Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works

Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.

This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.

Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.

I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.

And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.

A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.

Only stuff that

works.

Today is another episode with my friend and colleague, Dr. Zach Elle.

This episode will be on both of our platforms, so listen to Dr. Zach introduce this episode of Thinking Out Loud.

I think you're gonna enjoy it.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Thinking Out Loud with myself, Zach Elle and my colleague and great friend and mentor, Jean Taver Netti.

This show is just sort of a mini series that we do on both of our podcasts.

Mine is progressively incorrect.

And Jean, what's the name of your podcast?

Better teaching only stuff that works.

Absolutely.

And so we've taken the opportunity to just kind of unpack what we've been thinking in the past few weeks over many episodes.

I'm gonna put all of those in the show notes of this episode because I think it's important if you need to go back and take a look.

This episode's interesting.

Jean, you wanted to talk to me about.

Some things I've been working on you've been in the biz for quite some time more than longer than I have, and a lot of what I've been doing over the past few months has been brand new to me.

And what I mean is working in schools, not as an employee of a school, but as an external consultant.

And I wanted to talk to you about that because I know you talk to a lot of folks who express a desire to become a consultant and.

We have listeners who employ consultants.

We have teachers who work with external consultants.

So just wanted to share a little bit about what you have been up to in this past year because just.

It's just very recently you completed your first complete year as an external consultant.

And so you've had an interesting life, a change of life, and kind of just wanted to talk about some of the things that you've seen in some of your reflections.

And first of all one of the things that people who, who follow, you know, is that you work not only across the country but internationally.

So K, kind of can you say, talk a little bit about, let's just start with Canada.

Let's just start with Canada.

I know you have some schools you work with there.

What do you see as a difference in Canadian schools versus US?

Or is that too broad?

However you think, you know, a way to kind of explain differences and similarities.

Well, I feel I certainly don't feel like an expert.

I go into.

These schools and I ask questions and I stumble over, you know, certain jargon that we don't share.

And you see that there's a lot more overlap, you know, it's almost too.

Overlapping circles in the Venn diagram when it comes to most of education.

But these little things sort of signal to me like, oh, I said something someone doesn't quite understand.

I need to unpack that.

We don't sh but this is common in all of education, isn't it?

Like on social media, we talk to American educators and we don't quite even know what they're talking about.

We have to get them to define their terms, so to speak.

I see a lot of, I see a lot of similarities in the sense that a lot of times provinces are looking towards you know, certain regulations that are at the province level.

Just like in the United States we look towards certain state policies and state, you know, in state requirements.

There's not really a cohesive national.

Curriculum or national education system like there is in the uk?

To a much greater extent.

One of the things that is very different, I think, is, I think the United States is very inward facing in the sense that we are a, you know, the world's largest economy.

We.

We have a huge research arm that at the moment is suffering from a number of things, but a lot of the research comes outta the United States.

Our university system's so powerful and international attracts all the talent and so on.

So it's easy for schools to kind of look.

In you know, towards sort of our ourselves and dig into our own resources and kind of ignore the rest of the international education landscape.

Canada can't really do that.

And so they do look towards the US for certain, you know, guidance and resources and they're open to perhaps looking at the UK maybe a little bit more and learning from other countries.

But for the most part, what are we dealing with?

We're dealing with the same.

Problems.

There are curriculum problems, there are behavior problems.

There's the level at of the lesson and there's the level of these big ideas that often don't get integrated into the lesson.

I think just politically speaking this has been an interesting year in the sense that Canada has really faced a lot of turbulence and antagonism from the US government.

And so that's brought about a sort of a backfire effect where there's been a lot of national unity in Canada.

So me coming in as an American, it was kind of weird.

Right.

We're talking about like a time in which the McDonald's.

In Canada has signs saying we have all Canadian potatoes.

Right?

And I'm coming in and offering up my services as an external consultant from the United States.

So that was interesting and I hope I, I played that respectfully in a lot of ways.

Well, you know, we have a mutual friend who's a very well respected educator in the uk who has moved to the US and has been teaching here for the past seven years.

That's Helen Reynolds and it's funny talking to her about, you know, what's different, with regard to culture in the two different countries.

And she said this, she said, just imagine, I tell my UK friends, just imagine every time you make a suggestion to an American, just imagine they're saying you can't make me do that.

