SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. John Karippo, welcome to the Supported Learning Podcast. How are you, sir?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Thank you, Dr. Joe. Super excited to join you. And uh what I love about this is we're kind of blind interviewing each other as two educators who are passionate about uh teaching and learning. And uh I just love the idea that we're gonna kind of suss it out live. Absolutely. I think that's I think that's good.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

But I do have a little bit of background since my team did not share the notes. But you have over 22 years in education, over 15 years in the classroom, you're the co-author of Edu Protocols. You've had a decade of educational leadership at the site, district, county, and state level. You've taught in four to eight and nine to twelve classroom settings, leveraged experience to help teachers teach better and work less. Love that. And uh you're a published author. And uh we had uh you're one of the one of the copyrighted by Dave Purgis, uh Teach Like a Pirate. We just had him on the podcast not too long ago. So and I'm just learning more about you that you were in California and really close to Yosemite National Park. So I got a I got a travel travel itinerary already lined up.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yeah, so and as long as you're coming to Yosemite, you can hit Kings Canyon and uh Sequoia as well. They're just a little bit south of there. So you're gonna hit the triple.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

I was really tempted. I don't know if you know cars and bids, but like I uh there was like the Mercedes Sprinter, like extended, was was for sale out in California. It was like 60 grand. It was like a fit 10 people, like yeah. I'm like, and it sold for 70. I told him, I'm like, we could definitely that's actually a pretty good price. Was and last year I was like, hey, we were going out to Denver for my wife's cousin's wedding. Kids were invited. We're gonna we're gonna do the 24-hour by land. We'll we'll stop at Missouri, then we'll go up to Yosemite. Or no, we'll go up to um Yellowstone, we'll go up to the Tetons. Yeah, and then we did about five hours in the car on a different road trip, and we found out that that was gonna be absolute torture with three kids under nine years old. So, but maybe one day, maybe one day we'll do the cross-country adventure.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

But anyway, well you might like this story. One year, six of my friends talked uh a major education conference in Detroit into sponsoring us, and uh the six of us rented an RV and drove straight through no hotels from California to Michigan, and then did like 36 sessions in uh in three days and then flew home, and it was super fun.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

