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. 


Zach: Hello, and welcome to episode number 80 of the Modern Classrooms Project podcast. My name is Zach Diamond, and for any new listeners to the podcast who don't know me, I'm a middle school music teacher in Washington, DC. And of course, I'm a Modern Classrooms implementer in my music class. And I'm a Modern Classrooms mentor as well. Tonight I'm joined by a very special guest, none other than Modern Classrooms co-founder and CEO Kareem Farrah. Kareem, how are you doing? 


Kareem: Zach, how are you? It's good to be back. Episode 80. I still cannot believe that we're already at episode 80. I remember when you brought up the idea of recording a podcast way back when it feels like years and years ago, and now we're already at 80 episodes and hundreds of thousands of downloads, I believe. So super excited to be here. 


Zach: Yeah, it was years and years ago. Actually. It was 2020. It's kind of strange, but yeah, we're closing in on episode 100, which I'm amazed by, but here we are. And it's really great to be back on with you, too. Maybe listeners, some of our oldest listeners will know that you and I were the original co-hosts. That's true. Just like the beginning. 


Kareem: That's very true. Just like the beginning. Feels good to be back. And I'm excited to talk about summer. Summer 2022. It's crazy that we're actually going to be talking about summer of 2022. Again, every day feels a little bit like a blur, but it's actually not that far away. So I'm pumped to talk about it. 


Zach: Yeah, me too. And believe me, I'm pumped for summer as well. It's closer than I guess a lot of us may think it is because we have spring break and then we're in the home stretch, and so it's a great time to start thinking about summer. So I guess what we're going to talk about tonight is what teachers can be doing during the summer to prepare, to prepare to roll out their Modern Classrooms the following year, right? 


Kareem: Definitely. And also like what educators can do if they've been doing Modern Classrooms to date, like why the summer is such a powerful time, potentially as well. But before we dig in, Zach, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but I do think it's kind of hard to remember what a normal summer was like, obviously through the challenges of the last couple of years. And then in particular, I hear from so many educators that this year in particular was arguably the toughest just from a combination of workload and sub shortages and just like kind of the drain of Omicron kind of coming through. Have you been able to think about summer, and do you feel sort of uniquely in need of summer? How are you digesting the fact that summer is actually only three or four months away? 


Zach: I am feeling ready for summer. I still feel like it's far enough away that I'm not ready to look forward to it yet because we're really still in the thick of it. School is - it’s March, March is the bleakest of school months, and so I'm definitely looking forward to summer. I think this summer. We'll talk more shortly about Virtual Summer Institute, but I am looking forward to getting back into that sort of summer. I was at the beach for the last Virtual Summer Institute, so I have this very pleasant association with mentoring over the summer. But I also think that this summer, having come off of this school year, we're going to have a much better sense of what it's like to be going back into school buildings. Whereas last summer, even though Summer Institute, I thought was very successful and mentoring over the summer felt great, we weren't prepared. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into this school year. And I think a lot of teachers who have been on this podcast have said, and I certainly feel this way, we didn't realize how much we would lean on Modern Classrooms during this school year, going in and out of classes, having students coming in and going into hybrid, and all the strange things that have happened this year. Next year and during the summer, I think that I'll be able to mentor in a way that takes that into account. And so I am feeling like the summer is going to be a great time to mentor and to be a mentee, also, just because we're not in the thick of the school year and we can have that perspective of what it's like to teach in this reality but not be doing it, we can plan for it in a way that just feels more prepared, that feels more accurate as to what our experience is going to actually be like in late August, September.


Kareem: Totally. I mean, I think what's been so tough for teachers is like for better or for worse, I think the school year always had sort of an arc to it, right? Like, there's the beginning of the school year rush that can be both exciting and overwhelming and all about routines. And then there's a little bit of that second quarter lull, but you're near the holidays, and then third quarter quite frequently can feel very exhausting, and it can be some of the toughest times. And fourth quarter is kind of this energetic end to the year. But I think the reality is this year, in the last couple of years, the arc has just been thrown off, and I think a lot of educators are just sort of taking it day by day. Understandably so. But hopefully this summer can feel a little bit like a restart for folks. And like you said, knock on wood, hopefully, can plan for a much more predictable year than the last couple of years. When I was an educator, I found the summer to be both incredibly re-energizing and that I actually needed rest. But it was also my favorite time to redesign, to rethink what I was doing in my classroom and how to make it better. And I think that's kind of the first thing I'd love to discuss today is just like, why summer can be so valuable. For that reason, I'm kind of curious to hear from you first, and I can share my thoughts. I guess, taking the COVID equation out of this, how have you as an educator, usually used your summers, aside from just getting the very much-needed rest? And I want to stress the fact that any educator who's listening to this, who's going to choose to spend the entire summer just recharging and resting, I cannot respect that more. And you should absolutely do that. 