Now is that field different in the in Canada or?

Well, it's funny how I want schools to work together.

Like I want teams of folks to essentially not close all their doors from each other and just teach.

I think that's just a very.

It's a toxic work environment.

It's a place that doesn't think about kids first.

It's very sort of adults' needs first.

I just don't think any workplace should ever be like that.

Much less a school where we got into this to most of us or practically all of us got into this for the mission, the drive to to help someone and to improve the world in a way.

So I actually use that exact example you gave me with these Canadian schools.

I say in my country we're very individualists.

Dick.

Right?

And we tend to think of you know, don't tell me what to do.

I'm a professional, I'm autonomous.

And so on at leave Me Be.

However, the United States, just like Canada is also a nation of teams.

We're a nation of sports and we rally together and we wear the same jerseys and we wear the same colors that we shout together and we cheer together.

We all we go to summer camps together, we sing together, we go to church together, and we pray together.

So there is a very much a there, there's, we have two sides of us.

And really the direction we should be going is always towards.

Working together, helping each other and not being in competition with each other or afraid of each other to like help, help each other.

So I, it's funny you bring that up, but I, my, my hope is it a bit of what's come out of Canada's recent.

You know, adversity with the tariffs in the us you know, sort of being antagonistic is that people did feel like being brought together and let's work together to, to solve Canadian problems.

Let's not depend on anyone else to do this.

That's kind of the feeling I got out of it.

Okay.

Alright and you've worked in several of the several provinces.

So, and I think you mentioned just a moment ago that just as we have 50 departments of education in every, you know, representing every state that are all different, the provinces are different as well.

Yeah, and you,

and you have to, and you have to negotiate that, navigate that as a consultant.

I, I do, you know, to, to an extent, you know, at the, you try to learn and there's, and you try to, you know, you find what the barriers are.

But as you know, gene, sometimes the barriers are not quite barriers, right?

It's like, how can we work around this?

I know we're saying this, but there's gotta be a strategy we can come up with that can.

Downplay something or still meet certain requirements, but interpret it a different way.

A lot of this is thinking on your feet.

It's talking to people and as honestly as you can, and they ultimately might have to know the what, the, what it really says under the hood or what really is going on.

And, but you're here to offer sort of a naive, maybe, perhaps ignorant perspective of like, why can't we try this?

I'm like, I don't know.

We just haven't in the past.

Right.

Right, right, right.

So, so, internationally it doesn't sound like there's much difference you know, Canada and US facing same organizational issues.

Facing the same things.

How about and I know that you've worked in with private schools, charter schools public schools in different states.

How have you seen your work having to change, having to adjust working in those sites?

Yeah, I mean, for the vast majority of the jobs I've taken have all been in public schools, which was a very, which was a huge surprise to me because everyone told me given that you're very focused on explicit instruction and behavior and that.

That is often starts at the top where the, you know, leaders need to model these techniques and need to assure it through, through you know, drop-ins and coaching and so on.

That this would only work in charter schools.

Good luck ever getting a job in these public schools.

It's gonna be a mess, right.

And actually that's not been the case at all.

The vast majority of the jobs I've taken were in public schools.

However interestingly you said you predicted this and this was true.

A lot of these have been in small towns and rural areas, like small public school systems of five to eight schools total.

These seem to.

There's, there just seems to be fewer cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

They, there's one or two deciders that, that really lead the pd and there's not a lot of people that have to kind of, you know, fight
for fight around for this for time, for pd and you know, a lot of probably fewer philosophical debates within maybe smaller schools.

And these have just been really.

Enjoyable.

Enjoyable to be able to go to a small town like this and she has a couple of hotels, maybe, and get to work knowing that, you know, if I stayed here for two days, I could probably get around to every school.

If I get all, I can get all the principals in a small semi-circle of chairs inside of a single room, you know, as opposed to the schools that I.

Actually worked in as a teacher and as a school leader, which I mean you had to you could pack a gymnasium full of the principals, you know, huge sort of octopus, that's
what I call them, like octopus style districts where Yeah, you know, you cut off one of the tentacles that it's still moving and then it's all just wrapped up in knots.

No, there's a lot more.

There's a lot more clarity and I think structure that's possible when you can centrally manage a school district.

