Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works

Gene Tavernetti: 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 I'm excited to do another episode about literacy, specifically writing, and my guest today is Sherry Lefkowitz.

And Sherry began her career as a high school teacher in Bronx, New York, where she spent eight years teaching 10th and 11th grade English and AP literature.

Since then, she's worked at three education nonprofits and her work at all of them focused on improving writing instruction.

Sherry's a firm believer in the power of direct scaffolded writing instruction embedded in the content.

Students are learning to change outcomes for students and for the teachers who support them.

She holds a master's in teaching from Brown University and lives in New York City with her son and daughter.

Hello, Sherry, it is great to see you again.

How are things in New York?

Sherry Lewkowitz: Fantastic.

Great to see you Jean.

Gene Tavernetti: Well, I've been looking forward to having you on because, One of my big interests based on my experience in working with, with schools, you know, for the past 20 years, is that writing instruction and writing in general, there's a lot of room for improvement.

wanted to have you on to talk about your experiences in the past and what you're doing now.

in the introduction, we.

You know, we let everybody know that you had been a high school teacher what did you find, and you were teaching AP as well,

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: so I'm curious about the writing in the regular classes and also in the ap.

What did you find that was going on that kind of put you on this path to improvement?

Sherry Lewkowitz: It's, I, I like thinking back to those days.

So I, I started my career as a, a teacher in the New York City Public Schools.

I taught in a high school in the Bronx, uh, really amazing school that served students from all over the world, over 45 languages spoken.

and I mostly taught 11th and 12th grade and then AP literature.

and one of the things that was.

Quite shocking, honestly, in the beginning was seeing students in AP literature who, you know, on the appear on, in their appearance in terms of like what they looked like, I don't mean physically, but like how they presented as students.

You'd think like they had it all, they could, they could speak clearly.

They were, you know, insightful, analytical.

They did their homework, they showed up, and then you'd read the writing and it was like, wait, what?

What happened here?

And, you know, I laugh, but it was, it's really very sad.

And then, and I remember one girl, I remember one girl coming to me after school once and being like, miss, I, I really wanna do well in your class and I wanna do these essays, but, like, I don't know what I'm doing.

You know?

She basically was like, I have no idea how to even start.

And it was like, oh, okay.

And I remember trying to like, on the spot.

Start from the beginning, you know, stepped like maybe three and try to explain how to write an essay to her.

And it was like, how did it get this way?

How can they be in 12th grade about to go to college And they don't know how to write, forget about an essay.

They don't write a paragraph or a sentence.

It was really, it was shocking.

and yeah, I think ever since then I've just, and you know, I, I came out of college.

I had studied English as an English major, like I was, I was a book nerd.

And so writing always, you know, I was lucky that writing came easily to me.

Reading came easily lit, tomy.

And so the idea that like other kids were not being taught this and not mastering this, it really, it's, it disturbed me and it, it kind of never left me.

And I think ever since I left the classroom, I've been working on that.

Gene Tavernetti: So you've been, you've been working on that and you work with teachers, you do training with teachers as well.

Correct.

So what, what do you, what do you think is, is lacking?

Is there something in common?

Because I will tell you this, I. again, for the past 20 years as I've been doing this work, I have found in elementary there have been, and this is a big generalization of course, but there are two areas of, weakness in subject matter in general from elementary teachers, and it is math, which is one, and writing.

what did you find, or what have you found in working with, with those teachers that.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah, so you're hitting on like my, what I like to call my favorite new Ted talk, Ted talk topic that I, I have like one day I'm gonna do a TED talk on this, which is that I think elementary school and high schools have opposite problems.

So I came from the high school world, and so I think the problem there is a lot like the story I just told you, right?

We were teaching our content.

My colleagues taught history.

They taught AP bio, they taught physics.

They were super into their content, which is a beautiful, wonderful thing.

But the, the danger of being super into your content is that you are not paying enough attention to skills, and especially when you're teaching kids who are coming to you with.

2, 3, 4 years behind grade level.

If you're not thinking about skills and how they're accessing what you're teaching, the wonderful things that you're teaching, right?

They're not gonna get it.

And so I think that's the problem often at the high school level.

And then for the English teachers who are thinking about skills, they're not thinking about the foundational skills.

They're thinking, I'm gonna teach them analysis.

I'm gonna teach 'em how to do a work cited and a research paper.

And they're still needing help with sentences.

Right?

So that's the problem there.

And then in elementary school, and this, I only learned after leaving.

Teaching and being in schools and seeing elementary schools, which I, I truly believe elementary schools are like a different world to high schools.

It is.

So, it's such a different place.

Anyway, so in elementary schools, you have the problem that everything's about skills.

It's the opposite problem.

All the teachers think that their job is to teach skills, you know, finding the main idea.

Defining vocabulary through context clues like everything's about skills and nobody cares about content, and nobody cares about building kids knowledge.

And it's the, it's the most backwards thing.

It's like the high.

I have this vision where the high school teachers will go and train the elementary school teachers to talk about content, and then the elementary school teachers will teach the high school teachers to talk about skills to teach skills.

Gene Tavernetti: Oh, do they have the, do they have the prerequisite knowledge in writing to be able to teach it?

or is that something that needs to get worked on?

Sherry Lewkowitz: no, of course they don't.

And that is 100% not their fault.

I went to a, a, you know, supposedly very good.

Graduate school and much of what I did there was fantastic and I learned a lot, but there were certain things that were really missing that now, you know, I don't know how many, I'm getting older now, how many years I've been out that I look back and I go, how is that not.

Like day one or day two.