Zach: Absolutely. Yeah. 


Kareem: But through the lens of just like your classroom, how have you historically used summers? 


Zach: Yes. And you say, putting aside the COVID equation, I think that teachers forever have looked forward to the summer as a time to rest because the school year is stressful. Even before COVID it was stressful for us and we enjoy what we do. But it's hard. I definitely feel like in the summer, I'm in a different head space, and I have the sort of mental bandwidth to think about my classroom in a different way. Sometimes during the school year, I'll be on my morning commute driving into school, and I'm like, you know, I should try out the desks in this different configuration or whatever, little things like that. But then, I get to school, I have 20 minutes to think about all the repercussions of changing the desks. Then the kids come, and then I have 6 hours of classes, and then, the end of the school day, I'm just burned out. And so I'm like, I'm not going to do that right now. And it never really happens. But over the summer, I can dedicate more thought to it, and I can think through it, and I can plan these things out. And so that's why for me, summer has always been a really great time for just sort of like, reconfiguring what my entire class will be like. I think the very first thing that I thought of and the thing that I'm still thinking of is the fact that I took the Modern Classrooms training over the summer, and that was obviously the biggest shift to the way my classroom worked ever. But I personally don't think that I could have done that during the school year. And I know that there's lots of educators who are doing it very effectively right now because I'm mentoring them and they're amazing me. But I felt over that summer training, we did it. It was one week, and I would just go into DCI, my school where you did the training for us, and we were there for several hours every day, and I would just bounce ideas off of you, and I would be thinking and I'd be planning with other teachers. And that was like the distilled essence of what I think makes summer so valuable for teachers is that you have the time to sit down. And I say time. I mean, like hours to sit down and think and plan out how your class is going to work and not just like, what am I going to teach tomorrow? Because the school year is not trying to catch up with you at every moment. And so I think it's that sort of mental bandwidth that makes the summer just so valuable for teachers who are really trying to get the jump on a successful class.


Kareem: Totally. I mean, in many ways, the teaching life is not that different from the athlete life and that it's an off-season. And there's so many things during the school year that I feel like educators are doing. And they're like, “oh, I wish I could change that.” But I don't have time because I have either an elementary teacher who sees my kids all day long and teaches a bunch of different content areas, or I'm a middle school or high school teacher that has X number of preps and just busy all the time. And it's not like you lose the desire to make those improvements, but you have to be honest with yourself about your capacity to do those things. But I think what's nice about the summer is you can say, hey, I'm excited to get to summer because then I can bake in the shifts that I wanted to make. It's sort of like I had a list of improvements I wanted to make to my classroom that I couldn't have done this school year. And I encourage every educator to not be hard on themselves. I think it's a natural feeling to kind of go through the school year, wish you were making improvements during the school year and be mad at yourself that you didn't. And really, some of the improvements you want to make just aren't actually kind of, you're not going to be capable of making that big of a shift immediately in your classroom while the school year is going on. In some cases, you can. And I certainly built the Modern Classrooms Project model through learning from Rob during the school year. So undoubted, I have no doubt that one can completely redesign their classroom during the school year. But how many shifts you're going to make in any given year and when you're going to make it and how you're going to make it, that's a different story. And the summer creates the space to say, “all right, here's what I did well last year. Here's what I want to do differently, and here's how I'm going to block off a little bit of time this summer to make that happen.” And I think the best part of it is we often talk about with students, “hey, every unit you get a fresh start.” Well, ultimately, every school year you get a fresh start as a teacher. And that is, in some ways, frustrating because it's like I put in all that time and energy to build relationships with kids and create classroom culture and routine. And it was moving and it was smooth. And then I got to do a restart, but then at the same time, it's so exciting, right? I get to meet a whole group of new students. I get to institute a whole bunch of new ideas and structures into my classroom. I get to try a whole bunch of new things that I think are going to help support students and collaborating, supporting the whole child, pushing them across the continuum of mastery. So, yeah, I think it's a really powerful time. I did a lot of my thinking and innovating over the summer, and I actually remember vividly the big summer for me in my instructional practice was between the year that I had played around with the model, and I had sort of Rob one floor up, and I had visited his classroom and started to institute instructional videos, and the model was kind of coming to life. But that summer, in between, when I first started to do it and when I felt like it was really becoming a well-oiled machine was huge for me because I had started to build it out. It had grown over the course of the school year, but I was like, wow, I learned so much in these last eight months or so that it's going to inform how my classroom looks next year. And I'm kind of just, like salivating at the opportunity to build all the systems and structures and do a fresh launch with kids. So I really think summer is an incredibly, powerful time for educators. 