And if it's smaller, it seems like it's just fewer cooks that can kind of, kind of all row the boat in the same direction.

So when they're wanting to row the boat, they bring you in as kind of, gosh, I wish I knew the terms for crew, the guy that's with the megaphone.

It just yells the stroke.

But you know, try, kind of thinking about that metaphor.

As a consultant coming in, I know many times administrators will have an idea of what they want you to do.

You get there or in advance, you know, you've done your due diligence and asked a lot of questions before you get there and you realize that may be what you think you want me to do, but that's not what you need.

You're shaking your head.

You've run across that in your, was that a surprise to you that you needed to guide so much of the conversation to get them to where they needed to be versus where they thought they needed to go?

I guess, I guess so.

And I guess not too.

Like what, think about my instructional perspective with students.

Like I don't assume that they know certain things like doing that.

Is to typically you end up playing the blame game in that situation, or you end up disadvantaging folks that they just simply just don't know something.

It's, you know, it's not their fault.

Right.

And the folks that know the most they may.

They may very well know how to navigate this landscape to the point that they don't, they wouldn't have called me in the first place.

Right.

I just, I picture that.

So the very fact that I'm here tells me that there are certain things we're gonna need to work out together.

And I'm gonna have to direct a lot of that conversation.

I, it's very interesting when you work with a school that has never in its past ever brought in.

An external consultant, like, or the, at least not the people that are, have been charged to do so.

They're given a budget, you know, to spend for the year.

And certain budgets can only go towards this type of thing.

And maybe it's coaching or maybe it's curriculum, and they don't know how to bring someone in.

They don't know how long they could stay or they don't know what we should be working on.

The biggest problem I see.

With this relationship is what I call like kind of the request for song and dance consulting, like the idea that if you bring me in to do a keynote that will.

That's gonna invigorate everyone.

It's gonna change everything.

It's gonna make a, it's gonna make for a really fun day.

But, you know, we, let's put out some coffee and some donuts and let's have a, let's have a blast.

But the, you know, after the teachers get in with the kids and they, you start to see that the classroom is messy and there's lots of external demands the that, that inspiration wears off pretty quickly.

And we're back to, we're back to doing.

You know, what we've traditionally done.

So I really try to push against that model.

I want to think about a long-term relationship.

I want to think of it as a comprehensive strategic approach where we think of like our PD as an ecosystem.

How do we pull all the levers and we drive everything towards the direction of a narrow instructional focus and that we can observe and that we can.

We can say is a great bet for all of us, a high leverage practice.

Like, like, like improving lesson planning or improving the curriculum, or improving just the day-to-day delivery of lessons.

You know, I piggyback on something that you said there.

I think that especially folks that haven't hired consultants before, or they have hired consultants that.

Really weren't satisfactory, you know, that, you know, maybe they were the song and dance type of consultant or the I hate to I hate to generalize here, but I am.

And then but many consultants are retired educators.

They've been, they either retired teachers, retired administrators, and many of them don't wanna do the hard work.

This is really I'm saying this now and I'm sure there are gonna be some people, the retirees who are gonna call me, but but it's true.

You know, they think, well, I'm gonna do some consulting.

I'm gonna walk around with the principal.

I'm gonna tell 'em what to do.

People know what to do.

For many times, it's how do we do it?

They don't know how to do it.

And that's what I know in your work, that's what you're doing.

You're bringing them along.

Okay, now that we know this stuff, now we have to do the real work.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get in classrooms and work with teachers.

I I think there must be some of that, right?

I mean, I certainly want to.

Get his hands on as possible, right?

Like, I, I want to I wanna open the door and I wanna walk into the back of the classroom, and I want to, I have to resist sliding into the lesson.

You know, you know how that feels, right?

You're like but there certainly must be some of that.

I mean, I think, let's just address the elephant in the room for a second.

I mean, it's, I think it's reasonable in a sense.

To take a dim view of consulting.

Right.

There are just, there's, it's just the same way you might take a dim view of instructional coaching or of lead or of instructional leadership in general where you see a lot of really.

Bad practices.

There's certainly perverse incentives you know, motivated simply by just, you know, gathering contracts, moving on from school to school and never talking to them again.

Never doing the hard work.

Like, I recently worked with a school district that asked me to help them put together a behavior curriculum and what I'm, and what they meant was I needed to just.