That's uh that's that's definitely it's definitely a road trip. I I will say I think I'm biased. I think the West is way more interesting than the East in our country, just in the sites. But anyway, John, thrilled to have you here today. You're a best-selling author. You uh we just started talking a little bit about pedagogy, and you were talking about we have two, we have two dichotomy dichotomy of the people are gonna go all in on AI education and think it's gonna like erase all the present-day structures, people who are in a rush to get devices out of kids, and you think it's gonna be none of those. And where are we at the state of education today?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Well, so I think what's happening, and and I think this is gonna be a very kind of meta conversation, but I started teaching in the late mid-late 90s, like 1996. And that was right when standards were coming out. And so you gotta ask yourself this question historically. Why did we all of a sudden create statewide standards? And it's easy. We were not getting results. Teachers were teaching, parents and legislators thought like their kids were not getting results. And so they came out with standards, and teachers as a profession kind of proceeded to not care if there were standards because uh they taught how they wanted to teach. So, lo and behold, uh, a few years later, guess what shows up? Standardized tests. Why do we have standardized tests to make sure teachers are teaching the standards? Okay. Then teachers proceeded to not really pay much attention to the state test. They would say, I hate state testing, I'm not gonna do drill and kill, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we just kind of bumbled along for a few years. Then devices started becoming more popular. And then uh we had COVID happen, right? After No Child Left Behind and uh Race to the Top. And there's a through line here, Joe, which sounds like this no matter what happens, people keep teaching the same way. It doesn't matter if it's no child left behind, state testing, standards, adding devices, COVID. Teachers want to teach the same way. They have a cultural preference to teach this way. And so the dichotomy that I see forming up right now is that we've got a group of people who are saying, let's go whole hog with AI, which I'm not against, but I think the majority of teachers and parents don't know what that really means. Like we're not giving kids brisk and chat GPT to teach with AI. That is not a thing to give kids an LLM and say, let it write your essay or do your math. So there's a huge misunderstanding there. But then on the other side, we got a group of people that are saying we need to get rid of devices altogether. And this is where I'm gonna kind of bring this all together and then we can really start chatting it up. So let me get this straight. The reasoning for getting rid of devices is the kids are distracted. Well, I went to school in the 70s. We were distracted. You should have seen what we did with protractors to kill flies. I've already been distracted. As a teacher, I lived through the 90s without one-to-one. I lived through pogs, jacks, marbles, all these different things that were kids who were bored. So one group of teachers, uh sorry, I think a lot of the teachers that want to get rid of devices are thinking these kids are off task and they're distracted. And if I can get rid of the device, I can control them. Bad news for you guys. No. There's another group of teachers who I've seen saying this quietly on on social media is if we get rid of the devices, Joe, I won't have to add any AI knowledge or PD to my repertoire. Like, if there's no devices, I don't need to learn AI. And I don't know how old you are, but I can make some generalizations about your face. I started teaching at a time when veteran teachers were saying these exact words out loud in staff meetings. I'm gonna retire before I need to learn how to use email. That is not a reasonable professional answer to what the current status is. So there's a group of teachers who are thinking they can somehow save themselves from tons of crappy PD by not using AI or devices. And here's the problem. If you have kids on paper all year, your workload's gonna skyrocket. And Joe, you don't know much about my work right now, but I'm gonna tell you right now. I can get six graders through 100 Latin roots in two weeks with a class average above 90%. Say this nice and slow, kind of Clint Eastwood-wise. You cannot do that pace or growth on paper. It's impossible. Okay. So I'm gonna wrap this up. Where is the current push coming from? Parents are realizing their kids are underperforming in school. But if you look at the data since 1970, it's not really down that much. It's been bad all along. And I can show you the graphic later. Second, teachers are worn out from forcing kids to use technology, but they're using it like a babysitter. Hey guys, do iReady for 45 minutes. Hey guys, do Zern for 45 minutes, hey guys, do iXL for 45 minutes. That isn't ever gonna result in educational growth because the way that it's being done is kind of low-key soul killing. I'm gonna flash back to accelerator reader. Remember that? So most of these platforms are using are like a version of that. And so here's where my call to action for you is gonna be. I don't think that we are going to ban our way out of the current fit um educational melees. We're gonna have to change the way we teach so that it meets modern children. And then I will give back to Mike to you so we can actually have a conversation and not me just soapboxing.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

No, I like it. So your thesis is that we have not actually changed the way we've taught in 50. Correct.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Correct. And I got inspired by an Instagram post I saw last night, just for this talk, which is people think that kids are just sitting passively at looking in devices, and they think that devices are built to use up your attention span. Some teachers you will hear them say these kids are dopamine freaks, for one example. But here's the reality how do we measure engagement in a non-tech class, Joe? Are you looking at me? So all I'm doing is replacing the device. Kids sitting and looking at an adult while the adult lectures or teaches them a math equation or reads popcorn style reading. That's not engagement, it's attention. And there's a difference there. In engagement, kids enter a flow state. They're actively building, they're creating things, they're using all of these things. And that is way harder in a tech-free classroom. And how do I know? Again, I have uh 14 years of experience as a student in a tech-free classroom, and I taught as a teacher for seven or eight years before I had any kind of one-to-one situation.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

So the premise here is the system is completely broken in how we train teachers, how what our expectations are. How do we change it? Because you've mentioned several of the reform movements. So I think, I guess to give the audience some context, a lot of this came from a nation at risk, right? Whereas the study that Americans are behind, which then set off the late 1980s, 1990s reform movement, which 10 years later leads us to no child left behind, and schools are failing, and we finally have data that say all this. And that led to um race to the top, and now every child succeeds. So we've had essentially 25 years, 26 years of accountability in schools, of measuring progress, where otherwise, because I grew up in that environment, mostly it wasn't there. I mean, I you know, no child FBI was passed in 2000, but I would say the effects really weren't seen until like 2004, 2005, 2006. But then I was done with high school. So really 20 years, 25 years, but the but you're right, we haven't changed what we've how we fundamentally teach, but we also are now we're measuring something completely different, assessment-wise, too. And what like so I understand what you're saying, but I guess how do we get unstuck as a as a collaboration of educators? So as a as a as a community of educators, not collaboration, community of educators, the system is broke, we haven't we have to change. How do we change and what do we change into?