Zach: Yeah, you mentioned that. I hadn't even thought of this. But you're absolutely right. The fact that you're not changing a set of routines that are already in place, you're not changing a class that's already running piece by piece. You're just starting it this way. And that's really big. You can plan for that in a way that I think is a lot more flexible than planning for: Tomorrow, we're going to implement a pacing tracker because that's a big shift to a class. And depending on your students, I feel like that's a big shift for them, too. Whereas coming into the school year, just teaching this way, it gives you a lot of freedom to plan, and then you can obviously make adjustments as you go. I've heard from several of my mentees who I worked with last school year who started piece-by-piece implementing the model this year. They were like, “it's so much easier now because I started off the year just with everything already ready to go, and the students are doing the routines, are doing all this.” And again, this is not to say that people shouldn't try and implement during the school year, because we've seen they absolutely can and they are, they're doing a great job of it. But it is definitely an opportunity to set those sort of baseline routines with your kids in a way that you have a lot more control over. 


Kareem: Totally, totally. I could not agree more. I could not agree more. And one thing that's cool that we've created recently, so if listeners haven't seen it is that new explainer video, the animated video, which I so wish I had at the beginning. 


Zach: the one for students, right? 


Kareem: Yeah, right. Because we talk about that unit zero, which is critical, but now you can actually leverage that explainer video in your unit zero. And it's a really powerful way to explain to kids, “hey, this is how you're going to be learning, and this is why.” So another cool resource folks can leverage in their classrooms, especially when they launch. 


Zach: Yeah, that video is awesome. And I put it in the show notes. Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about what Modern Classrooms is doing as an organization for teachers who are planning over the summer. 


Kareem: Yeah. I mean, every year the Modern Classroom Project runs our big Virtual Summer Institute. If you think about the arc of the Modern Classrooms Project, we train teachers all year, and it's fabulous. And we love enrolling educators in our school year cohorts. And they do incredible work. And it's really amazing. Ultimately, though, the highest percentage of teachers we train by far is in the summer for the reasons that we just described. It's just like a really nice time for teachers to be able to go through our asynchronous, self-paced virtual mentorship program and really dive into exploring how to think differently about their classroom in a way that feels a little bit less restrictive. Right. I think there's always these constraints during the school year that make it difficult to invest time and energy into the redesign process. That's not the case in the summer. So we run our Virtual Summer Institute. We've done it now. I mean, we used to do it sort of through our old-school fellowship model. You were one of the OGs of that back in the day, Zach. But last year was our sort of first big Virtual Summer Institute that we really kind of branded that way. And it was really cool. And we trained well over a thousand teachers. And this year we're going to more than double that, hopefully, in our Virtual Summer Institute this year. And essentially it's a virtual mentorship program, but kind of on steroids because teachers are more available. And so our mentors, like you. So we get to offer kind of new elements to the mentorship program, and tons of folks come. I mean, they come from giant partnerships that we have with schools and districts, and then they also come individually through enrollments that way and through a variety of scholarships that are pretty cool as well. So we're gearing up for that. We are super excited about it. And we know that teachers are exhausted this year, but we're still seeing a ton of folks who are pretty eager to just apply what they've learned to create classrooms for students that are differentiated. I think what we all know as COVID was starting to impact classrooms is the challenges that educators face every single day. We're only going to become more challenging certainly during COVID, but even more so as a result of COVID now because of the diversity of learning levels and social emotional needs. So I think there's an anxiety in communities to just figure out how to leverage a lot of what they've learned to apply to teaching and learning moving forward so that kids needs are met more effectively. And I think our Summer Institute is a popular way to make that happen. 


