracker should remove a lot of your worries of having to keep on your grading. So I was like, great, awesome. I think every teacher wants that. But what it ended up doing was mr. M, I've done the work. You haven't updated the tracker. Well, no you haven't because I don't see all your work. Well, where am I supposed to put my work? There's a bin right there's. All these things where I know I was clear but I was clear to myself maybe not to my students. And so just streamlining all that process, making a different color bin. This is where the mastery checks go. Certain table where people have to sit and do their mastery check. I didn't think about any of this and so I really had to change the physical structure of the room and then change a lot of my unit zero, the beginner here's how this works lessons to make it a lot more feasible for my students to achieve success. And so nowadays it's not perfect but students know really clearly because it's now color coded and there are only certain places we take a mastery check. And you don't get to a mastery check unless myself, unless I've looked at your work all these things a modern classroom is not. I've got my video, you got the guided notes. I'm no longer teaching. You go. A lot of me thought that at the very beginning, which really helped out. It's going to help me out my efficiency with my time, but is it helping the students? So just those nuts and bolts, figuring out how to move through the process, that has made a world of difference. Because when students know what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it and what is the level of expectation, it really removes a lot of that malaise and that unmotivated spirit because they want to do well. They want to feel successful, they want to feel achievement. I just had to remove a lot of the clutter that was unnecessary. Yeah. And you said these are things you had not thought about that just sort of appeared to you as you started doing it. Right. I think that these are great points, it almost sounds like, to say these things. They don't feel like that big of a deal, but these are the roadblocks, these are the bottlenecks. And you only learn that by teaching this way. And I think it's probably different for every teacher, too. Like, you can't just universally say to all teachers, use an orange band for your mastery checks because that might not be the issue that others are having. One that I had, my students weren't picking up their guided notes and they just weren't taking their guided notes and they were just sitting there in the folders at the front of the room. So I started grabbing the big stack of guided notes for each section and as they walked in, I would just hand them the notes and they would carry them to their desk. And that got like 90% of the students to start doing the notes again. Nice. It's like little things that you learn this as not you. I mean, a teacher learns this as they go, right? Because these are the things that pop up. These are the things that our students tell us kind of off the cuff one day or we see these things happening in our classrooms and so we make little changes to them. And I think it's a great point to not, like, get hyper focused on troubleshooting in the sense of, like, how am I going to fix everything? It's just like, let's run the classroom and see where the pain points are and fix them. Yeah. And I think just with our little diversion there a bit ago about how the modern classroom helps teachers really assess their pedagogical approach and delivery. I think on the flip side of that token, to your point, it makes sense to us because for the most part, we're mature adults with functional thought processes with our work. And so we know it's nice because we planned it, but is it reaching the students? Right? And so when you're in a modern classroom, there's just more time and more space to allow students to voice issues, if they have any, because they're not stressed, too. Okay, I can't ask any questions. I can't tell the teacher, this doesn't make any sense because if I don't get this lesson done now, I'm going to be so over my head because tomorrow we're going to the next one. There's just less stress on the student part as well to uncover issues that you can fix because again, you have a little bit more it's not like you have more time, but your time is just used more effectively in a modern classroom. I think. Yeah, totally. The teachers and the students, I think that, yes, self pacing really liberates a lot of time for everyone that it felt like we didn't have, but we actually did. I guess I'd like to go back. You sort of mentioned this very quickly, but you had some students who were like, oh, you're not going to let me do it? Okay. I just won't do it. Right. I think that that's probably a very common and we're going to get to this later, but that's probably a very common concern around self pacing and something that people who first start out self pacing have to deal with and probably troubleshoot. How did you deal with that? Yeah, I call my class at team, and we're Team 15 because our room number is 15 and we are all in this together. That's the vibe, that's the culture of my room, and that was before modern classrooms, and I keep it now. And I just think for those students, it's not a fun feeling to know that your BFF is rocking ela week, unit four, week two, right. And you're not. And it has nothing to do with your capabilities, although that is that could partially be part of it. Perhaps your best buddy is a better reader than you, or whatever the case may be. Everyone's different, but you don't want to be the one red on the progress tracker. And I think that, again, my students, fifth graders, had a lot of experience not being fully in charge