So for example, the science of learning, which, you know, I know Jean, I know you through research, the research ed community.

Like when I found research ed, that was my sort of waking up and realizing there was this whole body of research about how kids learn.

I. That I had not been taught that you would think would be like step one for any teacher.

and then step two, maybe I would argue, or maybe three would be I, yeah, step two would probably be how kids learn to read specifically because it's so foundational.

And then step three would've been how kids learn to write and how do we teach writing because it is such a huge.

Part of reading.

and all, all of those, like the, the explicit kind of building blocks of each of those were missing.

And, and I know that that's what happens for all teachers.

Nobody goes into teaching thinking, I'm gonna do a bad job.

Right.

They're all there to help kids.

It's, they're not there for the, the salary, that's for sure.

So, it's definitely not on teachers.

I do think our teacher prep programs, uh, have a ways to go.

They're getting, they're getting there.

I think they're starting to wake up, but, yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: okay, so we talk about, content in the, in high school.

You know, teachers are very intent on, on teaching, on teaching content, and, I'm old enough to remember where, when you know, it was known, it became very well known with, we were doing so much more assessment that kids were not doing well in reading, writing basic skills, in literacy skills, and so it was announced every teacher.

Is a reading teacher.

Every teacher is a writing teacher, and there was all sorts of PD done for, for these, for the content area people.

what was lacking.

I mean, because that's the work you do now, right?

You work, you work,

Sherry Lewkowitz: why are we still doing that?

Haven't we figured that out yet?

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

Yeah.

What was it?

Was it again, was it another one of those things that we weren't adequately trained or was it a, uh, needed a mind shift?

From with the idea that it's not just content, it's how do you express,

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah, I mean.

Gene Tavernetti: express themselves?

Sherry Lewkowitz: It's a really good question.

I feel like you could ask this question about so many things in education reform, right?

Like, there's so many things that I feel like I'm sure you see as, as you get older, that you're like, haven't we had this debate already?

Like, didn't we settle this?

How are we still having this debate?

Like learning styles, like we're still talking about that.

you know, things like that.

I, I feel like the idea that every teacher teaches literacy is one of those that like, how is it that we're still convincing people, but, but we are.

And why?

I Gosh, I think, I think we probably came at it the wrong way.

We probably came at it as, as a like finger wagging, Hey, math teachers and social studies teachers.

You're over there being all selfish, caring about your content and you haven't been teaching literacy, which is like, of course not.

What's going on?

it's, they're being held, right?

They're being held accountable to kids passing these tests, which are all about content and dare I say, sometimes regurgitation.

So writing is not valued on those tests.

I mean.

Just to give an example of this, I knew a teacher who would teach her kids explicitly teach her kids do not write, short answer answers on the New York State test in full sentences.

Why?

Because it would waste their time.

They only got points for the correctness of the, of the topic of the knowledge.

So it didn't matter at all how their writing was.

So she would literally say, and was she wrong to say that?

No.

She wanted her kids to pass the test that mattered for their lives and for the school.

So the incentives weren't there.

And then, and then to have someone come to you and be like, you're not focusing on literacy enough.

Like, that must feel awful.

Um, so I do feel like some of it is like a, a pr like how we, how we communicated that.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

this is kind of your life now, isn't it?

I mean, you, I mean, we met at research ed and can you talk a little bit about.

You're what you've been presenting recently at at research ed.

I think it kind of fits in what we're talking about.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah, thank you for the intro.

I'd love to.

so I work at an organization called Teaching Lab.

Um, teaching Lab is a national nonprofit.

Their focus is on providing professional coaching and professional learning for teachers and school districts implementing.

I. Um, high quality instructional materials.

I'm not gonna say HQIM because I myself a few years ago was like, what is HQIM?

So high quality instructional materials, which is another way of saying curriculum, high quality curriculum.

Um, so that is their focus.

I am part of a kind of a unique part of the organization called the Teaching Lab Studio.

And the Teaching Lab Studio was designed to really respond to the innovation that was happening in AI and make sure that what.

Was created.

Um, 'cause as you know how it goes in ed tech, there's a lot of things created, solving problems that nobody has, and trying to make a profit.

And so the idea was we need to be, as a nonprofit, we need to be close to teachers and, and value what teachers are experiencing and make sure we understand deeply, or rather leverage the fact that we understand deeply what their needs are and build tools that solve real problems.

All this is a long story to say.

The writing Pathway is part of Teaching Labs Studio.

It actually, uh, started, it predates the studio.

and basically we started with funding from the Gates Foundation to create a free open source scope and sequence for teaching writing that could be used across the content areas.

Uh, originally it was grade seven through 10.

So that was the project.

Unfortunately, about two years into the funding, which started as a research project, um, gates pivoted and decided that they were focusing on STEM and math and all of their literacy.

Projects got stopped.

And so the pathway, this is before my time, but this is the story.

So the pathway almost died.

and very, very luckily then, um, Sarah Johnson, who's the CEO of teaching lab, who knew about the project, said, you know what?

This is a really interesting, important project.

They can come, let them come to teaching lab and we'll, we'll keep this work going.

And then we became part of the studio kind of in an or another organic story.

but what I'd like to point out is that the writing pathway did not start.

As an AI or ed tech product.

Um, it had no tech at all in the beginning unless you count a Google spreadsheet as tech, which I guess it is.

But it started as a giant Google spreadsheet and it was just a list of lessons.

And the goal was to figure out what are the most important writing skills foundational all the way up till res to research papers if the kids really need.

And we thought about, okay, there's 180 days in the year, you probably are not gonna be able to teach writing every day if you taught writing for a hundred days of the year.

