Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works

[00:00:00] 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 Jean Taver Netti, 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

Hello everyone, I'm very excited about our guest today. He's a young man who I met recently at Research Ed in Denver. We were both presenting at the conference, and we had a chance to hang out together, and [00:01:00] usually I don't describe with respect to their age, but the reason I don't mind calling him a young man is because he didn't mind pointing out any time I did something that was what a boomer would do.

So our guest today is a young man, it's Andrew Bixler, and he's been a classroom teacher for 10 years. He started in elementary before becoming a teacher. a middle school humanities teacher and he's managed great teams and he's been a lab site teacher. He now teaches AP Lit and ninth grade reading intervention at a high school in South Florida.

Good morning, Andrew. Thanks for being on. Looking forward to having this chat with you.

Thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

Hey, same here. Same here. You know, one of the things that one of the reasons that I thought you would be an interesting guest for the listeners of my podcast is that you have an interesting perspective of coaching, which is my primary interest, because you not only [00:02:00] were coached early in your career, but you.

Then you became a coach, and I'm doing air quotes, which I don't do air quotes, but, you know, you became a coach, a mentor of some other folks. So, When you started in a charter school, is that correct? When you started teaching? And if I remember the conversation correctly in between the times that you were making fun of me, calling me a boomer, I think you did say that you started receiving coaching almost immediately as you entered the profession.

Is that right?

Yeah, I was really fortunate. When I was first brought into a classroom, I was a, what they called an associate teacher, so an assistant teacher. And I just observed for the first week had like kind of like a checklist of things that I needed to pay attention to. And then the first thing that I was of given as a task was to just line the kids up line the kids up before they transition to a different component [00:03:00] or a different classroom for, say, science or recess or something like this, and it was just going through setting expectations, making sure you're getting 100 percent of those expectations met, and then, you know, practicing going through the reward consequence cycle, closing the loop, et cetera, and, you know, You know, for the first week or so, that's all you did was just line students up and make sure that you get that sort of procedure, the language all the different sort of nuances that go into just doing something super simple that you do multiple times a day.

And so, yeah, that was like, I was like, this is what teaching is, you know, it was kind of, a bit of a shock. You know, and six months of that ended with, you know, me leading a lesson and then two lessons. And then you know, a teacher would leave, my head teacher would leave the room for 20 minutes

right, so let me back up, a little bit because you were [00:04:00] doing this, they were having you practice Okay, so you didn't have your classroom yet. Before they, that's where they started with you. Okay, we're going to get the kids to line up.

Okay. And then you had to

essentially another student.

Okay. So you had to graduate from that. You were still an associate as they, there was like a gradual release for you. And then the next thing you did after you taught the kids how to line up and you knew there was more to teaching then what sort of support did you get?

So, to take one step back and reframe, because I found The phrase that you just used, interesting, was that I was teaching the kids. We actually sort of codified this whole process as teacher excellence training and, you know, TET for short. And so when we do TET, it would be, this is for the teachers.

In fact, a lot of the components You know, the first time I would do like math [00:05:00] workshop, I would only do the launch, like I wouldn't do the whole lesson. And so it was training for me. It wasn't for the kids, if that makes sense. And so I wasn't teaching the kids, the teacher was teaching me how to teach the kids or set an expectation.

So yeah, it was a gradual release where it's no surprise that I fell into explicit direct instruction interest in that because that's how I was taught how to teach. You know, explicitly shown what this is, why it's important, how to do it. I would have practice, I would get feedback, and I would improve.

I reached a level of mastery, and then we'd move on to the next part of the sequence. And so that, yeah, that was, it was slow in the initial parts, you know, like learning scales of a musical instrument is like painful, and you build, you know, analogous calluses but as soon as it clicks, you're like, oh That's why they were really annoying about that kid that I didn't see [00:06:00] picking his nose and I didn't address it.

You know, I started in elementary school. That's why I chose that reference. But yeah, so it was just a really comprehensive and I know you don't see the light yet, but just trust in us and you will. And that was the pattern with each step.