Type out and put together essentially a system that they could use school-wide to implement some of these best practices around, you know, controlled entry into the classroom.

And and, you know, putting our stuff away and packing up and fantastic listening, fantastic walking and so on.

So I put all of that stuff together and then tomorrow I'm gonna go into the school and we're gonna.

We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna follow through with our promise to teachers that they will be supported by the administrators in this behavior plan.

Are the administrators gonna enjoy the fact that they have to come to school with their tennis shoes on?

I don't know.

Right?

Are the teachers gonna be, you know, happy about this extra expectation that they modeled, you know, and teach behavior systematically?

I don't know.

But what we've done is we've set up something that is hard to do, that is complex, but that is perfectly achievable if all of the pieces are coordinated and we're all working together.

And this is messy stuff and it's hard work and it might fail and we might have to iterate and try again.

Do all consultants wanna do this or do they just want to go up and give a nice little PowerPoint thing and walk away from the mess?

Right.

I want to be in the middle of the mess, and that's just, that's my promise to schools when I talk to them.

Well, and I know I've had people who have wanted to come to work.

For me, and we've sat down to talk about it.

And that's what they believe the work is of a consultant.

Just, oh, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna do a pd, I'm gonna leave.

Oh, look at all the PDs I've done.

I'm very good presenter.

I don't care.

You know?

How are you one-on-one?

How are you?

Gonna help a teacher get better?

How are you gonna negotiate difficult conversations?

Those are the types of things that, that I look for in a consultant.

And I will let consultants know if that's what you wanna do, if that's what you think the job is, you'll get some work.

But I don't know how you, how you make a living because you need to do what you're talking about doing is having a relationship with a school, with a district actually getting results and results being higher student achievement.

So it can't just be, it can't just be the song and dance.

And having said that, you better be a good presenter.

I wonder if people, you know, they heard that example of the behavior curriculum and by the.

That's just, there's just one of the things I'm working on with schools.

It's certainly the most intensive in terms of the behavior piece, but why doesn't the school just do it?

Right?

And that's the big, that why do they need to pay you?

Why do they need to find you?

Why can't they do it themselves?

This is the big this is the big paradox of the whole thing, is that how they just, it's sort of like the just Google it thing.

Like they wouldn't have thought to do this because they don't know that many schools have a behavior curriculum.

It's kind of a new term and a new idea, but it's an old, it's based in old principles.

They don't know what.

Perhaps the codified behaviors are, they might write up a bunch of vague behaviors, even if they knew what a behavior curriculum was.

And then on top of that, they want.

In need, like some external advice and support in how to go about not making common mistakes around implementing this.

And when I come in and I speak about this you get this effect.

I don't know if it's.

It, it seems universal where you come in and everybody goes, oh yeah, that's not makes perfect sense.

And all the principles are going, we already said this.

Why are they all nodding their heads?

Like, like, they really like, like they, they've heard this for the first time.

But you also get that.

And the outside voice often brings in something that, that is powerful to teachers on the basis is that I have some established credibility from having done this in other schools.

You can do this too.

It's so that, I mean, what are, do you have any other thoughts on that?

Like, like why can't, you know, why can't we just make it so that the whole consulting industry just disappears?

And why can't schools just run their own ship?

Two things.

Number one, it gets back to something that we were talking about earlier that, that well-known, well-known to us person posted on x. Saying that
if you're so smart, consult, I'm gonna paraphrase, if you're so smart, consultants, why aren't you running a building or still in the classroom?

Are things that if you are running a building or are in a classroom and you could be very good at it, but still not know some of these other things, like something that you just described.

So that's one thing.

I mean, you just don't have the chance if you're an administrator, if you're a teacher, you are working hard every day making sure those kids are learning, making sure those that the school is running well.

Even if you know there are things that could be run better, but you don't know how, there may just be a little something that you don't know how to get it going.

You don't understand.

You haven't seen it in action.

You need somebody who's seen it happen.

That's one thing I believe that they just don't know and that's not their fault.

They're busy.

You got lots of stuff to do.

The other thing, and I think you, you touched on it, is that about hearing it from somebody, an outside person you know that and I've talked about this
before, I think on the podcast, that that we wouldn't accept any contract to work in a school unless the teach the principal was with us 100% of the time.