What would you teach?

What would be most important?

and that was kinda the idea and we mapped that out.

And then along the way, in the studio there was a, a gentleman named Josh Ling, who's incredible and who had the brilliant idea, who said, you know, AI can create this, these materials for teachers in the content that they're teaching, which is what we were training teachers to do.

And he said, you don't need to train teachers to do that.

You can train the AI to do that for teachers.

and so that's how they, the pathway became kind of ai, an AI tool, but it was originally a, a scope and sequence and not, there was no AI in the very beginning.

So, yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay, well, let's back up a little bit.

let's go way back before ai, like six months ago or whenever it was.

this writing program was a standalone program

and uh, it was for the content areas as well as the English language arts teachers.

Correct.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Exactly.

So it started out that the goal was to create a scope and sequence that English teachers.

Then primarily you're focused on English teacher, social studies teachers and science teachers in grade seven through 10 could use this in their content so that they could truly be literacy teachers, but without having to, to figure that out themselves, right.

Without that like thumb wagging, you know, finger wagging, and without actually providing them what they needed to be able to do it.

So that, that was how it started.

And then over time it's expanded, uh, up and down and you know, it's gotten bigger.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay.

Okay, so the, curriculum was a standalone curriculum.

They could get it and use it, it worked with whatever they were doing.

is that something is, is writing usually in the curriculum that a school might purchase these days?

And is that a conflict or, how do, how do you guys handle that?

Sherry Lewkowitz: This is a really important question.

So first of all, I would say it's not a curriculum.

I would say it's an approach and the idea of everything we made was always that it was an overlay.

I think that's the best word for this.

Like, it makes me think of the, remember the transparencies we used to use?

Okay.

I think of it like that for, for the younger teachers, they will be like, I don't know what she means, but it was a, a clear piece of paper that went on top of another paper and it was an overlay, so it didn't, you still had underneath the foundation, which would be the curriculum, so whatever their, the teachers are teaching, whether that's.

A district created curriculum, which, you know, once you get into high school, there's very little standardized curriculum.

It's mostly people teaching.

These are the books that I teach and this is the content that I teach.

So whatever that is, you take that and then you overlay the pathway on top of it.

Or if you are in a place where you're using, you know, an expeditionary learning or a wit and wisdom or whatever curriculum, you're overlaying it onto that.

Now, in that case, I will, I will be honest with you, it's more complicated because those standardized HQIM.

High quality instructional materials do all incorporate writing to some degree, right?

There's always writing in there, but what we generally hear over and over from teachers is that either the writing instruction that's there is not enough, it's not high quality enough.

It's not what their kids need, or they never get to it.

There's so much else in the curriculum.

These curriculum are so bloated that writing is like the last thing that that always gets cut and left, you know, left on the chopping blah.

That's not the right expression.

Anyway, it gets cut.

So we feel like the pathway offers folks a way to bring writing back in.

Without having to, not, without having to use a different curriculum.

but it's true that it is, it is not the, the simplest thing when you're already using something else like that.

And that's a lot of the work that we do in our professional learning is helping teachers to do that work.

Gene Tavernetti: I'm thinking of working with, with elementary teachers and, uh, elementary teachers If you were gonna put them on a continuum, from, you know, from element starting, especially in kindergarten, who are different, different breed than they have to be.

And then you get to middle school, which has to be a different breed of teachers as well.

They're the goofiest, right?

they're the, you know, that's probably who, that's probably who you hang out with at the conferences and you know, and then you get to the, they, you get to the AP folks who.

All, the only thing they talk about is, oh, oh, we gotta get this content done for the test.

So if you take a look at that, at that curriculum, the el at the curriculum, that spectrum, the elementary teachers are the, are most compliant.

they wanna do what's right.

And so here, you and your group comes in to talk about an overlay.

But what most, textbook companies are great at.

Are the pd, which is probably 50% sales job

Sherry Lewkowitz: Mm-hmm.

Gene Tavernetti: of why, I mean, it's so sophisticated, it's so good.

And now you have to come in after and say, oh no, you could continue to do that.

This is just the overlay.

how do you do that?

Not only with the teachers, but with the with administrators?

Sherry Lewkowitz: Jean, you gotta ask the tough questions.

Huh?

it's not easy.

I mean, this is, this is, you have hit the nail on like our biggest challenge, which, which is this curriculum piece.

There's a bunch of ways we're trying to get at it.

One is that, we have focused a bit more on middle school and high school, where there tends to be less of these curriculum implementations.

And as you said, the teachers are a bit more open to changing up the way they do things and not following a, a particular kind of script.

That's one thing that we've done.

And we've had, we've also, so I, I didn't, I didn't even mention the fact, which is like the most, one of the most important things I'm most proud of, which is that we did two years of research on this thing.

Um, so this whole thing started as a research project, before it was ever a website or any, any in any way launched to the public.

There was two years, actually, two years plus of research with teachers across the country using, creating this, building it and then using it, um, and testing for outcomes.

So that's a big piece of it because what we found in the research was that, uh, we had especially good impact.

We had impact across the board, but especially big impact in middle school particularly.

Actually, we just looked at the data the other day, eighth grade, over seventh grade, which I have no idea what to make of that.

But I mean, these are fairly small numbers, so maybe nothing is to made of that.

But, um, but definitely middle school over.

Uh, high school we saw bigger gains.

So we have kind of focused on middle school as a sweet spot.

The other way we're getting at this is that, we're looking at the curriculum.

