Zach Diamond  0:00  
Hey there listeners. This is Zach, I just wanted to kind of welcome you to our mini summer season of the podcast here for 2023 will mostly be publishing previous episodes of the podcast that I'm cutting out highlights from. So this is the first of those episodes. This is actually a highlights from episode one of this podcast way back in 2021. The audio is different. There's no indoor outro it sounds different. But it's a great conversation between me and Kareem. I hope you enjoy it. I'm not going to do an intro like this for all of these episodes. But I do want to let you know the gameplan here, which is that I'm going to republish the shownotes for the original episode, but also include a link to that episode itself, if you want to hear the full episode after listening to this sort of highlight reel. And it'll be like that for the rest of the summer. So I really hope you enjoyed this one. I certainly enjoyed going back and getting to hear this conversation again. But in any case, let's go ahead and get into it. Hope you enjoy

Kareem Farah  1:10  
Hi, everyone, welcome to the Modern Classroom Project's first podcast. I am Kareem Farah, the co-founder and executive director of the Modern Classrooms Project and I'm here with Zach.

Zach Diamond  1:21  
Hey, Kareem. I am a Modern Classrooms fellow from the 2019 2020 school year, and I'm a music teacher at DC International School. So I guess the first question is, where this model comes from? And what sort of inspired you to create the model and what got you here, like in the first place where it is? It's a very different model from anything I've ever seen. And so I'm sort of curious as to like, where the genesis of the model comes from what inspired it?

Kareem Farah  1:52  
Yeah, it's good question. You know, we get that question fairly often. And when I think about the response, you know, whenever you sort of start something, you always want to be honest about what actually inspired it, because it's easy to kind of think through the timeline and come up with arbitrary time points. To me, I always tell folks that the model was birthed out of a problem. I was an educator alongside my co founder, Rob Barnett, we were both teaching at the same school, Eastern High School, here in the DC area. And we just fundamentally knew we weren't able to reach our students effectively. And I always tell folks, it's not like admin was telling me I wasn't reaching my students, there wasn't like, you know, some specific test that told me I was reaching my students, we were teaching in a high need environment, proficiency rates were fairly low, huge diversity of learning levels, and our students are experiencing a ton of trauma. And when we stood in front of the room and tried to lecture, it was almost comically bad, how effective we were at meeting our students needs. So you know, in many ways people learn the model kind of forward facing blended, self paced mastery based. But the origination of the model is almost in the reverse. So what my co founder and I knew were that we can't we weren't assessing kids on mastery, and kids weren't achieving mastery. So our brains kind of went to Okay, cool. Well, we need to get to mastery. Well, what do you need to create an in a classroom environment to allow you to actually assess students on mastery? Well, you need some element of self pacing, you need some kids to be able to move ahead because they've mastered skills while some kids are staying on the same lesson because they haven't. And then we say, okay, great. So we need to create an element of self pacing. Well, how do you get to self pacing? Well, you have to eliminate this concept of a in person lecture, right? That to us was always this massive bottleneck, that was inherently limiting our capacity to innovate, it was so obvious to us at the time that like, we cannot innovate, if we are continuing to walk into our classrooms every single day, we're demanding kids to sit and listen to a lecture at the front of the room, regardless of their ability level, regardless of their even their right, because many of them are going to not be able to make it to the beginning of class. Right? And that's what inspired us to say, Okay, we have to eliminate the lecture. You know, the, the interesting thing there was, how do you do that? You know, it wasn't all that obvious initially, that we build our own instructional videos. You know, there's a lot of tools and programs out there that have existing kind of curriculum videos, YouTube's obviously a massive resource. And we had both tried elements of that my co founder and I, but what we had seen is when we built our own videos, engagement clearly spiked, we were able to personalize to our kids needs, we knew the school or the district priorities. We knew what our kids knew and didn't know to some degree. And we found out that that kind of personal process of building an instructional video was the way that we wanted to replace the lectures. And that's what really inspired the model. We wanted to create a space that met students needs. And that's that's what inspired it.

Zach Diamond  4:47  
I didn't realize how much I'd internalized the idea that a controlled classroom is a good classroom, right? Like that's, that's just not the case necessarily. Obviously, you don't want like, there's certain things that can't be happening in the classroom but like there's Certain things that can and learning can still happen. And we, a lot of teachers would try and like stop kids from talking to each other, or from maybe looking at something random that caught their curiosity in the internet, like these things can happen in a classroom where there's productive learning happening at the same time. And the other model allows that. My next question for you here is what's different about the modern classrooms project from other approaches that that teachers are taught? And I think you'd sort of touched on one, which is that it's curriculum agnostic. And it's also it's sort of it's, it's, it can be implemented in any sort of administrative structure, like there's nothing, it's just a it's just a model. And that's something that a lot of my mentees have been, we've had conversations around this, there's some concern about this stuff. But it always comes back to me, telling them that it's really just a model for getting content to your students, doesn't matter what the content is, doesn't matter. When you do your somebody lives. Doesn't matter what kind of somebody is you do like none of that is affected by the model. And the model is just so flexible.