of their learning, aside from if you didn't bring your home or back on Friday, you don't get recess or whatever. And so that's sort of the base expectation of quote unquote, self responsibility. And so I think there was a grace period because I knew that putting the onus 100%, although it always was, but making it really explicit, if you do not go get the, I'm not as nice as you, I guess I haven't handed anybody notes, but if you don't get the notes, if you do not listen to how you're supposed to get to the roadmap, if you do not take these steps, you are not going to learn anything. You're just not. And that was the challenge. Can you step into Team 15? Can you step up take control of your learning. I am not in charge of what happens inside of your brain. I'm in charge of making sure that when you hear you're working hard and you're efficient with your time and we're having a good environment, that's what I'm in charge of. You're in charge of accessing the material to the best of your ability, and if you need help, I can support you. And so it was a strict but warm beginning because I did not want any safety nets for my students that were struggling. I wanted them to feel the pressure, but I also understood that this was completely different than what they'd ever experienced. And this is the practice I continue to this day every morning while we have breakfast in the classroom in our district. So when my students are eating breakfast, I have progress tracker for our first content area on the board or on the televisions. And we just check in and I just say, look, here's where we're at. Are we comfortable with this? How are you feeling? A quick metacognitive and selfreflection survey. Okay, well, you know what you got to do. Let's get going. And that helps us. Now, at the very beginning, it was just a lot of, you understand this material is not going to fly into your head. You have to work on this. You have to get this going. But honestly, for me, all it took was reviewing the progress tracker publicly on a daily basis. Students do not want to feel left out when they know they can do it. And then there are some students that either are significantly behind grade level or they get pulled out for services. And so that's okay. We work with that. And it's an expectation that the team understands that we are all working on things to the best of our abilities. We all make that commitment to ourselves, and we are all going to produce and progress at the rate that we're supposed to if we put in the right amount of work. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. I mean, anyone who thinks that school age children can't self pace you heard it from Charlie. I mean, these are fifth graders. They're like 1011 years old, right? Yes. That's amazing. I think that idea of having the breakfast time as a time to sort of review all the different pacing trackers, that definitely reflects my experience, especially with my younger students. I mean, I teach middle school, and so my 6th graders are probably closest developmentally to your students, obviously, right. In age as well. Certainly. And I've talked about on the podcast before how I had to really structure those 6th grade classes more than I did with my older students because I was teaching them all the same. And I found that the 6th graders in a lot of classes, none of them started working. There was no work at all. They were all just like, we can do whatever we want. Wow, okay, let's play and run around. And so 7th and 8th graders are kind of over that by that point, but the 6th graders, I was like, okay, we need to come in here. We're going to line up at the door like we always used to. We're going to take seats sort of calmly and quietly, and I'm going to actually directly instruct the class for about three minutes to draw your attention to the pacing tracker and say, this is where we're at. Lesson four is on pace. These students see me over here to revise and what have you, a very structured introduction to the class, which I think is my class is because it's middle school or much shorter. Obviously it's not the whole day, but it's the same idea, like starting off the period or in your case the day, by reviewing where everyone's at, what the class is going to do, it gives structure to the class. And I think that is sort of the biggest piece of capital T troubleshooting that I did, and it sounds like you also did that, and it is definitely a good intervention. Absolutely. So before we go to the break, actually after the break, we're going to address some very common issues that I see coming up from the Facebook group, in the Slack group, sort of the modern classrooms community, and sort of treat it like a little mini Q and A. We're going to address some specific troubleshooting scenarios. But before we do that, I'm curious to hear from you as a mentor for modern classrooms, what are some of the common issues that you have helped your mentees to troubleshoot? And we may hear these echoed in the specific cases that I pulled for the post break section, but what have you helped your mentees to work out as a mentor? Yeah, so I think again, I'll put it into a program side and then a people side. The number one program side issue that I noticed my mentees have is they try to replace it's kind of scary when you think about the fact that you're not going to be direct instructing the class. Right. So that's a little intimidating or you feel a little sorrow for that. So what do you do? You put 17 paragraphs on a Google slide and it's like, well, you're essentially doing the same thing. It's just now a twelve minute video instead of your twelve minute chat in front of the room. And so really getting teachers, the mentees I've had the pleasure of working with, to