So for example, I'm in New York City, um, so in New York City right now we have New York City Reads, which is an initiative that's requiring all schools K through eight to use one of three ELA curriculum.

so we're looking at those and seeing can we maybe design a version of the pathway?

'cause right now the pathway is curriculum agnostic.

Content agnostic.

You can use it with anything, but maybe there's a version of the pathway that is specifically designed for one of those curricula.

Um, so that it is.

So the teacher doesn't have to figure out where do I overlay this and what do I cut and, right, because the, the reality is you can't add something without taking something out.

Like, we have to be honest about that.

So that's the work that's happening right now.

I'm very excited about it.

It's early, but I think that that's, it's necessary because of the question that you, you asked.

Gene Tavernetti: Well, one of the things that mentioned in your, in your introduction you're a firm in direct scaffolded.

Writing instruction.

Alright, so, so my work over the past 20 plus years has been training teachers in explicit instruction.

And explicit instruction is one of those terms that we hear.

Okay, well I do explicit instruction.

Well, you might be doing it, but not very well, So I'm thinking I have one thing to do.

I need to, I am content agnostic and we're gonna talk about explicit instruction in your content area, but your content agnostic, working with somebody who may not be doing explicit instruction well, and now you have to train them.

And how does, how do you guys work that out?

Sherry Lewkowitz: I know there's so much to do.

Right.

you know, you're reminding me, and I hope I'm not steering, veering off too far from the question, but I just attended, you know, Zach, Rochelle, right?

Gene Tavernetti: I know Zach, you know what, in fact is drinking game.

You have to take a shot.

Now if

Sherry Lewkowitz: oh, okay.

Here I got water.

So, Zach, Rochelle, has, is working with step lab.

And they were recently, I, I saw on in, you know, LinkedIn, wherever it was that they were doing a session, a full day PD in Inwood.

And I live in Washington Heights, like 15 minutes from Inwood.

Um, so when I saw that, I was like, okay, I gotta go to this.

Like, what are the, what are, because I don't think they're around in the, I feel like it's mostly UK based, so I was excited that they were in my neighborhood.

So,

Gene Tavernetti: a big, just just a quick plug.

Don't lose your train of thought.

Zach is the North America Director of Step Lab, so they're bringing it to the states.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Which is so exciting.

Okay, so I went to this session because I was just so curious what, what they're doing, and big, big surprise.

I was, I was totally impressed.

It was an excellent, excellent day.

What is the point?

The point is that in their session, so this was a full day session.

All of it was about pedagogy.

All of it was about teacher moves and, and how do you handle this and how do you present this?

And, practice lots and lots of practice, direct instruction, probably the stuff that you do with teachers.

and at the end, I, I went up and asked, Josh, I think his name is Josh.

And I said, you know, this was, this was fabulous, but you didn't say one word about curriculum.

And in the examples that you gave all the teachers, like there was this assumption in all the videos where we were providing feedback, there was an assumption that like the what of what they were teaching was the right what?

Like they showed vocabulary lesson, I forget the vocabulary word, but it's like we're all just assuming that that word was a, a good choice of a word to teach that class of students when maybe it wasn't, He said he made this face like, uh, like I know, you know, like obviously.

So basically the answer is of course, curriculum is the foundation and then there's the pedagogy piece.

And I think because it's from the UK and they have such a more standardized curriculum there, it's not as much of an issue.

So they've been able to really focus on the pedagogy, the delivery, right.

Which is its own whole world.

I think in the, in the US.

We're still figuring out the curriculum piece.

So we're, we're trying to do both.

We're trying to do the curriculum piece and the pedagogy piece at the same time, which is really hard.

I would say in our work, we're also trying to get at both, right?

We're trying to use writing as a, a vehicle for the curriculum to make the cu curriculum more rigorous and more meaty and more sticky.

But then we're also trying to teach teachers like the how of how to do this in the classroom.

So it's a lot.

It's a lot.

Gene Tavernetti: it is a. Lot.

And, um, you know, you've been to research ed, they may have mentioned, uh, cognitive load theory once or twice

Sherry Lewkowitz: I think I've heard of,

Gene Tavernetti: and, and thinking about, you know, so where do we start?

Which thing is more important if we do it at the same time, the confusion there in addition to somebody else, no, they can't see this, you know, but there's somebody else above, above our heads, which is the publisher saying, well, don't blame us if you don't.

You know?

uh, implement with fidelity.

So, lots of stuff going on.

You have lots of, lots of challenges.

you'll figure it out.

so I'm really curious, you know, what, what the, you are doing with the role of ai, uh, in, in writing.

Uh, how is that, how are you, how are you utilizing that?

Uh.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah.

And this is where, you know, I, I feel like I was, I was talking about like we have so much to do and it's, it is so much, but the AI piece is really where I do, I get excited because, and, and I'm not naive.

I think there's lots about AI that we have to be super careful about.

I'm particularly wary of AI that interacts directly with students.

I think it's a little, it's early days for that.

that said, I think there are some products being really thoughtful and careful about it, but in general, I'm a little bit wary of that.

But what I get excited about is the possibility for AI to help teachers who are adults, right, who already have, um, enough expertise, I think, to interact with something like AI and decide.

Do I wanna use this with my kids or not?

Is this the right thing or not?

but it can save them so much time, so, so much time.

And they have so little time.

So, to be specific, what, what our tool does is a teacher will come to the pathway, and I wish, I wish this is the first time I want it to be video, so I could show you.

But they would go to the pathway, they would see the skills, so they're chunked out as sentence skills and then paragraphs and beyond, and then broken down further within there.

Let's say I teach science and I am doing a lesson on photosynthesis, and I also know my students are struggling with their sentence skills.