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Well, you know, with teachers, sports and military metaphors are not very popular. For example, Joe, imagine showing up at a Formula One race, right? Formula One race, and you've got the fastest car in the world from 1974. How many races are you gonna win?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Probably not many, none.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

You're at a contemporary race, you got the fastest car in the world from 1974, you're not gonna win any races. Do you know why? The state of the art has moved forward. Okay, I want you to show up at a you can go American football or soccer. And I want you to coach the kids like it's 1974. How many games are you gonna win? Right. You might win a few, but you're not gonna dominate because your techniques are out of date. And so for for my purposes, the first thing we've gotta do is we gotta get honest about what we want is not a thing. What we want is not a thing. What our teacher desire is, it doesn't work. And I'll give you uh, and I need to interject one little thing because we're getting to know each other, our backgrounds. So I taught full-time as recently as COVID. Okay, and uh I taught full-time sixth grade during 21, uh 2020, 21. And then I got so many calls for people wanting me to help their schools that I start I went on the road. In the last five years, Joe, I've been in a thousand classrooms in eight states and four countries. So I have a very unique skill set and perspective here. I want you to imagine a thousand classrooms, eight states, four countries. Guess how many times I've walked in, Joe, and seen the classroom and gone, oh my god, I've never seen anything like this before. This is so amazing. Everywhere I go, it's the same thing. Sit in little groups, be quiet, wait for teacher, little basket of books that nobody ever seems to open, but they fidget with it a lot. Grades done at night on the teacher's time, not much improvement. Dude, everywhere I go, everybody teaches the same way. I don't know if you remember the old uh Sylvester Stallone movie, I think it was Judge Dredd, where every restaurant was Taco Bell.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

That's kind of what school is. And for the culture of teaching to be so narrow makes it impossible to be its best. And notice I didn't say ineffective. There's kids that do well in school, there's kids that take AP classes and go on to college and do really fancy things. But I'm talking about success for every kid. School is not built for that. And that's why we're not getting those results.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So do you think so? Here's my here's my theory, right? And by the way, I do have I do have your notes. I do have the the notes for finally shared with me about your background. So um, but my thing, and this is what I, as an administrator, I kind of like it drives me nuts. Doctors have to have continuing education credits, lawyers have continuing education, it's correct, accountant, but education.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Try to be an accountant from 1974 right now, Joe. Right. It's not you're not gonna do it. Now your math skills might be great, but you're gonna get eaten alive by the business of it. You don't know how to send a fax, and you're trying to use email, right? So it's not that your math skills are bad, but like you don't tax code has changed, you know, tax shelters are changed. All those things have changed. And in teaching, we just kind of remain monolithic and we're not that worried about what people outside of education are doing.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

I even we're like almost to a point where we're anti-learning. Like we're teachers are kind of a ghost element.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

We so ingrained that it's starting to feel like it's going backwards.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Right. And I don't, I uh so like there's there's obviously a disconnect in colleges with teacher prep programs that they don't adequately prepare kids, prepare students to become teachers, number one.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

There's a lack of well, but there's a little bit of it that's a more insidious. I don't mean to cut you off, but this one's important. There's a group of teachers who have a mistaken personal identity with what teaching is. And the analogy I use is I have a whole bunch of friends that are teachers, and quite a few have told me that they've done something like this. They would put all their stuffed animals on the bed and they'd set up an easel and they would teach the stuffed animals. And they thought that was so cool when they were a kid, right? That doesn't translate to a classroom. You got 30 people in there. They have needs, they have fears, they have hopes, they have desires. You can't just tell them to be quiet all day and teach them like they're stuffed animals. So, yes, the teacher prep programs have a big part in this proliferation of this mindset, but there's people that bring the mindset before they even get to college. And I think it's really tricky because it it diminishes the individuals. So the teacher is the most important thing in the room.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