Kareem Farah  6:05  
Right. And I think that's kind of there's a, there's a few ways you can think about how we're different I think from a simple terms, you know, we can talk about each pillar. So like blended learning, we're the only instructional model I know about there that actually invest in the idea of teachers building their own instructional videos. Yeah. But there are tools that teach you how to do that there are organizations that focus on that because they offer a product, but living, breathing instructional model that starts with that we don't know. So like, that's one of the biggest unique components. And so to start there, but I think the other main thing, as you said, was, it's the level of flexibility. It's providing teachers with a clear structure, but then saying, innovate within that structure. Yeah, make it your own. I'm not here to tell you what chunk of pacing you should use, I'm certainly not here to tell you what mastery based grading assessments you should use. And I'm certainly not here to tell you what should be you should be putting in your videos, I just have a framework that I suggest you use that allows you to meet students needs better. And I think that's really, you know, what separates us from a lot of the other organizations out there is its level of flexibility. And I think, in turn makes it quite scalable. How do I ensure that our teachers feel good about themselves? And how do I ensure that our teachers feel like they're the ones that get to be the primary leaders and the innovators? And I know that one of the things we're gonna talk about is like, how are we scaling? Like, how are we getting this model out there? Right. And I think that speaks to this idea that our goal is to build a teacher driven movement, like, this model doesn't exist and doesn't have traction unless teachers want to do it on their own accord and innovate. You know, someone asked me the other day, what happens if every teacher across the world just can pull this off for free and do it and I said, then I think we've accomplished our mission. And we're going to move on to new jobs, right, that no part of us wants to limit the capacity for teachers to build this model out in their own classrooms. It's why we built a free course that is now going pretty viral, which is exciting. But in addition to that, like Facebook group, for example, we have, you know, 1400 educators right now in this modern classrooms, Facebook group, and people are talking and discussing and answering each other's questions. Many of these educators, we did not train through the mentorship program, they learned the model for the free course. And now bouncing ideas off each other. The teachers are driving the spread of this model, like 100%, all we're doing as an organization is just steering the ship a little yep, yep. But then we want to think, Okay, what's the best way to actually support teachers at scale? What's the best way to create a space where teachers can get more support and help and we came up with this idea of a classroom of one the virtual mentorship program, this idea that it's not going to be a bunch of, you know, in COVID-19 time, especially like a bunch of, you know, live sessions that we're hosting, where we walk folks through the model that's not only not effective, but it's like, antithetical to

Zach Diamond  8:56  
the way that we model itself right to the model. 

Kareem Farah  8:58  
Yeah, exactly. So what we said was, look, we want to be able to provide teachers with a person they can go to who's an expert on the model consistently, they can go to when they need it, that's gonna give them feedback and a competency based way on the core components of the model. And that creates that sort of support system that isn't overbearing, and that's what led us to crafting the virtual mentorship program. And what we really liked so far about the virtual mentorship program is its lien, right? It provides teachers a way to access this but doesn't take over their days, it doesn't mean that they have to schedule 20 sessions of live PD, either in person or digitally, but instead can really control their own learning time build out the model and have a great person to go to at all times that they build a relationship with. And what's super cool about that is it also allows us to empower our great educators, right? I'm talking to you, you're a mentor. You were a fellow a year ago, right? The reason why that's so cool is now our best implementers are now able to share their expertise.

Christine Walker  9:57  
Hey, Christine Walker here. And I teach German at McMinnville High School in Oregon. And I wanted to share how modern classrooms has helped me in my classroom this year. And I had a young man in German one last year who was going through some really tough mental health crises. And I was so impressed about how he was doing this year. And when I asked him why he said, Well, fro, you gave me the path to learning. And there was nothing to do but check boxes and succeed. And so that's what I did. And so he's doing really well this year, despite still fighting some major mental health issues. So never leaving MCP never gone back by now.

Zach Diamond  10:44  
In my first couple years of teaching my, my, like the experiences that most helped me improve my teaching, were watching good teachers. Yep, it didn't come from PD, it didn't come from the top down in terms of admin telling me what to do. Not even my instructional coach, like my instructional coach, works with me in different ways. And we do other things. But like, my, my own learning, was like the the biggest changes that happen in my classroom came because I saw another teacher do something and I was like, Oh, I'm gonna do that.