I can go into the pathway, I can pick one of the complex sentence skills.

So for example, maybe I pick, uh, subordinating conjunctions, and for those.

Those out there who are like, what the heck is that?

Um, these are just words like since, or although or when, um, usually used in text at the beginning of a sentence.

Uh, although in our speech we tend to use 'em in the middle.

it's a structure that makes for complex sentences that we wanna explicitly teach kids.

They're not, most of them are not just gonna discover this and start doing it on their own unless we teach it explicitly so that that science teacher can come to the pathway, say, I'm teaching photosynthesis.

They type that into the, a little field.

Click, uh, their grade level.

That's the only other thing they need to tell us.

So I'm teaching ninth grade photosynthesis, and boom, the pathway will generate practice with those subordinate in conjunction.

So things like, uh, since flowers need, I'm making this up, but since flowers need sunlight to grow comma blank, so it gives them these sentence stems where they're completing them, you're giving them that scaffold of the beginning of the sentence with the sentence structure that you want them to use in the content that they're learning.

Then they're completing that, and then the teacher also gets an answer key.

They also get a guide for how to do this in terms of the instruction.

and so the literally hours that would've been spent for a teacher who wants to do this, where they're looking at their content and overlaying these strategies into their content, they do not need to do that anymore.

the AI does it for them, is it, is it a hundred percent perfect all of the time?

No, but it's about 97% of the way there.

it's pretty amazing.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay.

Two, two que two questions.

the first one having to do with, as you described that to me, you can at the end you said, uh, and we helped the teacher learn how to teach this, but as you were describing it, it sounds like practice.

Like, like a lot of what you're doing is providing practice, uh, for the content area teachers, boy, I'm doing a lot of generalization up end of one.

But, they don't necessarily have to have taught these, writing elements.

It would've been something brought in from, uh, their language arts and here is a, here's how we can practice it.

Here's a practical application of using this writing strategy that you learned.

Sherry Lewkowitz: so here's the, like, least optimal implementation of our tool, which I would argue is still better than nothing.

Okay?

So least optimal would be that science teacher is using this all by herself and uses it maybe once or twice a week.

prints out a worksheet, hands it to kids, says do this for homework, and that's it.

Is that gonna lead to impact?

Probably not.

Is it better probably than what they were doing before?

Probably I would, argue.

so kind of, you know, neutral, ideally, and this is where we work with schools and districts.

Ideally, it's not just the science teacher, right?

It's the whole school.

Into is, is focused on writing instruction across the content areas.

The English teachers are leading the charge, so they do the direct instruction on the strategy.

They're the ones that explain what a subordinate conjunction is, why we need to learn how to put it at the beginning of a sentence.

Why writers do that, right?

They teach that, which you can teach in one lesson.

I mean, it's not complicated.

Okay?

So the English teacher does that, and then once the English teacher has done that, all the other subject areas, and not just social studies, not just science.

The, the health teacher, the music teacher, the language teacher, anybody can use these strategies and they don't have to, it's not a whole lesson, right?

It could be an exit ticket that you do two days a week, but you're using these strategies and so students start to pick it up and they pick it up so much more quickly because there's this coherence and cohesiveness around how we talk about writing and how we write about what we're learning.

that's the vision and that's what we see.

So in our study we had where we had schools of teacher, uh, groups of teachers that were.

We had a, a one team in particular, that was all, I think they were all ninth grade.

Um, but all different content areas, which you don't see a lot, you don't see a lot of like PLC kind of work with, with cross content areas.

And people are often like, oh, the math teacher is never gonna play nice with the social.

It's like they really valued having time together.

We met once a month for an hour on Zoom.

We talked about writing instruction and we talked about student writing and how to evaluate it and what to do next.

and we had a consistent approach and those kids made gains.

I mean it is like, of course they did.

Like they write.

It's a no brainer.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay.

So that was the, that was the first question.

getting back to our research ed roots here, you and I, that almost sounded like retrieval practice, what the, what they were doing in the classes.

So that's one thing with regards to AI that, that it can do.

So here's another question, and I don't know if your company does this.

Or not, or maybe I'm just asking for your opinion about this because I see a lot of, teachers write about, they post in social media about using AI to evaluate, initially evaluate student writing.

You know, they provide a rubric to, to the whatever AI.

Platform they're using and, uh, they report that the kids get a lot of benefit from this type of, from this type of feedback.

Then they continue to revise.

And what, what, what do you, what do you think of that?

Do you, are you guys doing any of that, uh, yet,

Sherry Lewkowitz: I mean, let's just be real, right?

Like, that is so legitimate.

I mean, I, I taught high school English, the, the amount I, I taught English before I had children, and I often say to other teachers who have kids, I do not think I could have, I don't, I would not have made it.

If I had children and had to grade the way that I used to grade, I used to spend my entire weekend, my entire weeknights, braiding papers.

It takes an enormous amount of time to do that Well, and I didn't even do it that well.

Right.

So that is very real.

And I think the fact that they're, they're leveraging AI and looking to AI for support with that makes perfect sense.

I also think we do have to be really careful, um, and thoughtful.

We are, first of all, we're giving AI kids work, right?

It's their written work.

So there's, there's privacy in those issues there.

and then there's also the part that makes me most nervous, which is that, and probably the part that makes you nervous, right?

Is that teachers.

Stop doing this work entirely and completely farm out the reading of work and the assessing of work.

And that's really dangerous because then you have teachers who don't have that internal sense of what their kids are doing in their writing and what they're learning.

And, and that's, that's not good.