understand that, remove a little bit of power from your mighty hand and your mighty voice, it doesn't give the students the minimum of what they need to be successful, and then the ones that don't need anymore, they can go. So your slides do not have to be crazy inventive with a lot of text. They should be actually the opposite of that. And then you can supplement that in the collaboration and the revision process. There are ways that you can still insert yourself into the lesson. Your whole awesome story filled with tangents to incite interest in your lesson to the whole class. Live does not need to fit on a Google slide. There are ways to augment that and really just focus on that one submission. Or I call it a submission because that's what the mentees do. But the designing of the instructional video, less is more. And then I think another big one on the program side. Well, I guess it's the people side as well. What do I do? Okay, great. They're all self pacing, but they're all turning in their mastery check at the same time. Or they all want me to check their practice at the same time. How do I handle that flow? That is definitely one that I've worked with mentees with quite a bit. And I know because I am cool enough to get sort of the backstage view here, we'll be covering a little bit of those in the Q and A, so I won't steal too much from that now. Yeah, and that's fine because I definitely respond more to the first one. I mean, like my experience, one of the most common pieces of feedback that I give as a mentor, probably to every single one of my mentees, literally every single one, is to chunk down the videos. And I like that you frame it from the idea of teacher control. I know that we as the teachers, we think a lot about our content and so we think something is really cool and we want to present it to the class and have this wow moment where all 25 or 30 of the people in the room are like, wow, it's math or whatever. Right? I think that there's some kids who are just not going to be there with you and forcing it on them actually makes you seem less interesting to them and less relatable. And so I feel like I've learned to be okay having those moments come up in small groups or even in a one on one conversation with a student, that's where those magical moments happen in my class. Now, very rarely with the full group, it does happen sometimes. Like, sometimes it'll happen so dramatically in a single conversation that I'll stop the whole class and be like, whoa, everybody come and check out what the student did. This is amazing. Or something like that. It happens. But yeah, chunking down and not filling the lessons with that fluff that we want to say to our students but isn't actually necessary to this is not what I would actually say to the mentees because that's not been my observation. But just breaking down the lessons into smaller pieces, I definitely think that shortening the videos is great, but the way that you do that is by teaching less content. Right? And I think on that point real quick, really briefly here. I think a lot of mentees and I had this too, this concern of, well, what do I make a mastery check for? The is every lesson super important? Just the must do, the should do? Do they need a mastery check? My rule of thumb for my mentees is if you are going through the trouble of creating guided notes, not the trouble, I mean, that's the work. But if you're going to bother yourself by making a video and guided notes, then that deserves a mastery check. And if it's something that is not critical to their understanding, it probably doesn't need notes, it probably doesn't need a video. And as you said, it can be addressed in small groups. Yeah, it might not need to be taught to everyone. There you go. Yeah, totally. That's fantastic. So we're going to hit on this a little bit more after we come back. But now we are going to take a short break and we will be back in just a minute. Hi everyone, it's Karim here from the Modern Classrooms project. I just wanted to share some exciting news about our big virtual Summer institute this summer, the summer of 2022. Now, as many of you all know, the summer is one of the most popular times for folks to learn our model. It's a time where folks can take a step back from their normal classroom experience and really rethink and redesign their approach to teaching and learning. And this summer, we plan to train 3000 educators this summer. Now, educators come through a variety of ways. You can enroll individually, you can enroll through a school and district partnership, and this year we have some pretty awesome regional scholarship opportunities. These are scholarship opportunities for educators if you're located in DC, new York City, Connecticut, Chicago, Seattle, the Twin Cities or Tulsa, these are folks who can just apply. If you're an educator in these communities and if you get accepted, you get a full scholarship to our Summer Institute and some really great perks, including a $500 stipend. So check them out. You can just go to modernclassrooms. Orgscholarships to see the right regional scholarships and you can just go to our website and you'll see at the top announcement bar. You can learn more about our virtual Summer Institute, see the variety of ways you can roll individually or collaborate with us on a school or district partnership. I hope everyone's doing all right. Good luck with the rest of the year. Thank you for all that you do. All right, folks, we're back with Charlie. And as I was saying before the break, I'd like to spend the last little part of this episode addressing three specific self pacing issues that I've helped my mentees to troubleshoot. And I've also seen sort of come up in the Modern Classrooms community, kind of like