And so we were working in an elementary school and we were doing individual coaching cycles with all the teachers.

There were about 30 teachers in the school, so it took six, I don't know, maybe 20 days to get through all the teachers, and the principal was in there every moment we, you know, after about the first 10 lesson plan planning sessions.

She would, you know, give comments and give suggestions, and they were very good.

I mean, she knew her.

She knew the stuff.

Teacher leaves the room and I said, why am I here?

I said, you're better at this than I am.

And she said, they just need to hear it the first time from somebody else.

I could take it once you work with 'em, once I could take it.

They have all heard the same thing.

I know how to express it.

I know all the questions.

So I think that is a big thing that you mentioned an important consideration.

Sometimes you just need to hear it from somebody else.

And to add onto that, it's like, it's weird because it's a bit chicken in the egg.

Like how do you gain this experience?

I'm about to describe, but we started by talking about how, I've now worked in the US and the uk.

We, I went down to Chile, I went down to you know, the sort of the southern surge states I've been working in.

Where I'm from, Seattle, I've been all, you know, all over this country.

And I, in, in doing so, I've.

I've seen quite a variety of schools and school cultures and classrooms and I've seen a so many different patterns that I'm sort of putting together like, oh yeah, I've seen that.

It's like when you teach, you know, enough students and you go to do your report cards and you go, oh man, I could just take my old report cards and just change their names.

'cause Johnny is Sally and Right, right.

You start to develop these like.

You start to develop these archetypes and then the solutions spring from these common problems.

You're like, yeah, there's like three very common ways to solve this problem.

I developed a lot of that knowledge just in the past couple of years of working with all these schools.

What happens often if you're a principal is that you were a teacher in a neighboring school district, and then you took a teaching program.

And then a principal program for one year, and then you were a principal, and now you've sort of moved into an office position where you hire consultants or you became a superintendent and you're looking for consultants.

The breadth of what is possible in schools from this kind of education tourism that, that I've experienced was is vast and it's rich, and I never knew this before, getting into this.

This work that some schools have figured out certain systems like MTSS and intervention much better than others.

Some have figured out their drop-ins and their walkthroughs in ways that are extremely systematic.

Some schools, every classroom I can walk in and I can guarantee a structured lesson that yes, there are, teachers are on a spectrum of ability, but they're largely predictable enough that you come in and you can say, well, learning is taking place.

We're in the school next door.

The lessons are just incoherent and the behavior is wild and so on.

This is the kind of experience I believe that schools need to bring in because they're so inward facing and isolated and they don't even they, how can they possibly know what's happening in the best schools in the UK or in the best schools in another state?

They can't.

They I, there's something to be said about the dissemination of best practices that can't really happen.

Without looking outside for outside resources.

I think without looking for outside resources.

The other thing that those outside resources like you can come in and do is to actually model what that looks like because I, I have found in my consulting there are two groups of folks.

One who you talk about explicit instruction or you talk about something and say, we're already doing it.

And then the other folks who don't think they're doing it.

But when you model it, you realize, man, I'm not that far off.

There are just some important components.

If that we change that, it's gonna have a big impact.

And that's not only on classrooms, that's.

That's at a school site.

That again, principals, if they don't understand how to develop that system for that behavior program it's just not gonna happen.

And it's not that they're bad, it's just they need somebody to come in that lets them know it's possible.

It's possible.

We've seen it in other schools.

And here we go.

You have any in your year, you have any, like big, I wanna say wins.

I don't know if wind's the right example but like best experiences that you've had that this first year.

I think a, just a general sense that the.

Culture has changed in, in, in a large school district.

This has happened in one of my schools in Canada, one of my schools in New York.

One of my schools in Colorado, these are schools where we got together and we felt like at the beginning that this was gonna be impossible, right?

How do we tackle this big problem of, you know, we have this reason and that reason, and barriers and excuses and we know it's just gonna be challenging.

But look, a year, two years down the line with just some planned.

You know, forward planning and using the calendar well, and just thinking about the existing resources that you know.

The person who led this, the superintendent or the principal or whatever, that was really spearheading, this might've looked a little crazy at the first, like, oh, we're gonna focus on instruction.

You know, we're just gonna focus on the minutiae of teaching.