Right.

But I do think there's a middle ground to be had.

I do think there are some really exciting products out there doing some of this work.

So, uh, one of the products actually, that's part of the.

Uh, studio at Teaching Lab is called Enlighten ai.

Enlighten ai.

Um, they're doing this work, they're being super thoughtful about it.

one of the things that's actually really brilliant about what they do is, The AI helps the teacher score, but the teacher basically scores with the ai.

Almost like if you had a teaching assistant and the AI was your teaching assistant, so you're scoring with them and you're kind of like, oh, no, no, I wouldn't give them credit for that, or I would give them credit for that.

Right?

Like you're teaching the ai and they do that with five papers and once they've done that with five papers, the AI basically then takes over.

But it kind of keeps the human, keeps the teacher in the, in the loop of that process in I think a really important way.

So that's really interesting and it gives really.

Pretty, uh, solid feedback.

They've, they've found, I think recently they did some research where they're finding, accuracy rates of the ai, like interrater reliability, even higher than human interrelated.

It, it,

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah, I can imagine that.

Sherry Lewkowitz: another one I'll just really quickly mention, do you know Daisy Kris Dolo?

She's to, she's been at many research eds.

She's incredible.

They're doing really, really cool, innovative work with this stuff too.

Um, using.

Uh, audio feedback from teachers that then the AI compiles.

So I think the people who are doing this right are thinking about how do we make sure the teacher is part of the process and not left out.

But I do think there's a way to do it.

I will say we are also looking into it.

it is, it is early days, but we have something that we are pretty excited about and we'll hopefully be launching in the fall.

Gene Tavernetti: Oh, I think, I think a lot of benefit from that, from this immediate feedback versus you having to take your papers home and work all night and, and probably, two nights or maybe, you know, that time lag in between the time the, the student wrote it.

It could be, it could be long.

And seems like there's a

Sherry Lewkowitz: it gets to them, they don't even remember what they wrote.

They're like,

Gene Tavernetti: and they don't and they don't care.

It was, it was, it was, it was an assignment.

So I think that's a big part of, in, in my mind, a big part of why, this makes sense to me to have that immediate feedback is.

We're tricking kids into making the revisions in a sense, which is to me where that's the most, the most difficult thing to tell.

Somebody said you're not a good writer just because you are able to write it in your first draft.

Sherry Lewkowitz: right.

Gene Tavernetti: And I, and I think that's one of the, the things that I see.

Going back to elementary teachers and writing, okay, see, okay, we're gonna do a, we're gonna do an outline.

Now we're gonna do a, you know, but.

Sherry Lewkowitz: It's.

Gene Tavernetti: Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

First draft, second draft.

Well, we don't know how many drafts it's gonna take, and I think, well, we know how many drafts it's gonna take.

That's how many times I'm gonna take it home.

So now, if we have AI doing it, and now you're really beginning to be an a writer.

I mean, you listen to writers and the, you know, say, oh yeah, I, I may edit it 20 times.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Okay,

Right.

And I love, I love this point because I, I think it's so true.

I think kids so often think that being a good writer means that you sit down and write and it's perfect.

They, they think that's what it is to be a good writer.

And it's literally the opposite, right?

A good writer, you sit down and you write it and you delete and you revise and it, right?

And it's this laborious process, although fun.

'cause you are also figuring out, so Dr. Steve Graham, who we work with, he has this great thing he says about.

You know, we think through writing and we forget that we think of writing as a product.

But like in the process of writing something, you crystallize, you synthesize, you figure out what, oh, actually no, that isn't what I think, I wanna say it differently 'cause that's not what I think.

Like that piece is so critical and kids don't get, there's so little time ever given to them to be able to do that.

And then to your point about feedback, I mean, I think about like, imagine.

I don't know.

I'm not a sports person, but I feel like you see this in sports and it makes it so obvious.

So it's like trying to teach soccer to kids and having them do drills with no feedback.

Like imagine a whole soccer practice where, where.

You give two pieces of feedback to three of the kids, like useless, like how you're not gonna get anywhere.

And so I think what AI does for writing is it makes it possible for kids to get way more at bats and way more, um, opportunities for feedback, which are just critical.

And I do wanna shout out one other.

Tool out there.

So quill.org where I worked before I came to Teaching Lab, they have really amazing materials and, uh, online practice, it's all free.

as is the pathway.

I dunno if I mentioned that.

And, kids get, it's, it's a, a lot of it's around sentence combining, which is the best evidence-based practice there is for teaching, uh, sentence structure.

And they get multiple rounds of feedback, multiple, uh, opportunities to revise all within like a 5, 6, 7 minute activity.

So really highly recommend.

Gene Tavernetti: Well, you know, you're talking, you talked about, Naive practice.

I think that's the term, isn't it?

Naive practice where you just go out and play.

And I think that's one of the, practices that somebody told teachers was a good idea.

Okay, here's your, here's your topic for the day.

Spend the first 10 or 15 minutes writing on this topic.

as if that, that was the most important part, just coming up with ideas.

that's not the most important part of writing.

And you took 15 minutes of class and the kids probably didn't start till the last five

Sherry Lewkowitz: Right, right.

So true.

Yes.

It's the funner, the more fun part for the kids and the teacher.

And I'll, I'll give it that.

It's not the hard part, and teachers are there to help them with the hard part.

They should.

We should be.

Right.

That's what we're there for.

So it's like, reminds me of that student who came to me after school.

It's like, well, what?

Okay, I have I, she had ideas.

She had lots of ideas.

She's super smart.

Shouldn't know how to put them together on a page and how to organize them.