And so as you started, was there an expected timeframe that you would be in this TET program?

So. Interestingly, we would have TET for the whole school. So these standards at the beginning of the year, every teacher would have to meet. And so your direct manager would come in, even like a very experienced teacher, and the whole school would have goals for TET. So the first six weeks of school, 100 percent of kids are in their seat, completing their due now within the first two minutes of class, or you know, whatever the thing is.

And so there, there's that like school wide. of the year. We would do it actually whenever we would come back from break as [00:07:00] well to sort of reset the norms. But I can't recall a specific scope and sequence in terms of time. It was more so, could you implement the feedback? Make attempts to implement the feedback the events that I can remember, the times that I can remember where people were, you know, they were, their manager started to push them out the door a little bit was when there was conflict rather than failure.

So, I am refusing to do this. There's hesitance. there's a mindset issue manifesting in the execution or lack thereof of the feedback. And so I think it's, there's not like a fine line that I can recall. But I do remember that the people who would fail were the people that tended to just not be able to It was a square for a [00:08:00] round peg there for them for whatever reason.

And so, you know, those teachers tended to leave at some point. Not every school's a fit for every teacher kind of thing. But yeah, I don't recall like a specific timeline per se. It was pretty quick though. It felt quick at least. It felt quick. It felt really long at the same time.

well, well, two things, you know, and again I got to spend a couple of days with you. And one of the things that, that I realized very quickly that you were a bright guy, a little hardheaded. And which, which makes me wonder about the hiring process, you know, when and it seems like we're spending a lot of time on, on this, on your first school, but there are so many things that are applicable, I think, you know, to private schools, charter schools, public schools, and as we compare them, so thinking back if you can remember, in the hiring process, did they make it clear what you were going to be going through?

That, that, let me say that differently. Was it [00:09:00] clear that this is who we are as a school? This is how we do things. And you may fit and you may not.

Yeah. So they had so the school network that I was a part of. Success Academies in New York had a central office like we, a network office, and that's where all of the new hires would go for the first two weeks, and then they would go to their school. So at the network office, everyone gets two weeks boot camp of instruction and well, they start with behavioral management and then instruction.

Before that, they have a mini version of that. They have a full day interview. This is when I interviewed. They had a full day interview in which you would get a poem beforehand. And you had to read the poem and prepare like a mini lesson without any guidance. It's like. Just tell us what is interesting to you about the poem kind of [00:10:00] thing.

And then you would go through different sort of classes, I guess, of theory followed by practice. And for me, I got the sense that the interviewers were, yes, noticing all the things like, are they professional, are they polite, are they intelligent, thoughtful, etc. But for me, there was a lot of feedback in those interviews and then like, redos, do it agains.

And I think a big part of the interview was your response, your adaptability, your, the sense of, you know, how open minded you are. Do you take things really personally, stuff like this? And I noticed that as being quite different from other interviews that I had been on. And so, yeah, I think it was embedded, although If you were thinking about it, you knew kind of, you could guess reasonably what was to come, but I don't remember being explicitly stated like, [00:11:00] Hey, you're not going to teach for the first two months.

You're going to line students up and, you know, get kids into SLAM and whatnot.

Yeah. So, so that sounds like a really great model. To get to get teachers on their feet, get them going, get some confidence, they're able to do some things. Now, when you were in college, did you have, did you go through a teacher training program?

So I went to school, I went to a liberal arts school. I majored in English. My, my step into the classroom coincided with. my master's program in general and special education, which was a fellowship program that the school had in partnership with the college. So the, all of the training that I got practical training was, you know, while I was working.

So I didn't, it was a different kind of experience because [00:12:00] they were intertwined. It wasn't, I went to school, did some sort of Practicum, it was All at once. Which, in retrospect I do not recommend anyone doing is starting a full time teaching job and also, for the first time, then also doing grad school.

It was quite the stretch for me.