So agreed. And schools don't adequately most school systems, their induction program is getting them ready for like HR and health insurance. It's not really here's how we're there. A lot of them aren't going as far as this is how you're supposed to teach. So nothing, nothing gets nothing happens, basically, right? So okay, so you've been over in over a thousand classrooms, you've impacted 70,000 teachers trained. You you've had given keynotes, you've you've how do we how do we move the needle? How do we change what what are we what is our goal to change the structural dynamics of teaching and learning?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Well, that's what I've been working on for about 20 years. And the reality of it is that the culture of teaching doesn't want to hear it that much. There's small groups that do. From my perspective, there's a couple of things that we can change pedagogically, as long as we're willing to let the thing between our ears grow. Here's my first favorite thing, Joe. Everything in a K8 classroom moves too slowly. Everything. Everything. I've seen teachers take 10 minutes just to kid get kids logged into a GIMK or a way ground. Five minutes a day is 15 hours a year, Joe. We are wasting gigantic swaths of time. That's my first biggest one. Everything is too slow. And what we tell the K3 kids a lot of times, this is the cliche is wait for teacher, wait for teacher. And it takes 20 minutes to get kids logged into a typing program. And so instead of teaching them to have a tempo and a flow, I want you to imagine a kid every day that's trying to go and being told not to. And what does that look like after eight or nine years? It looks it looks worn out. So that's one of my first biggest things that we do, poorly or incorrectly. Another one that I hear a lot, and I know you've heard this one, Joe, I've said it myself in the past. Ready? If you don't do this now, you'll have homework tonight. And you gotta put yourself in the mind of a 12-year-old. So you're saying I can talk to the cute girl now and do my work tonight. So you're saying I can talk to my buddies and do the work tonight. You know what? I'm gonna say yes to that. And then what happens in real life, Joe?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Procrastination. Well, I like then they don't do mine as a mine as a high school teacher. Is I'm doing my work. I'm doing my work. Dr. Sr. Special, I'm doing my, or just give me, just give me my work. I don't need like I'm in, I'm I'm doing, give me my work. I did my work. And it's like, so the 60-minute, the 90-minute, the 30-minute, the 40-minute lesson, whatever happened, the learning that happened to class can be summarized in I give my kids something, a piece of paper, and that is adequate enough for missing an entire day of instruction.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, I agree. So let me get this straight. In an hour, I'm gonna talk for 30 to 40 minutes. I'm gonna be very entertaining. I'm gonna hand out 12 question worksheets, and then the kids are gonna do it. And that's proof of learning in a modern world. Negative. Negative. The second thing, so so the problem. So the first thing was the tempo. And the second thing was the open-endedness. So I run my class more like a CrossFit training. Everybody, let's go arms. Let's go arms. Let's go arms. Everybody, work the shoulders, work the shoulders. And I say, Dr. Joe in the back, uh, that form's not good, but thanks for playing along. And guess what happens? After a week or two, you get the routine, you get comfortable. Over time, your form gets better. And so one of the other massive things we do in education that is that is not helpful is we have got to give kids feedback real time. We've got to give them real-time feedback. And here's why. Until they get real-time feedback, they're not gonna work because what's the point? Um, in a classic high school class, okay, so what grade level did you was your favorite to teach? What is your favorite to do? Okay, I wanted to visualize a class, Joe. Hey guys, here's your textbook, your paragraph about the discovery of the new world is due at the end of class. What are your kids gonna do for 41 minutes? Mess around. Nothing, right? Because they're teenagers, they think they're invisible, invincible, and then with nine minutes to go, they're all panicking to try to slap some crap together.