I mean, the organization piece, it's also, you know, we haven't talked about executive functioning, but that's such a huge part of why writing is so hard.

there's so many skills involved in writing.

You have to think ahead.

You have to think about the reader.

You have to plan, you have to segment.

There's so much, and so if you don't break that down and teach it piece by piece, if you're just crossing your fingers, you know?

Yeah.

Like two of the kids in the class of 34, maybe.

We'll really figure it out and run with it.

That's about it.

Gene Tavernetti: So do you do that level of training with the teachers, uh, when they get your product or do most of 'em just, okay, log on, use the free part and.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Right.

So, we've shifted a bit.

So when we first, so during the stu the years of the study, it was very much the high touch.

Like, we wanna make sure they're really using this because we wanna see if it works when it's used.

Right.

We needed at least enough fidelity to test that it worked and, we got that.

And we had a, you know, treatment and control groups and control groups did business as usual, as usual treatment groups followed the pathway.

Not all perfectly, you know, some more than others, but they followed it for the most part.

Um, they also took a survey every day, which I do think was a big piece of it.

Um, so they had that, whatever that accountability feeling is of like having to take the survey every day and say what they used and didn't use, They used it for the most part.

And I mean the, the schools in the, uh, treatment group made about nine, 9.3 times the gains of students in the control group.

We got an effect size of 0.64, which moderate effect size, which for a writing intervention is pretty incredible.

It made a huge, a huge difference.

Oh, you asked me.

Do most teachers use it that way?

So the answer is no.

I think we launched the site, we, we got that evidence.

We knew it had, we had something that, we had good reason to believe would work, and so we launched the site.

We made it free.

We tried to, you know, promote it as much as we can.

We're a tiny team.

We don't have a marketing team.

But we tried and we've, we're now at the point where we have about 25,000 folks who have visited the site.

We've got, I think.

Like 3,500, 3.5 K, account creators.

'cause you need to create an account to use the site.

Um, so people are on there and people are using it, which is wonderful.

Are they all using it the way that we dream of it being used?

No, and that's where we hope to offer, and we do offer services to help schools, districts, um, states implement this at, at scale.

Um, and that piece, it, it requires more than just a tool as it always does.

Right.

Gene Tavernetti: Sherry, this is the type of thing that you could chat all day but we're not going to, but we did talk about, uh.

One thing that teachers could stop doing that's not effective.

That's the, topic of the day.

That's, that's just right.

With no feedback or anything about it.

Any other, any other things that you see teachers do that just aren't effective that they might stop doing?

Sherry Lewkowitz: I'm glad you asked.

I'm glad you asked this because I have one like burning top of my tongue right now.

so I'm not gonna say where, but I've been in schools where recently where I've seen a good bit of two things.

I see a lot of teachers pay teachers worksheets.

This isn't an elementary, this is only, Whole bunch of teachers pay teachers worksheets, and this is in schools that are supposedly using high quality curricula.

But somehow these worksheets keep showing up.

some are better than others, whatever.

But the point is that what I see a lot of is worksheets where students are working on a grammar skill or a sentence level skill.

On the one hand, great, I'm glad they're getting that practice.

But invariably, if it's from teachers, pay teachers, it is out of content.

And when I say out of content, I mean one day it's about frogs.

The next day it's about a circus.

The next day it's about butterflies.

There's no thought at all about building knowledge, that's irrelevant.

You're teaching the skill.

that hurts me because you could go to the pathway and in two seconds generate just as good practice, but in the content that they're learning.

The problem is I've had this now happen a few times.

Where elementary school teachers say, what do you mean the content?

Like they don't even know what I'm talking about because there is no content.

there does have to be some approach to at least, like book, we teach this book, right?

Or we teach this topic.

You've gotta have at least that.

And then the pathway can give you practice that hits those skills and the content at the same time.

You don't have to do one or the other.

You can do them both.

Gene Tavernetti: Right.

Anything else or is that, that the, the

Sherry Lewkowitz: Oh, I have like 500, but I'll, I'll leave it at that one.

Gene Tavernetti: Well, great.

Sheri, do you have any questions for me?

I.

Sherry Lewkowitz: I've been thinking a lot lately about, I don't know, leadership and learning and developing and, you know, I've, I feel like I've learned a lot, but I also, you know, the more you learn, the more you see.

You don't know.

There's so much.

I don't know.

So I'm curious at your stage where you are.

How do you feel about that?

And do you feel like there have been particular mentors, like I was curious if you've had a mentor that you feel like really helped you kind of take the next leap in your career, and what did they do that helped you do that?

Gene Tavernetti: well first of all, let's, let's back up about leadership for a second before I talk about a mentor.

Um, we're working with a, with a district right now and we just trained, um, all the administrators in the district and it was around the importance of, uh, developing a common language around effective instruction.

Sherry Lewkowitz: I

Gene Tavernetti: Surprise, surprise.

Okay.

That, that, that, that's where you start.

And our focus was on instruction and what it looks like, elements, how to do it well, et cetera, et cetera.

So at the end, and now it's time, at the end of our sessions with the, the district administrators, it was their turn to decide how we were going to.

Move forward to get this to work out with the teachers.

And one of the first things, one of our first recommendations was to continue training site administration in how in instructional leadership.

And we wanted to be very clear that this coaching was not gonna be about how to run your meeting.

It was not gonna be about, you know, set up your, set up your calendar so you know whose birthday it is so you can send them a birthday card.

All of those things that are important, the thing that you might not be surprised about this, Sherry, is that the thing that is not talked about when you take an instructional leadership.