So, you did the you start with the behavior and then you get into the teaching practices. What sort of what sort of lesson framework, what sort of? Pedagogy. What philosophy? I guess. Did this Charter program promote? Ha.

so, it's a complicated, I have a complicated answer, no surprise there, for you at least. So, the skeleton, we, so. Everything that was curriculum related was also created by the network. So, the same location that houses all the training has a component to it where [00:13:00] all the people that work in that part of the building, all they do is curriculum all day.

And so they create all the internal assessments, et cetera. The pedagogy and the curriculum design is I would say it's like 80 percent traditional explicit instruction, and then they would weave things that were a bit more topical and I would say, you know, quote unquote trending. But it was always rooted in outcome.

So, we would have, you know, ironically, as someone who doesn't, um, you know, really advertise things like project based learning we had my favorite unit that I think I remember teaching in elementary school was BIRDS unit in second grade. And It was all the writing standards, all the sort of things that we would do for reading, etc.

were rooted in [00:14:00] birds. So like their adaptations, and we went like birdwatching in Central Park, but then we would pause in Central Park, and you would have to like write a short response, and you were expected to like remember what was on the anchor chart from the previous day's class. So it was, there was that kind of like newer age part to it, but it was kind of always like, yeah, but what's your data like for these skill, for these skills, this content area?

So it was a mix, I would say. It was a good mix, I think. And they gave us a bit of flexibility of like, okay, yeah, you can drop that effort, celebration, project, museum, walk, if, you know, 50 percent of your class is not meeting the expectation for you know, this part of the math sequence. So, it was a good, it was a good balance in my view.

So, you're you're teaching this curriculum, and are you continuing to [00:15:00] get the, are you still an associate, or at that point, Thank you.

Yeah, so, I joined in the middle of the year, so I was put in a second grade classroom and then six months later, the school year ended and the, you know, the manager has to make a decision. Are you ready to take on your own classroom for the following school year? because you can't really make that decision in a cal in the calendar year, because like, what are you going to do?

You're going to take over someone's classroom. It's just not something that works. And so you kind of have to say, yes, you're ready, or you need an entire extra year in this role as an AT. I was fortunate enough to have a really good lead teacher. She was the grade team lead of second grade, and she coached me up really [00:16:00] well, and I started my first lead teacher role that next school year.

So six months in the summer and then I started my own my own classroom.

Was there any time during this whole associate teacher time that you were being coached that you said, man, this is BS, you know, you know, I, you know, you're not recognizing what I can do. Was there any pushback on your part, either, either overtly or just. internally.

I think I, I want to say that I'm, I feel like I'm really fortunate because having coached like not nearly as much as You obviously, or you know, even in comparison to my being a teacher I, growing up playing sports, I think I can kind of point to that is, you know, you make a pass, I played soccer.

So like you make a pass in soccer and it gets to your teammate. [00:17:00] That's an objective, like reality that everyone sees it. You were successful in that action. If you don't, then you don't. And it's not like personal, it's outside of you, it was successful or not. And so I think that was ingrained in me from like a really young age.

And while you have the, you know, personal feelings, obviously you're a human being of, you know, joy when you're successful. You know, you feel disappointed when you're not. I always kind of internalized it as opposed to externalized it. Um, and so I dealt more with like, I'm never gonna be good at this, or maybe this isn't for me I kind of had like the opposite reaction but yeah, I've seen tons of people, and it's completely understandable, like, you care about this thing, and you conflate that with being good at this thing and when people get into that game, it can be a, it can be a tricky knot to untie.

Well, there was nobody [00:18:00] at your, in your school within this charter system. And you didn't call it a system. What did you call it? A network within the network that hadn't gone through the same process that you had gone through or were going through. That's just the way just the the induction program for you.

Yeah. And so you were, the immersion process, I think was helpful as well in that regard, because the people who were talking to me, there's almost like a lineage. It's like, no, people who came, the people who coached me did this too. And I felt the exact same way you're feeling. And there's sort of a common experience to leverage there.