a mini Q and A here because both of us are relatively experienced mentors. So I hope that this will be helpful for some of the listeners who are dealing with these issues or similar issues to these. The first one I want to tackle is teachers who find that all of their students are behind pace. Teachers would say that they're concerned that these students won't get to all the materials and they may actually fail the class. So Charlie, if this were your mentee or if you saw this, what would you say to a teacher who was concerned about that? How could they troubleshoot that issue of their students all being behind pace? Yeah, so I see it in sort of two parts and I think one of the things is if you're concerned that your students won't get through all the material and they'll fail class, it's possible that it hasn't been made clear that while the students are self paced and there's an on target lesson behind lessons, et cetera, there is an end point. We will be taking an assessment. This lesson, this topic, this unit, whatever verbiage you want to use is coming to a close. And if you have not done the necessary work to prepare yourself, you will fail. But there's good news. And that's the first part of this about worried that all students are behind pace. You could typically find out, at least in my experience and the experience with my mentees pretty early on in a topic that you've prepped for. And what I mean by that is a multitude, a string of videos and lessons that you've produced if it is not going to work with the majority of your students. And I think that again, the beauty of the time, the space that the modern classroom provides you is while it would be a little bit unfortunate because you've already prepped and done the necessary work, you can change and redo. And I think that a lot of times I know for me specifically when I finish recording my videos for my lessons, I want to wrap that thing in a bow and be totally done. I've done it. Go kiddos, get rocking. And that just simply is not always the reality. Maybe my pacing within the planning of the unit was just too much. And so I think if you find yourself looking at a progress tracker that is all red, that's a you problem. I would say first, not a student problem. What have you done to put too much on their caseload for that week? How many must do are you giving them? It's likely if all of your students or significant portion of your students are behind you've given them too much. And there's a way that there are ways that you can ameliorate that by just adjusting. Maybe not every lesson is a must do. A couple of them could probably be should do if this is truly an issue and then you just adjust accordingly. That's how I would approach it. That's a great answer. I mean, that's pretty much exactly what I was going to say. So I guess I would say it's a great answer. I think we agree. What is within this teacher's control, right? What's within the teacher's control is what they put in front of the students. I feel like if I were in that scenario, I would look at that and say, this is strange for me. I know my students can do better than this because they have I mean, if it were my first unit, I guess I would have no baseline. But I know from experience that students are able to self pace. I think that I will take that as read. Right. I'm going to take that for granted. That's an assumption I'll make. And so if all of them are behind, something is wrong with my lessons and recognizing that it was something that I did, I would extend the end of the unit, I would make the unit longer and then for next year, I'd make a note. I need to change how I teach this to make sure that everyone learns it. I've done this on individual lessons. Like when I see all my students, not for an entire unit. I never had the experience that all of my students are behind pace for an entire unit. But I have had lessons that I didn't teach effectively. And so I know, like, every single student is getting an R on this, which means they submit something and they all have to revise every single one. Right. Clearly I'm not teaching this right because they're all doing something, but they're not doing it right. And so that's on me. And so it'll kind of be annoying for me for that couple of days when all of them need to check in with me and get help. If I'm lucky, it's something that other students can help with and I can help them to help each other and take some of the burden off of my own shoulders. But, yeah, I will extend the pacing. I'll just stretch that lesson out for a couple of days because we need the time. I need the time to check in with them. They need the time to learn it. When it's on me, I will extend the end and accommodate that. But yeah, definitely. I think that's a great answer. All right, next one. It says some students don't do any work without daily instruction on what to do. They don't seem to be able to manage their own time or have any sense of urgency and they are many lessons behind. And I think that this is sort of going to what we were talking about before, where there's not all the class right, but certain individual students who kind of cross their arms and say, oh, I can do whatever I want, I will do whatever I want. So yeah. How would you respond to this? We sort of already talked about it a little bit, but how would you respond to this? Yeah, I've dealt with this many times, and I think, again, you have the ability to have a really frank, earnest, and supportive conversation with the student because you're not responsible for directing a course of kids that particular class period on their choices. And I think that there is a huge it's not deficit thinking so much, but there's this prevailing theory that I've seen witness at the places I've had