Class, when you get your administrative license, a credential, whatever you call it, is the instruction piece.

And I say that very humbly because I didn't know it either.

Okay, so that's, in my experience, that is the first thing.

And it has actually changed, administrators lives.

It has saved their jobs.

You know, I've had, you know, teachers or administrators, you know, they always, we always want them to sit through coaching sessions and we finish a coaching session and the teacher's gone and the administrator will look at me and is just like, I never knew what to say.

I never knew what to say.

So that piece is missing just as the how to do explicit instruction is missing from the training of teachers.

It's also missing from the training of, administrators in how to deal with that my mentor, not my instructional.

Mentor, but just my educational mentor had been my, uh, high school language arts teacher.

So we, you know, we knew each other and he was able to support me you know, and he talked about how much he learned from me on the instructional piece.

and he started as a good teacher.

But it was just, it, it was, it was a mentoring relationship in that it was very supportive.

and he also had a way to let you know when you're screwing up.

Sherry Lewkowitz: It's important.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah, with a smile and you'd end up laughing.

but number one is knowing, is knowing instruction and not thinking that, you know, instruction.

Because that's, that's what happens with every school.

We, you know, we work in, we say, well, what do you think uh, is gonna be the pushback?

It's cliche, and I'm naming it as cliche.

So no cliches in this.

You know, the teacher say That's what we already do.

We already do this.

So not being able, and you just went to that step lab training where they actually show the videos.

Well, you may think you're doing it, but this is what it actually looks like.

This is the criteria to do it well.

So that would be my answer to you.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Which, I mean, it's interesting 'cause I feel like to get teachers there and to get administrators there, like it's, it's vulnerable.

Like you have to be.

It's not, it doesn't feel good to admit that the thing you thought you knew how to do, you didn't know how to do as well as you thought.

And like, that's, that's really hard.

I, I, I look back on my teaching, my God.

I mean, there's just so much I didn't know.

And that doesn't mean even if I did it tomorrow, I would do it perfectly.

Like I would still have to figure it out again.

But I feel like what least I can do is try to pass it along for teachers who are newer to this game because there's just no need.

There's so much we know already.

Gene Tavernetti: to call back to something that, that you mentioned, one of the things that, you mentioned, uh, soccer, learning something in soccer.

one of the things that I have found is that the people who, Really promoting explicit instruction and understand explicit instruction.

And when I say promoting it, I'm even talking about promoting it at a site level.

A teacher you know who says this is really good, they seem to have had some sort of background in performance.

I. Okay.

Whether it's athletics and you're breaking just exactly the, you know, we're breaking things down.

We're gonna practice this.

They may be, in some sort of visual arts, maybe performing arts where they understand we break things down and it's that schema that they have, that common schema that if we tie into that they, you know, then it's like, okay, so how do we do that in the classroom?

It's easier, it's much easier now to talk about, see how this relates.

it's amazing.

Ask your folks, do you have a, uh, some sort of background in performance?

Sherry Lewkowitz: studied art,

Gene Tavernetti: There you go.

Sherry Lewkowitz: and I love that you say this because there's a presentation I did maybe two, three years ago when I was at Quill.

And the, uh, metaphor I used throughout the presentation is teaching how you would teach drawing.

And I say, and I think, um, uh, Jim Heal has a thing where he, I think it's Jim Heal, where he shows like, imagine teaching kids how to draw.

It's like, here's a gorgeous picture of an owl, and then next is, is like a circle.

And he is like, just get that to look like this.

Go,

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

where do you start?

I mean, and this is the, you take piano lessons.

What's the first thing they teach you to do?

How to sit?

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah.

Oh

Gene Tavernetti: you take it, you take an art lesson.

I'm gonna show you a line.

We're gonna draw lines today.

So all of those things, you know, in our own content area, we get it.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: It's like, how, how does, how does this work someplace else?

Sherry Lewkowitz: Well, to me, the crazy thing is that it's, we seem to understand this everywhere except in schools.

it's like bananas.

Like how is it that schools became the one place where, don't explain it, don't break it down.

Let them.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

Well, thing, the other thing that.

Makes me crazy is this whole dichotomy of explicit instruction.

No project based.

You know what, you were an art teacher.

You were both, it was about the project.

I was a coach.

It was about Friday night,

Sherry Lewkowitz: right.

That's

Gene Tavernetti: so, very few things are either or in this life.

Sherry Lewkowitz: I love that.

Yes.

I get so frustrated with that too, with the like anti PBL.

It's like these things are, it's, it's a continuum.

You start here and then you go here, and then you go here, and then it's Friday night and you don't do Friday night.

Gene Tavernetti: Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Sherry, it has been, uh, joy talking to you, seeing you again God, let's, let's do it again.

Any last words before we go?

I.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Uh, gosh, you know what, can I just tell you the most wonderful thing?

Last night I went to, um, a screening of a documentary.

That I just wanna shout out.

It's called Left Behind, and it's about a group of amazing moms in New York City who got so tired of their students with dyslexia not being served, that they finally created their own school, and now they're opening their second school and it's their story.

And it was just mind blowingly powerful and good.

Uh, I'll leave with, did you know that 15 to 20% of students have dyslexia?

15 to 20?

It's a huge number.

They benefit from, guess what?

Explicit instruction as does everybody else.

So yeah,

Gene Tavernetti: guess what?

But guess what?

And then they could, then they could go write.

Then they could go write and read novels, you know?

That's the project.

Okay, Sherry, it's been a pleasure.

We will talk to you soon.

Sherry Lewkowitz: Okay.

Thanks Jean.

I.

Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.

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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.