unknown 24:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Huh. So the way I teach and the way I've been teaching teachers to teach looks like this. Here is either textbook, printed page, or web page. Everything you need is on that. I want you to write me two paragraphs about the discovery of the new world or Balboa or whatever, and you've got nine minutes. That means I can have the kids done with the assignment and graded within 12 to 15 minutes, which means I can do three more assignments in the 45 minutes that are left over. That's triple the work. If I said, let's triple your paycheck, you'd get excited about that. Now, the problem with tripling the work is teachers have a little voice in their amygdala back here that says, I don't really want to do more work because then I'll have to grade more work. And that's where devices and AI come in. So if you use a tool like Snorkel, which gives immediate feedback through AI, no copy pasting allowed. If you use class companion, which gives immediate feedback, no copy pasting allowed, you can use my short answer. The point is you get this rhythm going because now instead of hand in your stack of papers at the end of class and I might grade them tonight, I might grade them this weekend, it looks like this. Write those paragraphs, and I'm gonna tell you how the AI did in nine minutes. Oh, by the way, Joe, you can answer two or three times if you like, because I don't want kids just turning it in for a D. I want them to do it right. So, like here's another little pivot. In Snorkel, which if you haven't seen is fantastic, there's a four-point rubric from the AI. When you turn it in, your grade could be a zero, a one, a two, a three, or a four. And what I train teachers and my own kids that I'm working with a zero's a zero, a one's a zero, a two's a zero. I'm not accepting those scores because the AI will tell you what to fix. And if you're confused, I will walk over and help you. But here's where it gets cool: if you get a three, that's an A. And if you get a four, which is nearly impossible, I shouldn't say impossible, um, you got to work at it to get a four because the AI in snorkel is inflexible. And um, if you if you so if you get a three, you get a 90. If you get a four, I'll give you an extra 10% for being willing to try at least once more to improve your score. And Joe, we're graded before we leave class. Whereas, you know, what happened with Lucy Calkins and the workshop model was think about your idea for a whole week. So meanwhile, my kids are writing a paragraph a day, your kids are writing a paragraph a week, you're spending all weekend grading them, and then Monday going over them. It's not efficient. It's not efficient. In my class, we're doing five paragraphs a day or a week. In 10 weeks, my kids will have written 50 paragraphs and your kids will have written 10.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Well, not even close. You you you're striking at something that is core at like what we do in my company. I mean, what I believe in. First off, you know, the adage of whoever does the work does the learning, right? So I read, I I saw a book. I have a book. I should say this. I have a book that says never, it's the title is never work harder than your students. Never read it. I got the idea just the title. Never. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Right. I've done that a few times. I see you see like a picture of a quote and I go, I get it. I don't need to read the book. I get it.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Right. So, but it really came to fruition of like, you know, I can I I I taught IB history for my longest tenure in Virginia in a 90-minute block class. And the first year I tried to lecture my way through that, and I was freaking exhausted. Like, it is impossible. Yeah, that's obvious. And having kids actually do the work, having, and that's we created iteration cycles of them writing and giving feedback. So you that's the whole idea of how we do test prep in our company is it's really like you already know you've you've sat in a classroom all year, you've gotten your content. Right now, you have to do reps. What's standing between you and the score you want is the amount of reps you can do, times, and like you said, with feedback. Most feedback that feedback is so delayed from getting to the test. Yeah. And then you take a test, and then a week later you get it feedback, and then, oh, I can't make any corrections to this. This is what I got, moving on. Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Learning what you're doing, and what you're doing is analogous to letting third graders double dribble in the basketball game. You have to stop that behavior. It's analogous to having a fourth grader pick up a soccer ball during the game and they're not a goalie. Everybody loses their mind. There's things you cannot do, right? You just cannot. Here's another edge of protocol, which is, you know, that's kind of our thing that we do. Here's another one that I really like, Joe. Ready for this? Normally, and when I say that, everywhere I've ever seen, first quarter, the genre that we write in might be narrative. Sounding familiar? First quarter, practicing narrative. They might do two essays or three. Second quarter, we move on to compare, contrast, or argumentative. Again, they might do two or three essays, a lot of practice. Third quarter, classically, informational literacy. Okay. And then fourth quarter, we do poetry. Well, first of all, there's five genres, but we only did four. And we only did four because it wasn't symmetrical. In our type A brain, we're like, well, I've got five quarter, four quarters. How do I shove five things in? So this is one that uh I created, and then Josie Wozniak, who if you haven't met, she's fantastic. And so watch what we do now, Joe. We'll give kids a funny picture for the start. One of the classics we use as a car at Kate Mart that's overloaded. Watch what we do, though. Write one paragraph about this in narrative. Write one paragraph about this in compare contrast. Write one paragraph about this in informational literacy mode. We're asking kids to do three genres at once. And that's why, guess what? I don't do test prep. I know teachers that do 10 weeks of test prep. I don't do test prep. The whole year is test prep. We're always test prepping. And when we show kids that protocol, which our fun name for it is the triple genre challenge, three genres at once. Think of this functionally how it's a totally different animal. We're gonna do narrative all year, Joe. We're gonna do compare contrast all year. We're gonna do informational all year. And if I do that in snorkel, it'll grade all three paragraphs in real time, which means 10-year-old Joe could take three tries until he gets a four. Because I'm not taking a D. I'm not gonna take a D. You got to do it right. Here's the feedback. And the great part is if you pick good pictures, the kids laugh their heads off. They think it's the fun, funnest thing ever. And so that's the way that the Edger Protocols goes after this problem. You just make a couple tweaks on the lesson plan, you know, abandon ship on the type A, one thing per quarter. And now, to be fair, I could emphasize one a quarter. Like I could emphasize a narrative, but I'm never gonna stop. And then next quarter, I could emphasize argumentative, but I'm never gonna stop. And what happens is when the kids get to the big tests, the state test or the IB or the AP, they can code switch like crazy on genres. They can write on demand like nobody's business because I've immersed them in that all year. And my quote about that that I love I love, I ran into on the internet was uh wet man does not fear the rain. And I just don't think we're training kids at that level. I don't think we're immersing them enough. We do little small blips of things, and then I don't know if you've ever read the book The End of Average by Todd Rhodes, but it is fantastic. And uh he talks about the idea that school wasn't built for kids to actually grow, school was built so that the kids who were willing to do the work that the teacher demands went to the next level. That's not the same thing as every kid growing. And I think subconsciously teachers don't realize that they've bought into that strategy. Now they won't tell you that to your face, but when you look at the gradebook, and when kids say, What if an F, uh what teachers say, what if an F is the the grade they deserve? And when teachers say, I can't teach these kids because they have bad parents, so at what point are you abandoning ship on your own shit? And my perspective is that yes, there are troublesome parents. I got 19 years in the classroom that are crazy, pushy, tigery, weak-minded uh teachers, uh parents that lie about teachers. Yeah, that's all true. But here's the deal, Joe. I've got them for six hours a day. If I can't solve that problem with the kids in six hours a day, and the parents only see the kids for an hour a day, how are we supposed to do better than the parents with six times more? You build your culture. Those same kids are fine on football teams, soccer teams, they're fine at science camp, they're fine everywhere. They're bad in class because we're not leading them in the way that they need to be led. That's why they're bad in class. They're bored, they don't respect the classroom, they don't respect the situation. But then you see teachers that do things like countdown charts. Only 100 days till we're out of here, you guys. What's the teacher telling the kids? Here's how I start the classroom every year, Joe. Hey, I'm gonna treat you guys with respect because 25 years from now, I'm gonna meet your kids. When you tell sixth graders that, they lose their minds. 15 years from now, you're gonna call me and say, What's the best Macintosh to buy? Nine years from now, you're gonna say, Krupo, I graduated from college. Will you come to see me? I've been doing this long enough, you guys. I know that this is a potentially lifelong friendship that we're gonna be building. And I'm gonna treat you with that level of respect. And you know what's insane? When you tell the kids that, they respond in kind. What would you say to parents out there who are like I've adopted one of my students and I've performed weddings for three. I am not screwing around when I say this.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

That's that's you know what, you know what's funny? I am now old enough.

SPEAKER_00 36:12

And I'm not a minister. They made me do one of those $39 things.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

I have a student that uh like I used to meet up with a couple of graduated students after we moved back to Pennsylvania and meet up around Thanksgiving, take some to lunch, and with my wife and the ones I stay connected to over the years, track them through college. I had one invite us to her wedding a couple years ago, and now she's actually moving to Pittsburgh, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_00 36:37

So yeah, and you know what's the coolest is if they show up at your school as a teacher or a sub, that's fantastic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

We have a couple of those in the schools that I've worked in that they're generationally passed down.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

I've I've got another uh call to action for anybody that's on TikTok or Instagram and they teach they see teachers bemoaning the state of things. And I'm trust me on this, I'm a fantastic complainer. Things are not perfect right now. School is underfunded. I freaking hate standardized testing, it's ridiculous. They're turning it into college prep when what we need is a basic skills test. That's what school should be, is a basic skills test, not an AP test. If you're in IB, they have a test for you. We don't need to run everybody through that, right? I got my complaints, but I had a superintendent once, I was in front of about 200 administrators, and the superintendent said, John, how do we get more kids to think teaching is a good profession, especially students of color? How do we get more people of color to adopt this? Uh to this was my answer off the top of my head, and I'm gonna stick by it. You know, maybe if we weren't complaining about the kids all the time, maybe it's it looked like we enjoyed school. Maybe, maybe those kids would say, you know what, that looks cool. That's not what we're putting out there, you know. We're putting out that kind of Eeyore vibe, like, oh, it's Friday. I got so much grading to do this weekend. We aren't we aren't positioning our profession as something that's cool or interesting for adults to do. True. Teachers don't start off that great payroll-wise, but you know what? You do it for 10, 15 years, you're up on the hundred thousand dollar range in a lot of situations. It'll take care of itself if you're good.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Well, and it was a profession. Like when I before I even went into college, well, I should say, I was in college. Before I really got into the field, I looked at some of the teachers that I knew. They had a good what we call a middle class life, like a good life. Like they had a nice house, they lived in the school district they taught in. They had the had the middle class life. That is, you know, with so many other issues, that's kind of gone away. And we have piled so much onto the classroom, onto the teacher without really taking things off. But you know, you're kind of getting into the heart of what a a classroom and learning environment should look like. Well, what about what would you say to a parent that's hearing this or listening to this or seeing this, and they're like, What do I look for? What do I look for in a classroom? What do I need to know?

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Um so in my case, I'm gonna have a non-standard answer for you there, Joe. Okay. Classically, parents are looking for academics out of the school, right? They look on U.S. News World Reports, who are who's got the highest scores? Does that sound familiar? Classically, and my angle's different. I I would say I would rather have a school where they see my kid for for what they are. I would say I would like to have a school where the teachers are invested in my kid as a person. And here's the fact of the matter academically, if you're motivated, you can exist in any class. So if this kid really wants to learn, it's totally doable. But the number one thing they can have is a teacher that broadcasts empathy, interpersonal communications, supports your child, to me, those are way bigger. And again, I speak of this from the point of view of I had a kid that transferred into my class during COVID, and he had been his imagine a fifth grader that had been bullied to the point where he is having suicidal ideation. Fifth grade from the cool district, you know, the the academic high-performing district. He showed up at my school wearing pajama bottoms and yellow crocs, and we accepted him for who he was. And he actually tripled his academic performance, but also turned into a full-fledged human being with friends and relationships. And I've tracked his progress. He's a junior in high school now, and he's the lead drummer in a rock band and also sings. That is a long ways from where he started. And I had him doing plenty of academics in my class. We wrote essays, you know, we did projects, we don't, but the biggest thing he needed was a person who could lead him. And I and I don't think you're gonna find that in a school that's only about academics because it becomes a little bit sterile because they say things like, Well, yeah, well, that's a tough family situation. I can't really help it. I've got him for six hours, I can fix it.

SPEAKER_01 41:45

So you see it um non-academic, which is which is interesting because I would prefer to say intangibles and durable skills. What I'm getting framing one is you have, I guess we can kind of go black and white. You have schools that probably the more affluent are focused really strongly on the competitiveness and the academics. So there are parents there are super engaged and worried about that.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Well, I don't see that there's there's there's problems with that too, Joe, because have you listened to the Sold a Story podcast yet? Hmm. No, it's a fantastic thing. It's the thing that got Lucy Calkins removed at Columbia. And honestly, I think why do we put so many eggs in her basket? She has three years in the classroom. Tell me the magic she figured out in three years that we should all be following. Second, and I and I want to clarify this one. I don't know this for a fact, but my understanding is her degree is actually in theology, which could be good for education, but why is she telling us how to teach? I don't get it. And so, in that sold a story podcast, which is fantastic, if you like a like a really good murder mystery podcast, it's got that same really highly produced vibe. But there's a scenario where one of Lucy's employees decides she thinks, hey, this teaching thing is cool, and I'm gonna help change poor schools. I'm gonna go and work in poor schools and I'm gonna make them better. And she her plan was that she was going to go and work in these poor schools, I mean, in rich schools, for three years, and then take everything she learned from working at the rich school and do it at the poor school. Good plan, right? Why don't we just teach the same way as the rich school at the poor school? Here's the problem. Here's the problem. The poor schools were already teaching exactly the same as the rich schools. You know what the difference was, Joe? What's that? When your kid isn't learning to read at a rich school. You tell the parents that he needs a tutor. And when your kid's not learning to learn to read at a poor school, the teacher says, I don't know how to help him. It's it's still a pedagogical failure. And I always think of it this way: everybody's born with the same hardware. Our brains have equal capacity, no matter the color of our skin, our income. We can do things. And when we start looking at poor schools and saying they're underperforming because of their parents, that doesn't make any sense. They're underperforming. You know, the president of Hong Kong grew up in a house with a mud floor, and he's the, I believe, the current president of Hong Kong. That is not a thing. That is a mental limitation that we're putting on kids. Oh, yeah, well, only a few of you will go to college. Why is that? Well, it's because of the mindset we have. And I I really worry about that piece. Uh I see teachers saying, they want more engagement. I'm not here to entertain kids. They're not the same thing. Entertainment does not mean engagement. These are the same teachers that'll have kids watch a whole Disney movie. I guarantee you they are not engaged in that entire Disney movie. In fact, I've quit showing videos in my classroom that are more than about three minutes. Because the fact of the matter is the stuff I can show in school is not nearly as good as what they see outside. So I gotta, I gotta do better than that.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

John, I can't believe we've almost come up on an hour already. I am joining this conversation, but uh we do have to kind of wrap it up. But before we do, because first off, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. First off, for anyone listening out there, educator, parent, teacher, student, even, if they want to learn more about you, where should they find information?

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Oh, this is my favorite thing. Just Google me, John Caripo. Your Google feed will be slammed. You can also go if you want to be more surgical. You can go to edgeprotocolsplus.com. That's where we uh share all of our goodness. Our books are available on Amazon. There's even an audiobook of one of ours. And then one of my things I'm uh famous for in my own mind is free lifetime tech support. So I am more than happy. If anybody's listening and they say, John, I like it, but I don't know where to start, you send me an email, I will get you there. Because I believe some group of teachers has to go first in this shift of being student-oriented. And here's just one more little zinger for you, Joe. When we're in school, we are being taught John Dewey, right? In college, it's constructivism, human uh humanity, experiential, all that stuff. As soon as you're a paid teacher, you switch to Horace Mann. And it's Rose and it's impersonal. And here's just a litmus test for any teachers that might be listening. Joe, if I hired you to be my football coach, would I hand you a Pearson football box? It's lunacy. Can you imagine? You're my new music teacher, Joe. I want you to use Amplify Music Program. You better be on activity 16 by week four. No. The football coach tells the principal how the game is gonna go. The band teacher tells the principal how the fall concert's gonna go. The FFA teacher tells the principal what they're doing. And yet, when you hire me to be an English teacher, I say, What program do you use? Dude, I tell you how we're gonna teach English. Like, you don't need to buy me a book or a box. I got this. We're gonna be doing Heroes Journey, we're gonna be doing archetypes, we're gonna do all 36 literary devices. I'm gonna have every kid in my class writing three paragraphs by September. I know how I'm gonna teach. And I think that's missing in teaching. Teachers, you know, they have a mindset that they're very independent. Crazy part is they're independently all doing the same thing. Well, that would be like saying, I have the best Taco Bell on the planet. Bro, they're all Taco Bell. There's not better or worse Taco Bells. It's just Taco Bell. So when you come into teaching and say, I'm gonna do this the same way as everybody else, but have better results, you zoom out and think about that statement. You can do everything the same way and have better results. Illogical.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Well, John, I appreciate it you coming on. Um, I hope you'll come back. We'll we'll get maybe deeper into a couple topics more next time.

SPEAKER_00 49:07

I would love to see if your listeners have questions and we can we can follow up on some of the things I talked about. I've done all the things I'm expressing. So when people say, I don't know about that, I will tell you exactly how it's gonna work. Oh, by the way, Joe, when I went back and taught during COVID, what was everybody yelling? Learning. Learning loss, right? Everybody's screaming learning loss. During COVID, my language arts students, their scores doubled from 23% passing to 48 during COVID. My math kids went from 9% passing to 41. As a profession, we should be able to do that all the time. And I was doing it during COVID. So, what is going on with this profession where we can't get kids to move forward? At some point, we got to back up and say, how can I approach this problem differently? And my funniest thing of all is, I'll bet you 40% of the teachers in the United States have an open and fixed mindset poster on their wall, and they don't even really understand what they're what they're putting up there.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

I I 100% agree. I think mindset's really holding us back as a society, but also an education. So, John, yeah, thank you so much for being on it, the podcast, and uh we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the supported learning podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.