And that adds to depersonalizing the coaching process. Yeah. Because, you know, you go next door, and the teacher's like, Yep, he said the same thing to me, and I felt very similarly. And then, you know, I bit my tongue, and I did it again, and it worked. And now, I can't believe I thought of it any other way.

[00:19:00] So.

So, so then you became, you graduated out of the associate status, became a teacher, and then how long before you were intern training, training new staff?

So. It wasn't for another two years. After my first year as a lead teacher, I pursued an opportunity to move to middle school within the same charter network. I just felt that intellectually and I think when I got to visit and do a couple of guest lessons for fourth grade, I got to visit a few middle schools just to go see other teachers teach, see what that was like, see where my kids were going and what they needed to be prepared for.

It was these kinds of opportunities the school would provide and encourage. And so when I got to middle school, it is a big learning curve from [00:20:00] elementary to middle, I found. And so I wasn't, I went back to square one. It was like my first year all over again as a lead teacher in sixth grade.

And it wasn't until that following the second time I did sixth grade that I started coaching people.

So what's the difference between being a lead teacher and then coaching?

so I was The person who first trained me, I mentioned that she was a grade team lead of her second grade team. The second year that I taught sixth grade, I became a grade team of the sixth grade. So, in addition to managing like logistics for You know, grade specific homework norms, like what our desks should look like in every single class when the teacher is launching a lesson, just like all of those different things.

In addition to that, you were charged with not coaching in the same way a manager would coach, but more of like a support coach [00:21:00] and a third, you know, I, when the managing or the assistant principal would meet with that teacher on my team, sometimes I would join to kind of add context because I would be in the room sometimes when they weren't.

But more, yeah, more so like a support rather than, hey, I know that you've been working with Andrew and you're still not doing it or, you know, you're doing so much better. That would be the more manager's conversation. But yeah, that's when I first started. So that would be my second, my third year, my third full year teaching.

Second year as a lead teacher.

And so, you got to share every, all that tech training with the new folks. And did you ever get any, um, bad responses from your folks? Any pushback?

I wouldn't say bad responses. In terms of like overtly negative or anything like that, it was more it was more like a yes, [00:22:00] and then they wouldn't follow through on the thing.

Yeah.

or yeah, I think that would be like the one more common response where I'd be like, Oh, they're not going to go and do that. Or I'll come in the next day and I'm like, Oh, they're doing the exact same thing I said is like a big no. Just, you know, and whether it was like intentional or not, it's, you know, we're playing armchair psychologist. But yeah, that was, that's like, that was the big one for me. I never got like, oh, like you're crazy or you know, anything overt like that.

Okay. Okay. So then you you left the network and you went on to teach other places. Did you did you receive any coaching in any of your other jobs? Have you received coaching?

I mean, nothing in comparison. I think by the time I had moved to, out of the network, I had, I think, grown enough to where [00:23:00] I would get observed. And it was more like, you're doing really good. Keep it up. It was more of like an encouragement observation than it was, I'm gonna help, you know, add layers to your practice.

And, you know, that's understandable. There's a, you know, a lot of help that people need in, in a school and you have to do what you can with your, the resources that you have. But yeah I, there's a desert in terms of professional development in, in, in schools outside of this network. And that's been mostly echoed back to me when I've talked with other teachers as well.

Well, it is as you talk about your experience. And the fact that it was intertwined your early experience was actually intertwined with and supported by a university that was sponsoring this. That makes so much sense that, okay, this is what we need to do. We're [00:24:00] going to put you in this situation, and we're going to create the situation to be the best incubator that it can be, that we're going to turn out, that we're going to turn out good teachers.

If you were to give advice to a school about coaching, or if you were going to give advice to a teacher about being coached who didn't want to be coached what might you tell them?

I can't help but feel the pull to approach this Socratically, but, English teacher. So, I guess, question is, like, what is your job as a teacher? What is like your goal functionally? And I would say it's, You need to teach students so that they learn. And one of the ways that we know, like, for a fact that students learn is through modeling.