But two years later it's like, oh yeah, like we all have a shared language.

You hear teachers talking about cognitive load and working memory and retrieval practice.

You see on.

You know, in classrooms, visible signs of the techniques we're working on the walls, and teachers deploying these techniques with increasing confidence.

And I think ultimately what you want to see is student achievement growing?

And so in these school, you do see.

Sometimes a doubling of student achievement.

But this is the funny part about it, and I'm sure you agree with this.

It's just that you can't attribute any single thing to, to these, to, to this growth because we threw everything in the kitchen sink at the problem, right?

We tried to fix coaching, we tried to fix PLCs, we worked on the pd, we worked on the culture, and so hopefully all of these coordinating pieces together, depending on each other.

Are responsible for that growth, or at least this maybe a renewed emphasis on learning and academics is really the cause we know we just need to teach more often.

Well, great, we're, let's that's a win in itself.

And so I feel much I, I feel very satisfied.

And motivated to continue this because of these success stories which are still in transition and still you know, work remains to be done in all of these schools.

Yeah, I, you know, one of the things that.

You know, I do work with coaches and I was talking to somebody the other day on the podcast and they said, well, you're the coaching guy.

And my, I cringed a little bit.

I said, well, maybe, but I wanna be known as the instruction guy because you can't do coaching, you know, without instruction.

And one of the, one of the things that, that, I don't know if you've come across this yet, but, you know, be talking to a principal, maybe it's the, a principal in a district where we've already
worked at another school and they're a little bit leery of what they're going to, what you're gonna be, how you're gonna be working with the teachers, and they'll say, is there a school we can go to?

So where we could see all these teachers do this.

I said, no, you know, and I can send you to some classrooms because, you know, again, we're in the United States, can't make me, we can't make me do anything.

But teachers will take pieces of what we're talking about.

You could have two classrooms, one teacher's really doing, a lot of work in retrieval practice the next door, not as much, but you're still gonna see, you're still gonna see some growth.

And that's for me that's good.

As, as long, as, long as we're getting better.

when we're talking about schools, and I just, I have to put this in there because my ultimate goal or desire.

Would be that you are self-sufficient, that you have an infrastructure that you can work with that doesn't make you dependent on always asking for outside help.

And you see these schools that.

Every year they ask 15 people new to do something for them.

And the next year, that's a new 15 people and they're just chasing stars and highlights and they're they just wanna always have a buzz of new people coming in.

And that's just how they, that's just how they operate.

Well, no, you don't want, ultimately, you don't really want that to occur.

You want your principles to be instructional leaders.

You want, you don't want to have an, you know, an outsider.

Constantly having to think for you.

You wanna be able to think for yourself.

And so a lot of what I've been focusing on now is I know I'm only in that school like 1% of the time.

So how do you make it so that while that the 99% of the time that you're not there, that they're doing the things on their own and they're seeing the success and that motivates them to keep doing it.

And then when you come back around you're really just evaluating the system and you're looking to tweak it.

I really want schools to stand on their own two feet.

It would, it, it would surprise many people because they don't have the opportunity to go into so many schools to see how different these schools are.

IWI just visited a school in which I did my song and dance.

I did my song and dance about how leaders can model techniques to teachers in a group setting, and I showed.

How I do it.

I showed a video from the Step Lab documentary of a teacher doing it, and then I had them write it up and practice doing it, and it
was about two thirds of the way through the training when the principal came up to me and she said, yeah, we do this all the time.

And I just went, I. You're the first school I've ever met that outside of the UK that does this all the time because I got this from another school.

Right.

How surprising because in the school I was just in last week the principal has never modeled anything once to their entire staff in the 20 years they've been in that position.

Right.

And so the vast differences between schools allow for a bit of.

They kind of cloud.

I think people's understanding of really what this all is that this country is a huge number of isolated schools that don't talk to each other and with very different needs all scattered about, and and that requires, that, that requires, we work on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it is.

I think a. Unless you've been a consultant for a number of years, I don't think you understand the complexity of it because again, many people go in thinking, oh, I'm just gonna do some PD once in a while.

Sure.

But it's a lot more than that.

It's developing relationships, just like people say you know, you need to develop relationships.

It's not, Hey buddy, good to see you again, pal.

It's a relationship, it's a professional relationship.