Zach: Yeah, that's absolutely right. So can you describe how Virtual Summer Institute will go this year? What can people who sign up for Virtual Summer Institute expect? 


Kareem: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, we have three sessions. They're all five weeks long. So one starts on May 16, one starts on June 13, and one starts on July 11. And you have to sign up for these multiple weeks in advance. And some of them may fill up. But those are those five week sessions where you will travel through the mentorship program. You'll get paired with a mentor, someone like you, Zach, and you will tackle those five core assignments of building mastery checks, creating instructional videos, designing a self pacing plan and learning design plan and replicating that so you really feel confident in launching your own modern classroom the following school year. In addition to that, I think what makes Virtual Summer Institute different from the school year experience is there's just more collaboration opportunities. The reason why, again, is because folks are just fundamentally more available. Right. Like we can't expect or create the spaces for a ton of collaboration during the school year because it's one thing to tackle the Virtual Mentorship program and work with your mentor. It's another thing to show up to a bunch of synchronous sessions. So during the summer, we offer more synchronous opportunities to collaborate. So there's weekly discussion groups, there's workshops. It just creates a space where folks can opt in and out of really cool opportunities to collaborate with other educators learning the model and mentors who have been experts in this approach. So Summer Institute is truly that kind of self paced, asynchronous learning environment that we love to cultivate for kids. And I think what's different about the school year experience in the summer experience is it emulates the classroom even more because as we often talk about in the virtual mentorship program, in our online course materials, in our videos, is we want to create a healthy balance of collaboration and then the opportunity to learn things at your own pace. And I think the Summer Institute really kind of doubles down on the opportunity to collaborate with other educators, which I think is pretty cool. So that's the structure. And like I said, folks can register in a variety of ways. The majority of educators end up coming through school and district partnerships where schools and districts enroll large cohorts of teachers. But tons of educators come in through novel ways that can be just individual enrollments, which usually they're asking their principal or their district to reimburse them. And then there's some cool other structures like scholarships that we have for educators as well. I can share now there's actually a few scholarships available to folks that are regional. I've had a lot of folks ask, when are you going to come to our region? Because a lot of these are regional scholarships. And the answer is I'm trying my best to find an opportunity to get some funding to be able to offer scholarships in these regions. So just so every listener knows, when we're able to offer scholarships in regions, it's because we're able to get funding to be able to support educators. We are a nonprofit, so ultimately, we need to be able to get some funding to be able to provide those scholarships. So the regions that I will state right now where we have scholarships are just areas where we've been able to secure philanthropic support, to be able to fund teachers journey through the program and folks can apply. So we have a scholarship available to any teacher in Chicago, to any teacher across the state of Connecticut, to any teacher across the state of Indiana, to any teacher in the city of New York, to any teacher in the Seattle Metro area, to any teacher in Tulsa County, to any teacher in the Twin Cities, and to any teacher in Washington, DC. So if you're a listener in one of those communities, in addition to the opportunity to enroll, generally, you can actually apply for these scholarships. And they're all on our website. And the first deadline for these is April 11. So if you are interested, I encourage you to apply ASAP and you can get a seat into our Summer Institute. 


Zach: Yeah. And I have a lot of this information I'll be putting in the show notes, so you can always check the podcast show notes as well. Kareem, I want to highlight something that you mentioned. My experience last year as a mentor during the Summer Institute, the collaboration with other educators. And you said this, that it's because we're free, we're all available. I had many Zoom calls with my mentees, which is something, and they came to office hours. I was one of the expert mentors who held office hours. And so my mentees would come to my office hours and we would talk a lot more. And I don't mean to throw any shade at my current mentees who were emailing and commenting back and forth in the feedback journals. And it's great. It's how the school year cohorts feel. But I'm teaching and my mentees are teaching like we're full-time teachers, so that isn't something that we can do during the school year. But during the summer, if we're all just sort of at home or at the beach, we can hop on Zoom calls and talk to each other. It was very different. And I think that that is one of the perks of the Virtual Summer Institute is that because teachers are just generally more free over the summer, that collaboration between mentor and mentee can happen. And so that, I think, is really just to highlight what you said about collaboration and that sense of community during the Summer Institute with other teachers, other educators who are doing the program. I think that's something that's really cool about Summer Institute. 