And if you [00:25:00] model the behavior that you don't believe you can get better at something, that seems to be indirect counter to what your job is, what you're trying to imbue into students. So the question is like, well, what's your job? Your job is to teach. Well, then you should be open to being taught so that you can model the behavior that you want to see. Just, I find it tricky because you basically have to say that in, in so doing you're implying that You're, you know, what do you think you're a know it all kind of thing, but I guess you can always at the end of the day take or leave what someone gives you in terms of advice. But it's really important to check your reaction to what people are telling you, because it probably is coming [00:26:00] from a place, if negative, that's defensive, and therefore, not having anything to do with your goal because it's not about you, it's about The kids in the room.

So if it works, then you should do it, and you can't know if it works. If you have already precluded listening as a part of your engagement with your coach,

Well, Andrew, I spent a lot of time talking about your experience as a young teacher, your experience being coached, because that's my interest. I wanted to know, I wanted to know what you had to say about that. But you have some research you have some interests yourself. Like I said, at the very beginning in the introduction, we met at Research Ed in Denver.

And what was your presentation?

Let's, can you,

I know there's, I know there's, I know there's three D's.

can you do some retrieval practice of the title for your listeners? This, the whole joke was I wanted to be like, really specific about my

Three M's, it's three M's, three M's, right? Three [00:27:00] M's.

So mine was a little bit of a play on Jonathan Swift. So, mine was a mindful proposal, mindfulness, meditation, mitigates, extraneous cognitive load. Yeah. And my my launch this was only after talking to you guys the night before my presentation, I was like, Oh this title, now that I'm saying it out loud is destroying everyone's working memory before I even start my presentation. But basically I started meditating five almost five years ago.

And we always did breathing exercises when I was teaching in New York, we would do breathing exercises just before we would do a test. And I would notice like kids were just, you know, a little bit less stressed just before they took the assessment. And I connected that with my experience. And then I came across an article that said schools were replacing detention with meditation to see how that would work, et cetera.

And I was just like, Oh, I should try this in the classroom. You know, in a more formal way. And so I started just doing five minutes [00:28:00] at the start of every class that I would do. And then this past summer, I sort of, discovered the science of learning which is Again I hope that people don't discover it anymore and it just becomes, you know, the norm, but I then started to do some research on mindfulness and the efficacy of it, you know, more scientifically and its connection to attention.

And then I learned about cognitive load theory and I was like, Oh, there is something definitely to be wedged in here. And so, yeah, my, my presentation was on The connection between attention and mindfulness in the classroom and how things that we get distracted by should be included in our understanding of extraneous cognitive load.

So, things that take up our working memory that have nothing to do with learning. And if you know, take the ideal teacher and student. The teacher is the perfect instructor, perfect behavioral manager. The student is, you know, A never gets in [00:29:00] trouble, always doing their homework, always is tracking, you know, the teacher and doing all their assignments, etc.

That ideal student is still going to get distracted because they're a human being. So what can we do to improve attention more, more directly? Because what you pay attention to is what makes up your life. You know, you can't remember anything that you weren't at some point paying attention to. And so, you know, the phrase comes to mind, you know, as a student at least for me personally, hearing the phrase, pay attention but then never being taught how to actually do that, or what that means, or what that entails.

And it goes, that goes for teachers too. Like, what do we mean when we say this, and how fair is it of us to expect? everyone to pay attention when we don't really know that much about it. And so, you know, the workings of mindfulness is basically retrieving your attention, just like we do retrieval [00:30:00] practice for knowledge.

You explicitly practice the getting distracted, noticing that you're distracted, and bringing your attention back to the thing that you're trying to focus on, which is the present moment, because where does your life unfold? In the present, where do you learn in the present? And so it's good. I'm arguing to exist explicitly teach this skill.

And, you know, the feedback that I've gotten from students is great. And now I'm just trying to learn more and potentially, you know, develop a curriculum for this.