People understand that you have your role, you're bringing some expertise, and the consultant needs to understand that they have their role.

They're gonna have to they're gonna have to implement whatever it is that that we're talking about.

And then we're here to assist them.

But everybody has their role.

And I've known consultants and I bet a lot of people have.

That have spent a lot of time in a school district, maybe spent years, and then and then all of a sudden you're a headline in the newspaper.

We paid $850,000 over the last three years to a consulting firm and nothing has happened.

So, so it's, I it's important to do good work.

Anything anything.

You might have a question for me, Zach.

Well, I just, I'm curious because like maybe, you know, people have read between the lines in this discussion and know that like basically I call you all the time and ask you questions about how to make my, make this consulting work.

You know, I'm just curious like, what is next for me in your thinking of my trajectory?

Because I just finished my freshman year, which was sort of pseudo freshman year 'cause I kind of had two years before to make some mistakes and while still keeping my teaching job.

But that was really the first full year.

Now we're into the sophomore year.

It feels well into it already and then there's always the sophomore slump, isn't there?

How do I avoid that?

So, sophomore slump and what's next?

What do you think is next for me?

If you could kind of take out your crystal ball.

Well, I think.

Because you're in the schools doing the work, you know what's next.

You know, now they have this foundation of science, of learning.

Now, how does that science of learning translate into teaching?

Because like you, like, like you said a little bit earlier, great teaching going on one place, not so good in another.

Again, it's not that.

Complicated to teach folks how to embed those science of learning techniques, strategies principles into a well-designed lesson.

And what that means is that many times you need to work one-on-one.

And so I think going forward, I think what's in your future, it's either you.

Spending more time at a school site, doing more coaching with teachers, individual coaching at the same time training administrators and or coaches.

And I know what's gonna happen to you.

I can see in my crystal ball, Zach, you're gonna need help you.

You're gonna need help.

There are things that only you are gonna be able to do.

But what you're training folks to do is not so complex that somebody on staff can't be trained, or that you're gonna bring in another consultant to continue to work with them.

And it's not about building a company.

It's not about, you know, how do I maximize how do I maximize my income?

It's about how do I provide services?

And, you know, something that schools need to know, but it's not just knowing it is implementing it's seeing, having, being able to coach people, being able to model things for them.

And it just means spending, spending more time at schools because you can song and dance for an hour that doesn't work.

You can song and dance for a day.

It's a little better but, you know, you need, everybody needs that monitoring.

And what's nice nowadays with the virtual, you know, you can do check-ins, you can do check-ins, you can do virtual things and it can, really check in on people.

So that's kind of where I see you going.

And it's not, again, it's not because, oh, I wanna be, I don't want to be, have this big consulting firm.

No.

It's just how can I provide services to these schools so that they get the impact that they want.

And it was always I don't wanna say it was an ego thing, but it was important to me that when we left, they said we did some good things.

Not the consultants did good things, but we were able to accomplish good things because we had Gene and we had his consulting group there.

That's the, for me, you know, the teachers, it's the kids for me, the consultants, it's the adults mad.

You know, that's, I wanna lead the adults with something.

So that's what I see for you.

Zach, what are you, what are your thoughts as I tell you that.

Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep working on it.

I feel like I'm doing good work.

I've gotta, I've gotta do a little bit more of the, like, the life balancing act where I need to maybe consider.

That I have a family once in a while.

That'd be a nice job.

Like, look at me on a Saturday over here on this recording with my kids screaming downstairs.

So I've gotta figure out some of those things.

But that's all behind the curtain, the scenes.

You know what I think with that, I think we should kind of close out.

I really always appreciate v's.

Chats thinking out loud, I recommend to listeners you check out a couple of resources.

One is Jean's book teach Fast, which is all about like the lesson planning approach that I've been using with schools.

The other one is Jean's book maximizing Coaching Cycles, which have also been using to improve like the coaching cycle aspect, along with Step Lab.

And then check out my book.

Just tell them that's all about explicit instruction.

These are all on Amazon.

Otherwise we'll just keep on thinking out loud as things come to us.

It's kind of our PLC our unscripted PLC, and I just really love them.

So Jean take care.

All right.

Great talking to you, Zach.

Talk to you soon.

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You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky.

Tesscg.

com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.