Kareem: I totally agree. And that's something we're trying to double down on this year. So one of the things we're very careful about, and I've probably said this before in the podcast, is the organization is built by teachers, for teachers. I often say that Rob and I were probably one of the grumpier PD participants when we were educators because we just really wanted our PD to be actionable that allowed us to really create the systems, the structures, the resources, the strategies that were going to impact our classrooms and not be theory-based. So one of the things we are very delicate about is not wasting teacher time. So we are doubling down this year. I'm just creating the spaces that allow for collaboration. It's not like you as an educator, have to be going to these sessions always, but making sure that we have an avenue for that because people are thirsty for it is really critical. So I think you're totally right. You're obviously a mentor. You probably know this better than I do. The difference between school year and summer kind of mentorship experiences, and what we see is that folks can thrive and do incredible work during the school year and love the school year mentoring program. But other folks really love the summer program for the reasons that we just described. So we hope it's going to be a pretty big summer this year. And if you're listening and you're interested, certainly check it out. 


Zach: Yeah. I'm curious what you would advise to teachers who have kind of already started implementing the model, what they should be doing over the summer, I mean, apart from enrolling in the summer Institute, if they haven't already done the mentorship program. But how else can teachers who have already sort of tried the model out, approach the summer and prepare for the following school year. What do you think? 


Kareem: Yeah, I don't think anyone's ever done innovating. Yeah. I get the absolutely ridiculous privilege of getting to watch classroom after classroom. I was in Dallas and New Haven last week just alone, watching Modern Classrooms in action. And what I'm always shocked by is how every single time I do a site visit and watch classrooms, I learn something new about the model. And that's from being able to watch literally hundreds of Modern Classrooms. So I think the best part about the summer is, regardless of whether you're planning to launch the model in full for the first time, like you've been thinking about it and now it's time, or you've been doing most of it and you're going to tighten it up, or you've been doing the model for a long time and summer is around the corner. It's just an incredibly powerful time to look at what you did and tweak it. And I actually think it's a whole lot easier to tweak a Modern Classroom than it is to tweak a more traditional classroom, largely because you've created an unbelievable learning management system that is filled with your resources and content. So unlike teaching traditionally, where I feel like if I try to look back on what I did October 20th on a Tuesday to teach lesson four of a unit, my memory of that is limited. Right. I don't necessarily know what happened. I have the worksheets. I maybe have a slide deck that I used to try to present during a lecture, but it feels pretty distant. That's not the case with Modern Classrooms. You have really healthy data to tell you how a particular unit or lesson played out. You have all the resources in one place. You have it organized in a structure so you can go back and say, “hey, do I want to remake this lesson? Do I want to adjust it a little bit? Do you want to tweak it? Do I want to reorganize my LMS a little bit? Because I felt like kids got confused at the spot. Do I want to tighten up my classroom structure and some of my routines, because right now kids are having trouble and there seems to be a couple of bottlenecks here and there,” or “hey, I don't feel like I did enough PBL this year. So I'm going to turn unit four into a project based learning unit because I haven't baked that in enough.” Or “hey, I think it's time for me to start baking an inquiry more effectively into my lessons. I'd like to try some lessons where the video doesn't come first, but instead they're doing some open ended tasks.” Or “hey, I want to make collaboration even bigger and better this year. So I'm going to add in these systems and structures.” So I think there's some really awesome tweaking you can do with just like the literal coursework. But then there's some really cool tweaks you can make to the organizational structure of your classroom. And I just think, unlike when you teach traditionally, I feel like when you arrive at the summer, everything kind of feels gray. It's like, “oh, that was a whirlwind. Now it's June.” That's not how it is in the Modern Classrooms structure. Right. You make it to June and you have a very coherent picture of what happened, and you can do some really healthy reflection and adjustments moving forward. So I think it just creates the space to make, quote, unquote “improvements” to your learning environment much more efficiently and effectively. Curious if you agree with that, Zach, by the way, I mean, I'm saying this, that was my experience, but you're doing it as we speak. So I'm curious if you kind of digest it similarly. 