So let's back up a little bit to, to clarify. So you do a meditation with your students every day at the beginning of class. And now meditation and mindfulness, those are two, two terms that mean a lot of different things to different people. So when you talk about a meditation that you do, it's a guided meditation.

They're [00:31:00] led through it

Yeah, so,

as a way to direct notice where your attention is. Let's bring it back, type of, it's like a,

yeah, so, mindfulness, I guess, if you think about it, we are constantly meditating, always, there's always something that we are meditating on. The goal is to be aware of what you are meditating on, and so, that's what mindfulness is, the awareness of the contents of your mind. The way to do that very simply is to practice choosing an object to, of your awareness to focus your attention on.

And the most common one is the breath. So you're, you know, it's always available to you. It's simple. It's like physically easy to recognize. And, yes, you're just sitting, being guided being sort of prompted [00:32:00] periodically to bring your attention back to your breath, and that repetition serves students and, you know, anyone who does it like later on when they do get distracted in their normal day to day life, they have that repetition to fall back on to reorient what they're choosing to pay attention to.

well, here is one of the most interesting things about my experience getting to know you, Andrew is hearing your story about being coached about how to get kids line up straight, how to get kids line, you know, get through the door, get to their seats, what's on your desk. And then, on the other hand, let's talk about mindfulness and we're going to start the class with meditation.

I couldn't think of two more disparate things, yet you, that's what you're talking about in what you're researching, is bringing those things together, is that they are complementary and not contradictory.

[00:33:00] Yeah, it's it, I think it, it's more of a commentary on bigger discourse around you know, behavioral management in one, on one side meditation on the other. And what's in between is what people I think tend to be confused about is no, behavioral management is so that we are doing the things that have nothing to do with learning like as quickly as possible so that we open more time for the actual learning, like no one cares that you stand like this in line, it's just when everyone does it that way, we gain five minutes for math workshop.

over the course of a year, that's maybe an entire unit that we've added. And similarly, mindfulness is not about like reaching some sort of enlightenment or in so far as I think about it. Obviously their meditation is kind of like sports. There are you know, I use the example like badminton has nothing to do with football, but we consider them both [00:34:00] sports.

So this has nothing to do with. What people, I think, tend to think it has to do with, it's just practicing your attention, not for any other reason other than when you then go on to do math workshop, you now have better attention, and you now are opening up more time to learn more things.

Well, and attention is Something that has been stolen, I dunno if that's the right word, but as we take a look at the research on screen time you know, social media, all of those things, how long kids can actually attend to anything, or myself, you know, I'm always worried about, you know, what's going on.

I just got an alert and having to it. It seems like it could be part of that detox of from our addiction to social media. And now that I said that, you know, to our addiction, I think, you know, in all [00:35:00] programs, you know, when we are trying to rehab some, we are trying to, I'm not trying to rehab anybody, but when people are rehabbing mindfulness and relaxing the mind, and, you know, these types of techniques are what is part of the program.

And so I can see that it fitting in that as well as just part of an SEL program.

Yeah I mean, any Anytime that you are feeling badly, it's because there is a thought that, there's a thought and the content of that thought is upsetting, and you were hijacked by that thought. you in that moment were confused as to who you were as opposed to the thought that you were embodying. And you all of a sudden become the valence and you know, character of that thought.

So a sad thought makes you sad. [00:36:00] But when you are paying attention, you can notice that the character of that thought before you become the quality of that thought. And that's kind of the. advantage that I think you're referring to that you gain when you've been practicing this because your attention isn't hijacked by that thought.

And then to connect that to the social media aspect, it's You're not hijacked by the impulse to go check your phone, right? These are all thoughts that kind of slip by our attention. And then all of a sudden we look up at the clock and an hour has gone by and we don't even remember the time spent. And so I think it's more than, I think.

It's more than just being damaged by social media. It's an inherent, not flaw per se, but a bug of the design because we want our, we want attention to bias important information and [00:37:00] de prioritize. other information. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to do anything. We'd be paralyzed. It's just our, our focus our flashlight of attention is often taken from us without us even knowing that it's been taken.