the privilege to teach, where if the lessons have been planned and they've been executed or they've been put on, in this case, modern classrooms set up, that all the students should just come running to gleefully guide through the content. And for a lot of students, that's just not how they approach school. There's so many other things on their mind. There's so many other things, pressures going on at home. It's our job, I think, to make the non comfortable work as comfortable as possible. Not comfortable in the sense that we're just going to cruise through it, but allow the students an opportunity to jump into the work. What can you do to okay, so you're struggling with this. I see you're behind. What do you need? Let's get you in on it. And having that conversation with the student one on one allows them to find out what is needed. How can I succeed? You're giving me this one on one attention, and this is positive. I'm not in trouble. But student, you're not doing what you need to be successful. How can we get you there? That is just goes a long way for students to get picked up and on track. Yeah, absolutely. I agree completely. I think that interestingly. This question is, or I guess this statement, right, this issue is not exactly indicative that you need to troubleshoot yourself. Pacing. I mean, there are just students who are sometimes not motivated. That's the reality of teaching. Even in traditional classrooms. My students didn't all do all of the work when I was teaching. Traditionally. If they did, I probably wouldn't have changed, right. Some kids, and I think that also self pacing, does add a level of responsibility that they may not be used to. Oh, certainly it's our job to motivate them. It's also our job to intervene. It's also our job to email their families, their parents and guardians. It's our job to keep on top of them with the pacing tracker. And there are things that we can do. It's our job as teachers. Well, and I think in a traditional classroom, that student that is unmotivated and not getting work done gets to I mean, that is their repeated experience day after day, week after week, because it is so difficult to pause everything for a couple of students when you have to stick to sticking, quote unquote, to a pacing guide. That's one a day. I mean, you just can't do that and so in a modern classroom, you have that time and that space. It's almost like it's a good thing. The problem is a good thing because the system allows you to work with them, whereas the traditional wouldn't allow that time. Totally. And I guess with regard to troubleshooting, you said for the previous question, it was like you said it was a you problem, right, the teacher problem. But this one is not a you problem. This is something that we cannot control. We can only control how we respond. And I think that how we respond is not indicative of the quality of our modern classroom. That's just part of being a teacher. Cool. I think we agree on that one. All right. And this last one, this last troubleshooting scenario which you had sort of started to hint at before the break, it says, I am overwhelmed by the number of submissions I need to review. And this is becoming a bottleneck to my students, effectively self pacing, since all their work needs to pass through me before they can move on. This is an actual scenario that I have discussed with my mentees and also with people online. So how would you respond to this? Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to make a whole lot of friends with this one because again, I think it's a teacher structured problem. If I understand it correctly, the students cannot move on until all the work passes through the teacher and then that is their guide, that now they've got the check mark, they can move on. That is seems so stressful. I think that's one easy fix that can happen with this is once the student has turned in a mastery check, for example, they don't wait for me to check it and give them the blessing to move on. They go. And I think this models professional real world scenarios. If I'm working in a project management team and my part of it is due to my supervisor, my supervisor is not going to wait for my checkpoints for me to submit something to them before I then have the initiative to just continue to work. So I have to get my stuff turned in. And then if there is an issue or a problem, what I do I'm mixing analogies here at metaphors, but I will go and check in with the student. I never want to be the reason my students are not succeeding or progressing, especially if I'm being so critical to them, being in charge of their experience and their learning. So I think if it is true that you have positioned yourself as the gateway for your students and I understand this completely because I would imagine that this came from a fairly recent implementer that is coming from that traditional. I just taught the lesson. We're in the middle of it. We're on guided question number two. I hope you're all getting in your notebooks, turn your papers into me before recess. You are the paragon of how that classroom functions and that just can't exist in a self paced classroom with any efficiency. You've got to create ways for your students to get stuff into you that you will check, but they can still move on. And if there's an issue, then you go back, bring them to a small table and rectify it. Yeah, totally. I mean, I sort of caught on to that little detail too, that all the work needs to pass through me before they can move on. Right. That's the key portion of this, which is that they are the gatekeeper, like you said. I don't see the harm in letting the students watch the Ed puzzle for the next lesson, even if I haven't looked at their submission yet. And I