Zach: I absolutely do agree. Yeah, I remember you made me think I still do this, but when I was teaching traditionally, I would always keep a little journal of, like, how lessons went. It was an IB thing. I teach at an IB school. And so I would have to put reflections in my units. But I like to do that anyway. But I would get to the summer or I would get to the following school year to replan that unit again. And I would look in the journal and it would say, like, “October 10: students did not understand the ruler.” And I'm like, what does that mean? What was I trying to say? Like, what did my students not understand and what did I do wrong? And so now it's like I can look at the lessons that my students most needed to revise. I can look at the lessons my students got stuck on, and that is actionable data to me now. I've done it twice. Now, this is my third year teaching in a Modern Classroom. And so I've had two summers between my Modern Classrooms. And so my reflections now are so much more specific. I look at it and it's like unit three, lesson two wasn't clear. And so I go in and I look at it, what the lesson was and I'm like, oh, I see. It was this I remember because I still take those little notes, and it's just like it's much clearer to me what I need to revise and what I can leave alone. And you also mention this, but all of the stuff is still right there on my LMS. If you look at my LMS now, it still shows everything from the entire school year. It just gets pushed down as I post new things, as I post new units. And so that is also a little sort of footprint of what happened during the school year. I can see what students submitted, what lessons. I can see all of the comments that I left on their assignments when they had to revise things. I don't spend that much time reviewing all of this. But when I need to, it is there. And so I'll go and I'll look at that. If I see that journal entry and it's like I don't understand what I was trying to say my students didn't get. I'll just go and look at some of the ones from last year. They're archived and they're all on that Google classroom from last year. And I can see my comments that I was leaving. And you know what I will do if a lot of students are making the same mistake is just make a little text snippet. I use a little text expansion program to automate my snippets. And so if they all have the exact same comment, I'm like, okay, that's what the problem was. I need to teach that in the video. I think maybe I was assuming that they knew that or something. And so, yeah, the data is there to make these changes as opposed to just trying to remember how did lesson three go in unit two? It was October. I don't remember that now. I don't remember it in November. The school year just sort of sweeps you up and you get caught up in everything that happens. And it's hard to look back at how things went and make changes. But yeah, having that data, having the data on who did what, having the data on which lessons were hard, that's really useful and helps to plan over the summer. 


Kareem: Totally cannot agree more. 


Zach: I guess I also want to add, like, the teachers who are now trying out components of the model can tweak their implementation of the model as well. It doesn't have to just be about your content, right? You can think now and you can take notes on this. My students don't seem like they're motivated, so maybe I have to have more of a sense of urgency in the classroom around the pacing tracker. Maybe I could have a five minute routine at the beginning of every class where we silently watch videos or something like that. And this year you might struggle to roll that out, but next year we talked about this before. That can just be how your class is from the get go. The implementation of the model is also something that you can sort of adjust over the summer and use the summer to work that out and start the school year off strong. 


Kareem: Totally. I mean, the reality is when you arrive at the summer, it gives a very clear and identifiable opportunity to spend some time seriously reflecting on the shifts you want to make and also spend some time doubling down on the things that you saw worked, but you didn't have time to bake into every single unit. And I think that's what so many of the fabulous educators like yourself who are really good at this model do is figure out what your strengths are and make sure that you double down on them and make them even better and then figure out where there are weak points and try to plug those holes. And I think it's such a cool time to make that happen. And there's a really identifiable way to do it in the summer with a modern classroom. 


Zach: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'm very excited for the summer, and obviously I'm excited for the summer. I'm ready for the summer. But yeah, I'm really excited for the modern classrooms stuff that's happening this summer. 


Kareem: Us, too, certainly. Us, too. 


Zach: Yeah. I'm very excited to be a part of it. Well, before we sign off, Kareem, there are a couple of things that we wanted to just shout out real quick here on the podcast so that listeners knew about them not relating to summer necessarily, but just a couple of little updates from modern classrooms. There's this discover.modernclassrooms.org page that I just learned about today. Can you tell us more about this? It's very cool and it's in the show notes. But can you tell us more about it? 


Kareem: Yeah. I mean, I think in simple terms, it's like a Free Course Light. And when I say light, I mean like light, light. But what we found is people want to know what it's like to see a Modern Classroom, but in much like, quicker, simpler terms, like what is it actually like to see an example of a high school classroom or an engineering classroom? And we've always had our exemplar units and then we've had our full course. But this is like a miniature version of it. And we call it Modern Classrooms at a Glance. So you can pop in and see kindergarten classrooms and elementary classrooms and middle school classrooms and high school classrooms and just get a flavor of what these things look like in really simple ways. And we'll constantly be adding to this and improving it. But these are real teachers just kind of telling their story in this bite sized journey. You can pop in there and spend all of five minutes and you just get a flavor for what some of these educators are doing in their classrooms. And it's super cool. It's called Modern Classrooms at a Glance. When you get to the page, it's at discover.Modernclassrooms.org. I think this is going to be a piece of our work that we continue to expand on and strengthen and accelerate. But I think it's pretty cool. 


Zach: Yeah. Longtime listeners of the podcast will recognize a lot of these teachers.


Kareem: Definitely. 


Zach: I mean, actually not their faces, I guess, because we're an audio podcast. Right. But they'll remember those names. Yeah. I see. I'm in here and this is my old exemplar unit. I'm going to have to get Rob a new unit because this is my old I love it. Yeah. But no, this is very, very cool. This is very cool. And I'm clicking through it right now. I have not yet gotten to the end. There is a lot of really cool stuff here, and a lot of really cool little pull quotes from teachers talking about how they implement Modern Classrooms and also some resources, too. So very cool. We have a couple of other little things just related to the podcast, too, to let the listeners know about. I'm going to start adding these to the show notes, and they've been tweeted out, and they've also been sent out in the Slack group, and I believe also on Facebook. But Modern Classrooms Director of Marketing and Community Engagement Samantha has started writing up podcast recaps that she posts on the Modern Classroom's blog. And these recaps, they're unreal. She has put so much amazing work into these. I look at this, and because I edit these podcasts, I've always kind of felt like I was the one who listened to them the most closely. But I no longer think that. Samantha has put in so much detail and she's linked so many resources. This is really incredible. I'm going to link them in the podcast Show Notes, but not right away, because she has to obviously hear the episode first. So they'll be linked in the Show Notes a couple of days after the episodes post. And I'm going to link a couple of them from previous episodes. I'm looking at the Q and A from last month right now, just incredible, incredible blog posts that recap the podcast episode. And you can listen to it and just more links, more stuff to explore. And it's really a very cool way of engaging with the podcast. So that's very cool. And another thing that Samantha is doing for the podcast is developing transcripts. So you can read the podcast now, if you go to the podcast website, Podcast.Modernclassroom.org/80, in this case, you can click on the little transcript button and you can read the episode. Again, this is going to come out a few days after the episode publishes because it has to be transcribed. But that's another resource that we're putting out there just to increase accessibility with the podcast, maybe. So you can search through the podcasts if you want, but very cool. They're out there. You'll see it on the podcast recap sites, too. In the little player podcast player, there's a transcript button. So a couple of little updates from the podcast. These recaps and the transcripts are very cool. And I'm immensely grateful to Samantha for putting this stuff together because it's just very, very cool. And I think that that about covers it for tonight's episode. Kareem, thank you for joining me. And thank you for your insight on the summer and the updates on Virtual Summer Institute. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. 


Kareem: It is always a blast. And thank you, Zach, for holding it down and continuing to host this. I continue to hear from educators in all of our kind of communities just how much they enjoy this podcast. So it's an honor to be on and to all the other educators out there, we're recording this in March. I know it's been a really tough year. You've almost made it this summer and hopefully this summer is an incredibly relaxing one where you really can reenergize and potentially think a little bit about how you can tweak your classroom or if you're new to the model, think about how you can design it for a wonderful launch in the fall. So thanks for having me, Zach absolutely.


Zach: Listeners, remember, you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org and you can find the show notes for this episode. We talked about a whole lot of stuff and there's a lot of information like dates and things like that that you can see in the show notes at podcast.modernclassrooms.org/80, which is this episode. You can also read that recap in a couple of days on the Modern Classrooms blog and we'll have the transcript up there as well. 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.