Until again, we look up at the clock and we're like, Oh, have I been doom scrolling for an hour and a half? What happened? And how do I fix that? And relying on social media to make it less seductive is. Is not a good strategy, that's for sure.

Well, Andrew, I am looking forward to your additional work in that. And I think the people are going to see, you know, why I wanted to have you as a guest. You're just an interesting guy with a lot of diverse thoughts out there.

Do you have any questions for me? (Question for Gene)

Yeah, I was wondering if you are going to be doing anything in relation to, like, real time teacher [00:38:00] coaching? Cause I know that you were asking me about that, and you seemed, there was a sparkle in your eye, I remember.

Well, I was approached by by somebody who was thinking about doing a project where basically there would be a, the teacher would have an earpiece, and they would be attached to AI, and AI would be the coach, and you know, with, there would be, the AI would have access to video going on in the classroom, and they could, you know, They could say things like, Oh, check Andrew in the back row.

He's not paying attention or, you know, or, you know, we're not sure that kids understood what was going on. And I was a little bit, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that much real time because when you're learning, when you're learning to be a teacher, it is [00:39:00] so complex. There's so much going on and your attention.

You, your attention can't be dispersed early when you're in your later when you become more expert in the classroom, your peripheral vision increases, you're able to see more things to get to try to make a point. You're trying to make a point in a lesson, and then you get something in your ear.

I I don't know. I don't know if that's a good thing. Now, reflecting on it after I think that's a good thing. The other thing that, that I do when I'm coaching, I may step in if I see a teacher if there's something that I can straighten out. Like, sometimes you as a teacher, something goes bad, And then it just kind of cascades, and it gets worse and worse.

If I can step in at a certain point and get things back on track, I call that real time coaching. But I want it to be overt [00:40:00] and something that is the teacher can see without a lot of discussion about it in the moment, if that makes sense. Like if I do something and I have to explain it then it doesn't work.

Let me give you an example of that. When I am doing an instructional cycle, a learning cycle, coaching cycle with a teacher and we planned a lesson and now we go into the classroom and the teacher is doing it. Performing the lesson. There are times when the teacher has been doing a great job.

They've been doing a great job. And I will go up and say, you know what, this was so good. You know, the next time you ask that checking for understanding question, why don't you tweak it a little bit and ask them that and see what you can get. Nine out of ten times the teacher will just ignore me. I bothered them.

They were on a roll. Why did you interrupt me when I was on a roll? And so I've learned to keep [00:41:00] my mouth shut. That was a long answer to, I don't think that real time coaching unless the teacher is very expert Is going to be useful. I think it's going to be more distracting than useful.

Yeah, I, yeah. You know, I don't know too much about AI, but it seems from my perspective to be very far from I would imagine ever being able to work in that regard. Having a robot tell you something with enough, you know, like deftness to not, yeah, like unravel the lesson almost immediately.

I can imagine it like skipping and being like, you know, you take out the earpiece in three seconds.

Yeah. Well, and my belief about instruction is it never has to be perfect. I mean, that's why we have formative assessments. That's why we check for understanding. Maybe my explanation wasn't perfect but kids mostly got it. And [00:42:00] We'll do some, we'll do some fixing of what they didn't get the next day, but we just don't have to be 100%.

I think 75 to 80 percent effective teaching a well designed lesson, and the kids are going to, kids are going to get it. You can always do better. Things can

Yeah the, you aim for the bullseye. That's, you aim for a hundred percent. That's the Another conflation that I think people can sometimes make it's like, oh, you want things to be perfect. It's like, well, yeah, I don't expect it to be perfect, but I expect you to like strive for that because what else are you going to be striving for?

Yeah, absolutely. Andrew, it was it was a lot of fun. Hope it was fun for you

All right. And and we'll stay in touch and have a great day.

You too, sir. Have a good one.

Bye bye.

If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend. Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can follow me [00:43:00] 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.

Talk to you soon!