Kareem Farah  11:12  
I mean, and you know, what do you say that the model was inspired by that structure as well. I didn't say this in my initial introduction. But I was teaching at Eastern, and I wasn't sure I was going to stay in the classroom anymore. And this was back in 2016. But I just knew I wasn't meeting my students neat. So I was teaching algebra to the kids did not like the way I was teaching. I was teaching traditionally. And it wasn't until I walked into my co founders room, Rob Barnett. And I remember that day to a tee. I walked into his classroom, he was already building instructional videos. And many ways, he is the originator of the model. And I walked in there and I was like, wait a minute, like, I don't have to do it that other way. And that night, just how you kind of went to your classroom after you saw mine and built the pacing tracker. That was like a version of what you now have that night, I recorded my first instructional video, because I saw him do that. And I was like, holy moly, I think something real is right there. And I'm just going to start building. So again, that inspiration by just walking into other classrooms and seeing what they're like, I think there's just so so powerful, 

Zach Diamond  12:12  
Yeah, because it sort of shatters that sort of like preconceived notion of what good teaching is, which we, which we all have, and you can walk into some other teachers classroom, and they're just like doing their thing. And you're like, Whoa, that I never even thought you could do that. I knew it instinctively. And I also knew it in certain ways, like very explicitly, like lecturing doesn't work. I would just stand there and lecture and the majority of me of the words that I was saying, were, like, be quiet, like, stop talking. And that's not productive for anyone. I wanted to also be able to, you know, I think that teachers are often told that we should be developing relationships with kids in the classroom. It's not entirely it wasn't entirely clear to me what that meant. But relationships with kids now is such an important thing for me. And that was something that I was trying to improve on. It was just this, you know, being able to hang out with the kids and like, talk to them and have a positive interaction with a kid is so much more productive. Even if we're not learning anything, it's just so much more important, especially in middle school, to have a positive interaction rather than like a negative one where you're telling them to be quiet, right. I will say that, like, I tend to get caught up in video editing. And I have also worked with a lot of mentees who are perfectionist with their videos, right? That is a challenge in the sense of like, I don't want to put out something that I'm not happy with. But it took me realizing how little the students care, right to kind of overcome that. And also like being okay with my kids, being like, this is super cringy. Mr. Diamond is like, okay, whatever it says,

Kareem Farah  13:51  
You know, it speaks to this idea of the evidence shows that the more personal a video is, the more engaging it is. Yeah. And what people forget is like being personal also means being ridiculous, or not perfect. Or making mistakes, right? I remember making literally computational errors in my first videos, and then just dropping an ad puzzle question or telling the kids hey, find my mistake in lesson four.

Zach Diamond  14:14  
Yep, I would do that, too. I would, with the sixth graders that I taught, I would be like, if you can find the mistake, come and find me, I'll give you high five, right? And they would be like, they would walk over to me and put their hand up in the air. And they'd be like, What are you doing? Right? And they'd be like, I find that mistake. And I'd be like, Oh, okay, and I give them a high five. And I've mentioned this to a lot of the mentees that I work with too. It's like, don't worry about the mistakes like I literally put in the feedback journal. I love that you left in the mistake, correct because it makes it your video. Now, I know that this particular kid isn't making enough progress. Had I been lecturing every single day they might actually have been passing like they might actually have been like doing something right which got me to basically say yeah, okay, whatever. You got it. You got the lowest grade but you did it right. But in the in the self paced model where they weren't making any progress, they weren't submitting any mastery checks or they kept submitting the same one and kept being wrong. The the falling forward was me sort of saying, Okay, now I see that right? What do I do for those kids, right? So the shortening the shortness of your video doesn't come down to like, I remember when I was doing the training, I was like, like just painstakingly editing out when I was saying, oh, man, ah, and like rephrasing things, that's not how you make your videos short, the way that you make your videos short. And this is where it comes back to the pedagogical side of things is that you need to chunk the lessons into small bits. Yes, you don't need to spend a whole lot of time talking about three different topics, because that's kids can't retain that. And also, it makes it harder on the mastery check for you to actually determine if they've mastered something. So keeping the videos short is sort of like my it's a proxy for me saying you need to chunk your lessons up more.

Kareem Farah  16:03  
Zach, it's been great chatting with you and excited to do many more of these with you.

Zach Diamond  16:07  
Yep, absolutely. Perfect.

Kareem Farah  16:09  
Well, there it is. All right, Zach, great talking to you and excited for the next one. 

Zach Diamond  16:13  
Yep. Take it easy, Kareem