Participant #1:
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. Podcast. 


Hello, and welcome to episode 122 of the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. My name is Toni Rose Deanon, she/they pronouns, a community engagement manager here at MCP, and I am joined today by campus principal who has implemented MCP schoolwide, Crystal Deaver. She/her pronouns. Welcome, Crystal. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's so exciting to be in this space with you. I know one of our VP spoke really highly of you, and so I just had to get you on the podcast. So thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast. And before we get started, how are you feeling today? I feel great. It is a brisk day here in Texas, and it's a beautiful day. I'm excited to be here. Oh, I always love that. I didn't know that it could be brisk in Texas, so that's good to know. It rarely is, so when we actually get to drink a hot tea, we get really excited down here. So it's a beautiful day. That's actually what I'm doing right now is drinking hot tea because here in Olympia, Washington, it's really chilly. So beautiful. 


Okay, well, tell us more about who you are and how you started your MCP journey. Okay, so I am in my 13th year in education. I spent three years in the classroom as a physics and chemistry teacher at the high school level before I moved into instructional coaching, where I did that for a couple of years at a very large district in the DFW Metroplex in Texas. Then, let's see, after I was an instructional coach, I was an assistant principal for five years. And right at the beginning of the Pandemic, in February, March, I guess it was, of 2020, the job as game development design school principal opened up in Burleson ISD, which is the district I work in in Texas. And so I applied for that position and was hired the summer of 2020. So that's a little bit about myself and my journey with Modern Classrooms Project. So within a few months of being a first year principal, during what we now know was the beginning of the Pandemic, I was tasked with designing a building. So our school board purchased a building that was already at that time, it was a church, and they wanted to remodel it into my school, into a new campus for us. So I was tasked with how are we going to fit the students in this building? What is the best way to really get the original vision of this campus was to be a blended, self paced learning school. And they said, how are we going to do this? And I said, that is a great question. I have no idea. I said, Give me two weeks, I'll have an answer. So I went to Google Scholar, actually, and started researching blended, self paced learning, mastery based learning, just looking through all the different aspects of what our campus original vision was supposed to be. And I came across the Johns Hopkins the School of Education research that was conducted in correlation or with the Modern Classrooms Projectt. And I started doing some digging right through this research, and I thought, okay, this is something I could probably present to a professional board of trustees and my superintendent and say, this is what we're going to do, and here's the research to back it. So I went online, found the Modern Classrooms Project. I took the free online course first just to experience a glimpse into what this could look like for my campus. I then submitted a request, like, if you would like to speak to somebody more about Modern Classrooms Project, please submit a request here. So I typed in there. I don't even know if this is possible, but I need this to be a campus wide endeavor. Is there anybody I can talk to about this? And a week later, I found myself on a zoom call with Mr. Cream Farah. And I guess the rest is history, I think is what they say. And that's kind of how I started my Modern Classrooms Project endeavor, if you will. Journey. I love all of that. I mean, you've been in education for a long time, which is really exciting, and it seems like it was just a natural move, right? So you are in the classroom for 13 years, and I really love that, especially when school leaders have been in the classroom for that long because they kind of got in the trenches, right? I was definitely one of those teachers. Crystal not even going to lie that I was like, whenever I had a new AP or principal, I'd be like, how long were you in the classroom? So I know for me, I was like, I have to be if I wanted to move up, right, I have to be in the classroom for at least ten years. Which is why I'm like, no one says I had to do that, but because I was definitely one of those teachers, I was like, for me, for my sake, I would be in the classroom for at least ten years. Yeah. As a classroom teacher and then an instructional coach. And then I spent a lot of time as an assistant principal, which five years doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're an assistant principal, it seems like a lot. Those are the trenches. That assistant principal role in navigating instructional leadership with whole campus change initiatives, if you will, those are the training grounds for the principal role and so I cherish those years leading up to my principal ship, and I don't think I would change anything about them. They were rough, some of them were rough, but


Participant #1:
I learned a lot. And at the end of the day, I can look back and say, kids where I am, kids are better because I'm there. And that's the kind of leader I want to be. I love that. Was this something that you aspired to be a principal, or was it just kind of naturally happened? Well, actually, I had an assistant principal when I was in the classroom. Say, people like to follow you. Have you thought about being an administrator? And I didn't at the time. I didn't really think I was young. I was early twenty s. I thought, no, that's crazy. No one's going to follow me. This is nonsense. But I stopped using that self doubt to talk and said, actually, yeah, I think I could get people to believe in the right things and convince people what is right for kids and how we should do things and systems and process oriented. I'm a very strategic thinker. And when I really gave myself that credit, I said, yeah, I'm going to go for this. Talk to my very new husband and said, I want to get my master's degree. He said, go for it. So it kind of evolved from a compliment, believe it or not. It evolved from a compliment. Yeah. It only takes, honestly, that one person to change the trajectory of your life, right. It could either be a compliment or an action or something that inspired you. But that's such a lovely story, so thank you for sharing. That another thing that I think this is a first for me anyway, that someone found us through Google Scholar. It's always been like another podcast or like a teacher, but I love the fact that you went on Google Scholar and found us, so yay. I'm so grateful for Google Scholar. I just need something research based. I don't want a quick fix. A gimmick is not going to work. I needed something that was research based that I could present to educated educators, if you will, and say, listen, this is the evidence we have that this has worked before. I know the talent that my team has. I know the abilities that we have. We can do this. We just need to get our feet underneath us and get some support and some mentorship and some training, and then we're going to take this where it should have always have been. Just never had the opportunity to get there with things that had happened before I arrived. Sometimes leadership turnover can be hard on a campus, or it was a school within a school, and then it turned into its own school. There's just a lot of transition those first few years that our campus existed. And so really being able to establish our vision and find our groove and having that vision come to fruition has been rewarding. Yeah, I can attest to the whole transition thing. It is really challenging, but definitely establishing the vision and just sharing that out and being as transparent as possible, it's just so impactful for teachers. All right, Crystal, let's talk about your school. Game development design school. Tell us more about that. That just sounds so fascinating. Yes. Okay, so the Game Development Design School, we're in Burlington ISD that is a school of choice. So it's a public independent school district in Texas. And the school of choice means that students can apply to Come Here. It is a lottery based system. Great. So very interesting thing about my school is it is actually grade six to twelve. I have my first graduating class in the spring of 2023. So in like five short months, I'm graduating our first inaugural class of seniors. We're so excited. It's such a milestone for our campus. So Burleson ISD so Burleson is a suburb in Dallas Fort Worth area of Texas, and we're grade six to twelve school, like I just discussed. So the name Game Development Design, our focus here is on video game programming. So we teach students how to code and program video games because that level of difficulty, that rigor encoding, can translate to multiple careers, whether it's job in banking, security, firewall protection, ethical hacking. There's all sorts of things that our kids can learn from the coding that we teach them, because video game programming is such a complex style of programming. They say if you can code a video game, you can code anything. And so we thought, why not tap into student interest and the highest level of rigor that you can have in a subject like coding? And so that's the first part of our name. Then the design part is we focus on video game and graphic designs. Our students start taking high school credit classes in 7th grade, so they take high school credit classes starting in 7th grade in their computer science courses. And that goes all the way up through their senior year. Our students graduate with industry based certifications in graphic design. So Adobe Photoshop and as well as the coding aspect of Python, which is the coding language we use, we students graduate with a normal high school foundation program with a distinguished level of achievement in Texas. That's kind of our standard graduation diploma, if you will. And we started the full implementation of the Modern Classrooms model in the 21 22 school year. So that was all core and elective teachers implementing the model. That's really cool, Crystal. I'm like writing down all the notes because I don't think I've heard of a school like this before. And so this is just really fascinating. I know that I have a brother who's really into video games, and this would be something that he probably would have chosen to go to if he had the chance. So I'm really glad that you all were able to create a space like this. Is there a huge ask for video game programming around your area? So it's actually almost small town is where our school is located. This is very cutting edge for our district and even the surrounding district. There are like CTE schools, career technology education schools all around. Ours is the only one that we have found. And I have reached and I've looked and I have searched. I have Google Scholar, I have done all the things. Our school is the only one that we have found. With this level of focus on game development and design, we are still growing our school. We're not at capacity yet. We are hoping to get there in the next couple of years. I think we'll be at capacity of about 500 students. Wow, this is just so cool. I mean, like 7th grade, they're already taking computer science courses. They're doing like Adobe and Python. This is just so fascinating. I'm sure a lot of our listeners who are computer science teachers are going to just be so thrilled to hear about this. So this is quite exciting and I definitely don't know anything about it, so coding is so scary to me, but I understand the importance of it awesome. Yeah, it's a different world. The coding world is a very different world. But that's also one of the reasons we chose Modern Costumes Project as our instructional model, is students that are going to grow up and potentially become coders. Right. These are independent workers sometimes who they can work in a group, they can be collaborative. It's independent. It's oftentimes self paced. You just have a deadline. Like, I need this project by this date. And so our students are learning how to manage their time, how to organize themselves in an efficient and effective manner, and how to ensure that they are achieving what they're supposed to be achieving at their own pace. That was such an important component to why our vision is what it is. It's because our future careers of our students depend on their ability to build that at a young age. And so that's why we kind of ran with those tenants of our school. Blended, self paced learning, mastery based learning. And that's why we selected MCP as our model. Okay, so let's dive deeper into this, right? I mean, this is really rad that you're able to implement it campus wide. So we typically get a lot of questions from educators and how to get their colleagues and school leaders invested in creating a blended learning, self paced, mastery based learning environment. Right? And something for you as a school leader. You did your research, you went through our free course, which is really fascinating and great. I love it when school leaders do that. And so tell us how you were able to go campus wide with implementing the model. What are some tips on how to expand MCP within a school content or grade level. What could you tell our listeners on how to get it going in their school or their campuses? So the first thing we did is thought about how we were going to strategically roll this out to We know we want blended, self paced learning. We know we need mastery based grading and learning implementation to be effective at our campus. I found this research based model. I want you all to take some time and go through the free online course that they offer, and then let's come back and talk about it. I know you're going to have a lot of questions. I want you to go through the course. Let's come back, write all your questions down, let's address them as a group, and let's determine if what we're going to do next. So they went out. I gave him a couple of weeks. It's just a few hours long, the courses, but teacher time is precious. And so I gave him a couple of weeks to do that. We reconvened and we said, okay. They said, yes, we want to do this. Here are the questions that we have. I said, we can work through this because the questions you have are the questions that your departments are going to have and your other teachers and other leaders on our campus. So we then went through all the questions. We came up with action steps to address concerns. We came up with ways to celebrate successes. We kind of just outlined what we were going to do to support everyone in this endeavor. After we did that, we called a campus PD, and we shared this Vision of Modern Classrooms Project. Not just our vision, but how it tied to our vision, how blended, self paced learning worked, what did mastery based grading and learning look like, what we were going to do as a campus and when we were going to start. So we basically had a strategic roll out. There were four opportunities for the mentorship program to take place. So the first one was early spring of 2021. And what I did was I personally went to specific teachers that I knew had influence in the school, and that was my Guiding Coalition, essentially. So my five teachers and Guiding Coalition, and just to share who was on that it was a representative team lead, if you will, from English, Social Studies, Math, science, and then my coding, one of my coding teachers was on my guiding coalition. She represented coding and electives. So all those five teachers, and then I picked two other teachers who are not on my guiding coalition, but had a strong voice within my school, and I wanted to encourage them to take a risk and give it a shot, if you will. So those are the first seven teachers I took into the initial mentorship program. When those teachers went through the initial mentorship program, what I found was my goal, and it happened, is to essentially light that fire, start that discussion. I knew that this could be a wildfire. I just had to get the right pieces ignited in order to start the fire. They started implementing little pieces of it in their classes, which got kids excited about their classes, and they were going to other teachers and talking to them about what was exciting. And Mr. So and So's class, he's doing this really cool thing online now. And so then that teacher is saying, hey, I want to get in the next group. I want to go into the next round. So the late spring of 2021, we had the second round, and these are the teachers who maybe were a little more hesitant at first, but trying to dip their toe in the water. So I had eight teachers come in that second round, and so that was essentially a little over half of my staff at the time. They went to the mentorship program in Modern Classrooms Project, and now I had a cohorts. I had cohorts of people. Cohort one, cohort two, cohorts three and four were cohort. Three was the teachers who did not want to do it during the school year. Some of them were just overwhelmed. Some of them were first year teachers that were finishing up alternative certification programs and things like that, and they just didn't have the time to invest. So that third cohort went through at the beginning of summer in the 2021 year. And then that fourth cohort, I reserved all the spots in that fourth cohort for teachers who I were new to the campus and that I was hiring over the summer. And so really trying to be strategic with how who you pick to go into each level, when you're going to roll it out, who you're going to pick. I knew I had to get a group in at the beginning of spring, because if I waited until after spring break, that summer was going to be calling their name more than trying something new at the last two months of school. And so we really worked on strategically putting that process and system into place to get teachers involved and making sure that I had supporters before we went to the whole school. If my guiding coalition would have said absolutely not, we wouldn't be here today. But because I had their support, they understood the importance of it and I had their buy in. I was able to roll that out to the whole entire campus. I mean, you did a lot of really great things here, Crystal. Right. So there's that whole trust of having this guiding coalition and knowing that you trusted them enough to go through what you were trying to propose and then asking for their opinions. Right. And so I know as an educator, I really hated it when decisions were being made for us and we weren't part of that group, right. We weren't part of like nobody asked for our opinions or thoughts of how this could the campus. And before I did anything campus wide, I have a core group of teachers. I call them the Guiding Coalition. And these are essentially the department heads, if you will, or team leads. There's so many different names for them. So my team leads, my department heads, they form, along with my assistant principal, counselor, testing coordinator, and myself, we form the Guiding Coalition for our school. And what I did was I first took this concept, this idea of modern classrooms project to the Guiding Coalition. I said, okay, we have established this vision for this school. impact our students learning environment or learning experiences. And so it seems like you've created this trust with your educators and then there's a lot of intentionality behind what you did. Right. Because, you know, as a school leader, it's not going to work if I don't have my teachers support behind. And so I love all the things that you stated, like, hey, just small pieces of the model, looking at the timing, it was just all, like you said, very strategic. And I just really love the fact that it seemed like there was a lot of relationship building as well. Right. You handpicked some of the teachers to go through the mentorship program because you saw them and you valued them and you acknowledge the fact that they had a strong voice in the school. And so this is all so great and I love it. And so I know with our listeners and our educators who are asking, maybe taking a step back and seeing like, hey, who has the biggest impact and who has strong opinions about things around the school and getting them to really see the impacts of this model. So I love that you had already manifested the fact that it was like, oh, I know that this is going to light a fire. I knew this was going to be a wildfire, actually. And you did it so beautifully. And I love that the last Cohort was reserved for new teachers. You really did think of, I feel like pretty much everything. It took a lot of time and thought and energy. It's prep heavy, it's plan heavy. But whenever we started rolling, we were rolling. There's no other way. It's not a better, more eloquent way to say that I don't believe once it started going and one teacher tackled one, and then they started working together and then they were creating these little Cohort PLCs that were meeting and helping each other and hey, I'm struggling with this. What are you doing? Okay. I think one of the biggest parts and the biggest learnings I had moments of that that was really important is just to admit that this was new for all of us. I wasn't a modern classroom project teacher. I did not implement this in my classroom when I was a teacher. So there were things I didn't have an answer to. And I think that's why the mentorship was so important. I didn't have an answer for it. Listen, I will go over the Internet. I will find an answer. I will help you. I will come. I will watch. I'll give feedback. I'll do all the things that we're supposed to do as instructional leaders, but it's okay to say, I don't know, but we're going to figure this out together. And that's really how we just tackled this as a campus, was, we're going to learn through this together, and kids are going to be better for it. And that's such a nice reminder, right, that we actually don't know everything and it's okay to ask for help. Yes, absolutely. And again, I really love the fact that you acknowledge the fact that this is new. This is new for all of us. So we're going to learn together. And that's kind of how I rolled it out with my students as well. This is a brand new way of teaching and learning, and so bear with me. We're going to learn together. We're going to make some mistakes. And my students embraced it. And I feel like if you had the same approach with educators, that is actually a lot nicer right. Than like, okay, well, you have to do this, and you have to be blank and blank about it. And so I think, Crystal, I hope that you're patting yourself on the back, because it seemed like you've created a space where educators are allowed to make mistakes and try something new and learn new things together. So that makes my heart so happy. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Yeah. Okay. So you talked about your process with going campus wide, which is, again, really great. Thank you for sharing that. What are some challenges, one or two challenges that came up for you when you were introducing implementing the model? I think the initial biggest challenge was accepting the fact that not everybody wanted to do it. There were some teachers, and it was actually very few in the grand scheme. I think the most important and the challenge I had faced there, and a lesson I learned from it also, is I I did lose two or three really good teachers who did not want to adopt the new model to other schools within our district. And while that was a challenge, I think it was something that it was a necessary part of this process. Not everybody wants to change things. We had some teachers, maybe that were closer to retirement age. I have been doing it this way for so long. I don't want to change it. And that was a hard step. It feels like failure when someone doesn't want to come along with the new programming that you're going to implement. And I think I just had to learn that it wasn't a failure on my end. It was just part of the process. And so that was a really big challenge, feeling like people were abandoning you as a leader, but I had to really just take time and just understand where they were coming from and that this was not a personal decision, that this was an instructional decision that they needed to make for themselves. So that was one part of it, and it was actually very few teachers that chose not to come along for the journey. Another challenge that I faced was, it just takes time. And I think we as leaders, when we want something done, we want it done immediately. We want implementation immediately. We want it to be correct. We want things to be perfect. And that's just not the case. It takes time to implement something new. It takes time to get really good at something new. And trusting the process might not be my strongest characteristic. And so I had to multiple times tell myself, the research shows that this works. You're doing good. Your teachers are doing well. Your students are learning and growing. Trust the process. And so I think that was my biggest challenge, was just letting the journey take place and not rushing the results of that journey. Yeah, it sounds like you kind of had to relinquish all that control, right? Yeah. That's so scary to do as an educator. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right with trusting the process. And I love Crystal. This is just such all the gems that are coming out of your mouth. I'm like, I kind of look, you want to work with Crystal? It's really fun. I looked at my assistant principal more than once that first year, and I said, I don't know. I don't know if we did the right thing. I might have messed up. She said no. Stop. Breathe. So that control. I mean, there's a reason leaders are leaders is we like control. That is part of the fabric that I am built from is I enjoy being in control but understanding to balance that control when to make decisions when to collaboratively come to decision making those understanding the nuances of the leadership and trusting the decisions that are made using the data to support those decisions and just continually developing teachers and developing yourself to develop them, if you will. It's a very cyclical process, and it's something that we're still working on to this day. We're in year two of implementation, and my team, we learned something this last week about specific software program that we're using that is kind of changing the game for us. And we're like, Whoa, hold on, let's stop. How can we rework this? How can we use this better? And so it's understanding that we are lifelong learners, and it's okay to learn as you go. You don't have to have all the answers to start. Yeah. And something. I learned, too, as an educator, is there's really not such a thing as an instant gratification. And that's something we want all the time, right? And patience is definitely a virtue and something I'm working on consistently. And it also makes me think about how some educators are really hesitant because this is just a new initiative, right? And it made me think about how you were saying it takes time. And I think a lot of the times when we have a new initiative at a school where educators have to do something, there's not a lot of accountability and follow up. And because there's this expectation that's going to change everything within a year, and if it doesn't, they do away with it, right? And so I think that this is something that educators and school leaders just need to be reminded, is that things take time. It really does. We cannot change something overnight. We cannot change something this drastic anyway. Of course, you'll have like, little changes and little impacts all around. But definitely seeing being able to see the big picture and trusting the process and allowing the journey to happen is really important, like you say. So these are great reminders. Okay, so how do you support your educators to ensure they have time, energy and capacity to implement the model? Because you said in the beginning, right, this is a lot of work, it's front loading, it's a lot of planning. And I know that sometimes some educators who come across our model are just like, whoa, wait a minute, that's too much work. I cannot do that or I don't have the capacity and the energy to do that right now. So how do you, as a school leader, support your educators to make sure that they feel supported and that they feel like they have enough time to do what they need to do? So I think as educators and I'm putting myself in that because I think whether any level of educator title that you have, you will always be an educator. And so I think as educators, there's these proverbial plates that everybody talks about, that's one more thing on my plate. That's one more thing on my plate. And so my idea here was, if I'm going to add something, if you will, which if I'm changing the way we're looking at this plate, if I'm adding something to this plate, which is more planning and more prep heavy way of teaching and learning, then what am I going to take off the plate? And so one of the things I stopped doing was faculty meetings. I don't know the last time I had a faculty meeting. I just create little short videos. I do a blended learning style faculty meeting. And when I say short videos, it is the seven to nine minutes. And there's like a mastery check at the end for teachers to submit, essentially showing that they watch the video, they are responsible for the information within that video. And so that's my faculty meetings. Now they are able to watch them. I don't put them out that often, either one, every couple of months, if you will. But those monthly faculty meetings where you talk about things that then you spend another 30 minutes emailing back and forth, or another hour looking for the document that was in the faculty meeting that you don't have, we just stopped all of that. So we do. I modeled, you know, the Instructional Programming of Modern Classrooms project with the teachers, which energized me and taught me how to support them. So now, hey, what I learned was my iPad with Explain Everything on it was a lot easier to run a faculty meeting than Screencastify for the most part. So that's how I did mine. And then I was able to talk teachers through how to utilize those tools that had been purchased for them or already had. It's kind of a mixture. Some teachers already had them, some teachers did not. Another thing I did for time was we implemented like a twin teacher model. And so each teacher on our campus has a twin teacher that monitors that other teachers class. So teacher A and teacher B, if you will, teacher A and B are twin teachers. I give teacher B 3 hours of planning. So an entire morning off or an entire afternoon off every three weeks. That is something that I really, really push for this year. It has been a little less than that. It's been every like four to five weeks. Substitutes are not abundant, and a lot of our teachers have been ill between the flu and stomach bugs and all that stuff. So we've not had quite as many this year. However, when we first implemented the model, we really worked to get teachers extra planning time, working with those twin teachers. So you didn't need a sub to come in necessarily if it was just a twin teaching planning time. So they would essentially just monitor two classes at once using the blended learning model. You're not missing instruction if the teachers out of the classroom for that day. And you had a teacher that was assigned a twin teacher with them that could facilitate the learning, so the learning did not stop. That was really important. And then in order to build their capacity, whenever we do learning walks or we do online learning management systems, when we would go through the teacher's learning management system and look at their week video or their assignments and we looked for Rigor, the same things every school leader looks for in a classroom, which is is the Rigor there? Is it aligned to the standards? Is it engaging our students on tasks? So we kind of split that up into two parts. There's the part that you go in and look for in the classroom, and then there's the part of alignment and rigor and activities that you look for in the learning management system. So when I go through we, essentially I have model teachers for different aspects. So I might have a teacher that is doing a bang up job of organizing their learning management system. So what I do is I say, hey, your learning management system is looking fantastic. Your design conventions are on point. The way you named your folders, the way you've organized it, the way you've added access to parents so they can support their child and they're learning all these different aspects. Can you lead a model or model or leave a quick professional development roundtable after school one day and the next month of your choice, I'll give you an hour to plan it, or if sometimes I have money, I'll pay you to do it after school. And then I would invite some teachers that I saw struggling with that component and then have other teachers voluntarily show up if they wanted to. We would do that with learning management system design, blended learning videos, mastery grading. So looking at teachers gradebooks, like, which teacher is really tackling? Mastery based learning and understanding over completion, that's a big transition for teachers. And so who's doing that really well and who can stand up and deliver that to their peers? And that's how I helped build capacity and how I continue to build capacity on our campus. And you're definitely creating that space where teachers are learning from each other, right? You're giving them this kind of like a leadership role of like, hey, you're doing something really great, so you're acknowledging them and then you're elevating them, which I think is just what educators want, honestly. Right? And I think educators don't become educators for pay. Definitely not. And I think you've kind of captured it, right? They need time. Educators need time. And you've said this before that teacher time is really, really important. And so how did you come up with the twin teachers concept? Because I find that to be really fascinating. And also before you even answer that, Crystal, I also want to say, like, holy moly, faculty meetings. I hated faculty meetings. And the last school that I taught at, we had 15 minutes faculty meetings. And I love that. But now you're blowing my mind when you say like, no, we didn't have it. I just did the MCP model. They had a video, they had a mastery check, and we kept it moving. And I'm like, what a great and effective way to save time and really allow for teachers to use the time that they have to do what they need to do. So anyways, back to twin teachers. How did you come up with that concept? So what we used to found was we we just didn't have subs. And so even when a teacher was out for the day, like a teacher called in, a sub is not picking up. And I thought, okay, this is getting hairy because there's not a lot of I don't like support personnel on our campus. For example, there's me, one AP, a counselor and a testing coordinator. That is it. And so oftentimes if there's three teachers out and we didn't have coverage or a sub or whatever, my counselor is sitting in a classroom trying to help. My testing coordinator is being pulled. If it's testing season, my AP is being pulled, or I'm pulled, or we're rotating in and out of that area every day. Okay, I'll take the first 2 hours. I got a meeting, so and so you're going to have to come in. We're doing these like crazy, like hoops jumping through hoops. And it was for content that maybe we didn't know as much about as we should have to be helping these kids. Like I said, I was a physics and chemistry teacher. High school English is not my strong suit, to be honest with you. Somebody else is going to take that one. Today I'm going over to science. And so I thought, okay, there has to be a better way to where kids are not missing instruction. Because a teacher has to be out. And listen, teachers have to be out. I have teachers with little kids. I have young children of my own. There's times that being out is a necessary part of this job. And so I didn't want it to be punitive. I did not want it to be, well, if you want time, then you're going to have to put in time. But I think it's a culture of support is really what I was trying to create when I created this twin teacher. So I thought, we can figure out how the classes are small enough where a teacher is able to watch 40 kids if they are engaged in blended learning. And they're engaged, so they're not having the behavior issues that we've had. They're potentially there. And so it came as the necessity kind of drove the need for we've got to come up with a better system because we're missing meetings, we're covering classes. We're kind of the extra people on campus. I'm using extra in quotation, quotation marks running here because there's nobody extra. We just didn't have the coverage. And when I realized that teachers were able to cover each other and learning, not miss, not cease because the teacher was absent, I thought I did take it back to my guiding coalition and say, hey, I have this wild idea. What do you all think? I said, but I'm not the one doing the coverage, so I don't want to make this a thing. So if anybody wants to opt out, they can opt out. No one opted out. Everyone is willing to cover a second class for 3 hours if they get there. 3 hours. And so we just did this establish this teamwork culture that if one of us is going to be successful, then we're all going to be successful. And I think that's kind of how it developed is a wild idea based off of need. And again, nice. I'm speechless at this point because that is an initiative, right? Like, hey, if we're going to cover each other, I also get my planning time. I also get the time for myself to do what I need to do. And I think that's, like, the biggest thing about this model that I really loved is that I could go to conferences, I could be absent, and the learning continues. There's not an interruption. The students just pick up where they left off. And I think that that's just such a beautiful thing that, like, now it doesn't have to be that particular teacher in that room for learning to happen. So I love that. Okay, so, listeners, we're going to take a quick break for an announcement, and when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about Crystal's expertise and experiences. Hey, listeners, it's Tony Rose here with some announcements and reminders. If you and or your teacher bestie are interested in the virtual mentorship program, we do have scholarships available. Make sure to check out modern Classrooms.org scholarships. We have regional scholarships available for educators in Baltimore City, new York City, DC, chicago, Tulsa County, and the Twin Cities that include full tuition, a year of implementation support, and a $500 stipend for finishing the program. We are continuing our scholarship across the state of Indiana, which includes implementation support and 30 PGPs. Any educator in the state can enroll right now@modernclassrooms.org, Indiana. We also have partnerships with districts across the country who are paying for educators to go through our training. As for professional learning, make sure to check out our webinars page on Modernclassrooms.org webinars and to connect with our community. Join our Twitter chat on the first Wednesday of the month and our virtual meetup on the second Wednesday of the month, and we hope to connect with you outside of our podcast. All right, we're back with Crystal, and I can't wait to continue learning from you, Crystal. So how has this model impacted your school and educator mindset about education? So whenever I was I'm going to go back to my instructional coaching days because I think those were such a critical part of my journey to this point, we kind of lived off of the questions that every Plc should be asking. What questions should every single Plc ask? And it's, what do you want the students to know? How do you know if they know it? What are you going to do if they don't understand? And what are you going to do if they already got it? That's a very rudimentary version of the questions, but that's just how I remember. And so the blended learning model and the mastery based learning model in the self pacing, they answer all of those questions you're aspired to do. Your should do every single aspect of this model addresses those four questions. And if you can address those four questions in every classroom, every day, there is no way kids are not learning and growing. I am standing on that statement that it would be impossible if kids are learning at the rigor and the level in which they should be learning. If that teacher understands what those kids know and don't know, and then they address it appropriately, you have maximum growth taking place in the campus. And so that is how we have focused this model in our school. My mindset really was, this is not a change in what we're doing. This is how we are doing it. What we do is teach students. What we do is align ourselves to the standards of our state. What we do is align ourselves and make sure that students are assessed appropriately. All things that it doesn't matter what state you're in, what your standards are, those are just leadership. Those are just educational things that we do. But how we do that and understanding the intentionality of what we do every day and making things intentional and not habit, not doing things out of habit, my mindset has been changed from, well, this is what you're supposed to do in education, to this is why we're doing it in education. And I always said, if I could go back and get back in the classroom for a few more years, boy, the difference I can make now. I think I was a solid classroom teacher when I was there, but to this day, I think I should probably still go back and apologize to those kids, because I could do so much better knowing what I know now and then learning over the years. So our kids are learning, and that's what we're here for. Yes. Maximum growth. I really like that phrase. It is definitely the maximum growth that needs to happen. And again, it's all about our students, right? So I love that. So, okay, crystal, if you were to talk to school leaders who are hesitant about yet another initiative, what would you say to them about modern classrooms? I would say don't approach it as an initiative. I think when we approach things as an initiative and we kind of touched on this earlier in the episode, but we give ourselves these rudimentary or arbitrary timelines, like, okay, I'm going to give it three months. And if I don't see the growth in three months or I'm going to give it six months or one year. We do these weird things with initiatives, and I think we as leaders, specifically myself. And I thought when I went into this, like, you cannot cap this. You cannot put a timeline on this. You cannot restrict this. You just go in and understand that this is going to be a learning curve, and it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's okay to learn, it's okay to grow. If we're expecting that of our students. If we're expecting that of our teachers as leaders, it's okay to expect that of ourselves as well. And so I would tell them, don't approach it as initiative. Just approach it as the way things are done on your campus. The right people will find their place on your campus when it's just how things are done. Mike dropped. I literally just, like, dropped it. Pretend Mike. I was an English teacher. So it's funny when you said, oh, high school English. I'm not doing that. But also, just like, words are really powerful, right? And so there's just such a negative connotation when we think about the word initiative. And so I really love this whole don't call it an initiative. Just say, like, this is the learning and teaching practices that are going to happen in this specific school, and this is just how things are going to be done to max out student growth. Right? And I love that so much. Thank you. So we took the word initiative out of this podcast is the first time I've used the word initiative, I think, as it is associated with one of our costumes project. So it's very interesting that this was the question. We call ourselves educational revolutionaries on our campus, and we expect excellence from one another. Excellence should never be the exception, and it should just be the expectation. And so we hold each other to that standard. Myself, my teachers, my leadership team, every single person in my school understands how we learn and teach and learn here. My front office clerk, my tenants clerk, my administrative assistant, everyone, and my nurse, they understand that we are a blended learning model. We do self paced learning and we do mastery based learning. And those are the three tenets of this school. And if someone calls and asks you what any of those are, this is what they mean and this is what it looks like. And so there is no question about who we are. It's part of your identity. Whenever you adopt it and you really take it in, it's not something you do, it's who you are. And not like, changing, not like you got to chop your hair off and die at a crazy color. Nothing like that. But it's just part of who you are as a campus, and that identity matters to people. And whenever you're able to articulate it and develop a profile for the type of teachers that you need and want, when teachers leave, you know what kind of teacher you need to come in and be able to do this. Flexibility, understanding, a risk taker, all those different pieces, those are the people who build your school. And now whenever you get 30 of them together, it's a party. But it's just part of the initiative thing. It's not something that we talk about often, ever. I'm really glad that you pointed that out, too, because I wasn't even thinking. That our motto wasn't an initiative, but going into different schools and sitting at the table with school and district leaders, and they're just trying to figure out why educators are resistant to this model. And a lot of the times it comes up with, like, educators are tired of initiative. And so I'm like, that's a really interesting way to look at it. And so, again, thank you for shifting the language here, and you come up with the greatest title. I love the guiding coalition. I love the educational revolutionaries. Like, wow, I think I'm going to have to pick your brain for some titles that I'm also trying to come up with at modern classrooms. I think I adopted or stole or commandeered. I'm not really sure what the word there is, but the guiding coalition was another school in our district. One of their principals called their leadership team the guiding Coalition, and I liked it, and so I said, I don't even know what that means, but I'm taking it. I said, who's on it? And she just named a bunch of people. I said, okay, I got that team. I said, I called it my instructional leadership team, but that's real boring compared to guiding coalition. So we just changed the name of it over the years, instructional revolutionaries or educational revolutionaries. Sometimes you just have to get people pumped up to do something different and excited about change, and that's hard to do sometimes. And so that's why I just called it what it is. Like, guys, there's nobody else doing this. This is cutting edge. So there's also nobody that is a game development design school in Burleson ISD. So if we're going to be cutting edge, let's go all the way. So that's kind of where that evolved from. And just, again, just shifting all the different types of words have had negative connotation, right? Because I know, like, my therapist is, like, our thoughts the words that we use impact our thoughts. Our thoughts impact the way we do things. And so it's just like a cyclical order, right? Like a cyclical thing where it's like, okay, words really do have impact. So let's make some changes. Let's make some shifts so we can continue dismantling what we thought was the right quote, unquote, the right way. Right. And so I really appreciate that. Okay, crystal, what do you hope to see in the future, and what goals do you have? I think just to continue to revolutionize teaching and learning. I don't know what capacity that's going to be in. I want to change the way people view school and what that means for students and educators, whether that's in the principal role, assistant principal, superintendent, the private industry. I don't know about my future goals. I just want to continue to continue to make things great and to ensure my sphere of influence is for the positive of kids and teachers. I think that anywhere that you go, anywhere that we go as leaders can be impacted. Whatever space we're in can be impacted by our experiences. And if I can help teachers and help students, then that's where I want to be. Yes. And I just also wanted to kind of add on when you say you want people to view education differently, and that's not even just talking about the stakeholders. It's also talking about society in general because there's been a lot of people just talking down on the education system. Right. And rightfully so. There's a lot of things to fix, definitely. But also just like definitely welcoming in families and caregivers into that conversation as well. It's not just them being passive. This model really creates a more active type of learning for everyone involved, which I think is, again, a really beautiful thing about the model. Yes. I've had parents say, I never understood that in school until I watched a video that Mr. So and so or Miss so and so put out. And I was able to help my kid for the first time in four years on a math homework or math not homework, but math work. That matters to parents sometimes. I think parents parents don't get involved sometimes because of their lack of understanding of what we do. And if we can open up the door and bring them in and include them in the child's learning, there is nothing that harms I mean, that is so helpful to teachers, to the student. A parent couldn't help a kid for like, four years in a math problem. I mean, I get it whenever a kid hits a certain listen, whenever 7th, 8th grade English rolls around and where that comment belongs is not my strong suit, like, oh, boy, here we go. Let's see. Let me do a little googling, son, I can help you. But I think that inviting them in and also having people understand that the way we have done school, if you will, the way we do school, is not how it has to be done. I think it's just really important for policymakers representatives. I think it's important for the greater good of education. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. Right? I mean, it's definitely creating a more trusting relationship between all the stakeholders because everything is transparent now. Everything is out there. It's not like a hidden or a surprise thing, especially if you're creating a self paced learning environment. Right. And so I know that when I worked with when I taught my caregivers and families and parents were really excited to have this way of learning because they have access to what their kids are learning. And so they understand the teacher's personality. They understand how to sit there and learn with their kid, and it just creates a deeper connection with their students at home and a deeper connection with the teachers. Educators. Right. Because now there's like, okay, you're teaching me something new. I'm learning alongside my student. It's just such a beautiful cycle. And so Crystal, how can our listeners connect with you? I have had a few people reach out. Email is the best. I know that seems potentially antiquated.


Participant #1:
Email is the best way for anybody to connect with me. And then I have a group of teachers who are always willing to connect with other groups of teachers who are implementing this, learning this, what their experiences are. I have a fantastic staff, faculty and staff that are more than willing to jump out and assist however they can. So my email is the easiest and the best way to make sure I can get your listeners connected with me. Beautiful. And we'll have that in the Show Notes as well as social media as well. So you can kind of reach out however you are comfortable reaching out to Crystal. So, Crystal, thank you so much. I have loved hearing your stories and I'm so happy that we had an opportunity to be in the same space. You've definitely taught me a lot. So I'm going to go back into my little office and think about all the things you said. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast being here and sharing our experience as a campus and I hope somebody learned something today and or reaches out and asks a question or is interested. I'm happy to speak with anyone. Yay. So listeners, remember, you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org and you can find the Show Notes for this episode at podcast modernclassrooms.org 122. We'll have this episode's recap and transcript uploaded to the Modern Classrooms blog on Friday, so be sure to check there. Check back in the Show Notes for this episode if you'd like to access those. Thank you all for listening. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday.


Participant #1:
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 @modernclassproj that's PR OJ. 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.