generally tend to get to them in class. One thing that I like to do is to separate time out, even if it's not like consistently the same time every day. I'll say, like, for the next five minutes, I need you to not bother me because I'm going to look at mastery checks and I'll actually turn students away, which seems kind of mean, but they know at this point like I'm doing something and they've all been in a situation where they want me to check their work and they're annoyed by other students coming up to me and taking up my time. So all of my students at this point will sort of respect that and leave me alone and it's just five minutes. I think that another thing that I thought about as I read this issue that needs troubleshooting is that the mastery checks should be very fast to grade. I'm saying five minutes and I can usually look through if I'm doing it right, I can look through five, six, seven mastery checks in five minutes because all I need to do is glance at it and check it off or say it needs to be revised. I'm not going to revise with them all first because like I said, there's no harm in them moving on. And like, you made that great point, like they can move on and I'll check in with them one by one when we do have the time and not in a harried and rushed way. Right. But my mastery checks are very small and that's because I was getting at this before. My lessons are very small, too. I think that teaching a large amount of content sneaks in the need to have a very complicated mastery check with interconnected parts. And you might look at it and one part might affect the other part and so you're not even sure right away if it gets mastery or not. Right. That's why I think that it's really important to have mastery checks that are super simple to grade and very fast to grade. And I've always said this on the podcast and I still will continue to say it. I think it's better to have two short lessons than one big lesson with both concepts in it. So your unit might be a little bigger, but it's the same amount of content. It's just more checkpoints, more time for you to see it. So even if you are the gatekeeper, which I don't think you should be, I agree with you completely. But even if you are, it doesn't take you that long to be the gatekeeper. You get through them real fast. Right, well, and I know that there are some teachers and I do this myself too, I say I'm not a gay keeper, but in a way I am. I don't want my students taking a mastery check unless I check their notes and or their practice. But that is it like you said, super duper quick. I'm not fine tooth combing, anything. It's just I want to make sure you did the work before you're approving mastery on it. That saves you time and it saves me time. So I just wanted to add a quick note just in case this person was more concerned with the number of submissions they need to review. I'm assuming that submission means the whole package. So split out the mastery check, make it quick, make it quicker and easier for your students to show mastery and you see that they've mastered it. And then if you're requiring any note checking or practice work, that should also model the mastery check and be lean and not require a lot of checkpoints. I just wanted to add that in. Totally. It kind of goes to what you were saying before about what gets a mastery check. You know, it's not like we're giving our kids a unit test at the end of every day, right? It's a small piece of work. It's a small piece of work. And it does require some planning to come up with the work that both gauges their mastery but also lets you look at it quickly and just do it fast, check it off, say, yes, you can move on, or we need to revise together. But yeah, great answers, I think. Great. Well, Charlie, thank you so much. It's always fun to talk with another modern classroom mentor about mentoring. I feel like it's a fun job. I like teaching about teaching. I like talking about teaching. Obviously, here I am on the podcast. But yeah, this has been a fantastic discussion. Before we sign off, how can our listeners connect with you, Charlie? If they want to connect with you, hear more, talk to you about stuff, how can they connect with you? Yeah, awesome. So it's kind of a weird answer because I love connecting with people and supporting and helping, but I am odd and that I have absolutely zero social media accounts. So you can if you're interested in connecting, send me an email at my modernclassemble. Charlie Moynihan@modernclassrooms.org, I believe, or I have a website, moynathought.com where I do blog posts and there's ways you can educationally and parenting focus things of that nature. People connect with me through that as well. It's been a blast. I really appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me. I've had a blast. To listeners. Remember, you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org and you can find the show notes for this episode which have some of Charlie's roadmaps. You can see the revisions he made to them. You can find that at podcast. Modernclassrooms.org 87 we'll have this episode recap and transcript uploaded to the Modern Classrooms blog on Friday, so be sure to check there for that if you are interested, but otherwise, thank you all for listening. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday.


Voiceover: Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode. And remember, you can learn more about our work at www.modernclassrooms.org, and you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at Learn.Modernclassrooms.org. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at modernclassproj, that's P-R-O-J. We are so appreciative of all you do for students and schools. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast.