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. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to save money and time with college planning and navigate the maze of college emissions without spending hours and hours and hours or wasting thousands of dollars. And it usually involves finding people who've cracked the code, who have learned the system that schools aren't necessarily teaching or telling us. And that's why I'm thrilled to welcome our guest today, the director of uh college readiness at UWorld, Mr. Philip Bates. How are you, Philip? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I apologize for that. I'm appreciate you coming on.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Well, you're all good, man. It's all good.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Uh so Philip, we were just talking just before you're out of Texas. Uh kind of you've spent 17 years I hear out of my notes as an educator and school administrator uh before moving into ed tech. So, like, kind of give us the background on your learning journey and how you have navigated the the world of education and gotten to where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Sure, absolutely. So, yeah, I started out as a uh a school teacher, uh, taught sixth grade for um about four years, and you know, during that time uh had some some folks that I really admire and and kind of were mentoring me and they kind of pushed me into administration. And so I became an elementary uh assistant principal for a couple of years, then moved into being a principal of elementary school, um, did several different uh elementary principal jobs. Uh, just you know, I'd go into a place, try to get them where they needed to be, and then they would put me someplace else to try to replicate that same thing. So did that for a while and then um went to the junior high. So I was principal junior high, and then uh got a chance to be principal of a high school. So I've I tell people I've seen everything from pre-K graduation to high school graduation.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah. So you've you've basically seen it all as an administrator at all levels.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Absolutely, absolutely. It and you know, there's not there's not a whole lot different, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

That is pretty unique, though, because most administrators don't take that path. They usually stay in in one area of concentration over a period of time. So um, I assume with that experience you were on track probably to go into upper administration, potentially even a superintendent role.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Well, I was, and that was that's where kind of my education journey took took a very abrupt turn. Um, I was debating whether or not, you know, I had two opportunities. I had the opportunity uh to go into upper admin, and then I had the opportunity at U World. And I would say, you know, we've got a fantastic CEO who's very, I would say, part in inspiring and part um encouraging. And, you know, what he was talking about with starting college readiness uh and and giving me an opportunity to hire a great team, you know, put in a lot of quality time into building SAT, ACT, and eventually AP stuff just was too exciting for me to pass up. So that that's what kind of got me this different direction.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

So for families who aren't familiar, what is UWorld and why should families who are preparing their kids for ACT, SAT, and AP exams pay attention to what you're building?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Sure. So we we've been around actually for 20 years. Um, but you know, we were not in the K-12 space. We were, you know, initially in the medical space. Um and I would say the great thing about UWorld is is, you know, we make really complicated things easier for students to understand. And that might be, you know, a high school student, obviously, for SAT, ACT, AP. Uh, it's gonna be a medical student, it's gonna be a student trying to get into medical school, it's going to be, you know, a person trying to pass the NCLEX exam for nursing. You know, so we we help a variety of different types of students in that most critical time when they're taking the most important exam or the most important certification test of their lives. And we pride ourselves on, you know, very much high-quality resources, get you ready for that exam in the most efficiently and effective way possible.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah, so uh UWorld got its name kind of in the medical education space, and then it's kind of expanded from there. Is that kind of the journey that they went on?

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah, absolutely. I I'd say, you know, Dr. Chander, our CEO, um, you also is an internal medicine doctor, made the shift uh or, you know, expanded the the company's offerings and expanded the verticals that we went into. I think partly because he just really enjoyed helping people and it was opportunities to help a wider range of folks. And then I think he also did it because he had young kids. And I think he saw his children and got excited about getting into uh, you know, the the high school market.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Right. A lot of students typically prep for exams by reading notes or watching videos, kind of just like the traditional method of I'm just gonna memorize a whole bunch of stuff. What does the research actually say about how students learn best? And how does that shape what you do out of your home?

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think there's a lot of myths on the best way to prepare for, you know, really any big assessment, any big test exam. Um, you know, I think the traditional ineffective way is kind of drill and kill. And, you know, I've got to just answer question after question after question after question, uh, practice test after practice test. We take a different, more research based approach, and and ours is immediate feedback. So, you know, obviously you've got to have rigorous content that matches the exam that you're about to be taking, you know, the SAT or an AP exam. And then we're gonna provide you with content. But the second that you start to struggle with that content, the second you have a misconception, we're gonna point that out. We're gonna kind of redirect uh your thinking, talk about that misconception, and then you're gonna excel where you were struggling, and then you can move on to learn new content. And so it's not more, it's not really memorization more than it is kind of building up your skill set and making sure that when you see that particular concept, you're confident to be able to handle that, you know, correctly.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

And you all recently expanded into the AP world in kind of a big way. What does that look like now on your platform and how you prepare kids for the rigors of AP exam testing?

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, same methodology of UWorld, uh, I think one unique part about it too is we're not just helping uh students. We're now actually moved into helping teachers as well and helping schools. And so we, you know, it always developed really, really effective question banks and, you know, really fantastic ways to drill down to actual questions that appear in the exam. And now we've started to add additional instructional resources. That might be videos, that might be instructional activities, that might be um, you know, lessons that that teachers, AP teachers can use to help make uh the content more engaging to students, helping them really understand rigorous, rigorous AP college level content and doing it in such a way where we connect uh you know students with that.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

And talk to us about how you're integrating AI greater in terms of into that feedback tool that you're talking about. Um, because I've seen some other tools out there promoting it. What is yours specifically focused on, specifically in the uh ed tech space?

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Yeah. So uh 50% of AP exams, around about that, depends on the course, are essay-based. And so, you know, I think a lot of parents, a lot of students for that matter, think about that AP exam just being multiple choice. Well, that's the first part. Well, the second part is this really, really rigorous, typically more challenging section that is essays. And, you know, if a student is is asked to prepare and get ready for this big, rigorous essay part of the exam, and they're answering questions themselves, they're gonna be really uh, I mean, you know, teenagers, they're gonna be very biased when they're grading their own essays. You know, they're gonna say, well, I would have, I would have put that evidence in there. I'm just gonna go ahead and give myself that point, or I think I'm gonna do fine here. What AI does for them is it provides them an impartial grader who's going to look through the rubric and actually give them really great feedback that they can trust and use to improve their essay writing.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah, um that I think is the biggest piece uh most families miss is that um like the the biggest difference in in your college prep or in college prep for AP exams, specifically related to those FRQs, is that graded feedback by someone. And most kids, you hit it, you hit the nail on the head. Most kids are not doing that themselves. They might take, oh, my kids got A's in the class or taking a bunch of practice tests, but they're not who's challenging themselves with essays and actually being honest or even knowing how to grade them based on those rubrics.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

What is um well and and and same with teachers. I mean, we Yeah. Yeah, we I mean, we've got that AI piece for teachers as well. So you can imagine the AP teacher who's just got stacks and stacks and stacks of essays to grade. Um, and and typically that has the AP teacher not wanting to assign essays because they're just gonna grade them all. And so we will have our teachers utilize that that AI um U grader is what we call it, and it will grade student essays for them, and they've got to validate those scores. I mean, the the teacher absolutely wants to go back and say, okay, how did this tool do? Um, and it helps them. And it also helps new AP teachers who, just frankly, haven't had a lot of experience grading essays. They now have another tool they can use to kind of help gauge and calibrate their own grading.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

What's the most common mistake you see students making when it comes to AP prep or SAT prep?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Um Yeah, I think I think the I Yeah, I think the idea of a student having to just take practice test after practice test after practice test, um it is just it's just a myth. And and you know, if you take a practice test and then you score it Yeah, you're experiencing the rigor of the question, but any misconception you had, any trouble you had, it's not it's it's not reteaching you anything. You know, it's just saying, hey, you got that wrong. The answer is actually B, not C. And you know, the student is is if their next you know method of of practice is to just grab another practice test, they're just they're they're gonna, it's very inefficient way to do it. I mean, taking 12 practice tests rather than taking a couple or just working on the content and getting feedback, it's just such a more effective way to do things.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

And so you actually host a podcast yourself from classroom to campus, um, and you're talking to educators every week. What are what are some of the patterns you're seeing happen in in schools right now in when it's parent students?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

I mean, the the the reason the reason we started the podcast, I think number one was to get um just to celebrate educators. Uh educators you know really get get beat up pretty good for a lot of different reasons, um, unfortunately. So it's a chance to kind of highlight the great things they do. And when we sit down with them, uh the trends here recently have been, you know, traditional things of, you know, how do we make instruction engaging to students? I think kind of a new thing that's coming out is we're seeing teachers, educators, specifically AD educators, frustrated by, hey, just the technology. You know, there's students on a Chromebook laptop all the time and trying to kind of balance, we don't want them on Chromebooks all the time. You know, we want them engaged with, you know, critical thinking. We want them engaged with, you know, participating in the class. We want them having conversations with each other, having conversations with the teacher. So balancing using technology effectively, but not letting it be the sole thing that either the teacher andor the students are depending on. There's got to be that balance there. And we've started actually taking a lot of our instructional materials and making them printable because teachers want to use, they want students to actually write things down. They want students to engage in that way. And so I think that's a trend we're seeing too. And I think the last big trend we're seeing is the push for teachers to help kids get college ready by teaching a lot of executive function that maybe teachers in the past didn't have to do so much. Um, so supporting students in that way. And there's lots of reasons why teaching executive function is important, and there's lots of reasons why there's holes in maybe a student's executive function that might not have been there a few years ago.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Yeah, the um gaps from COVID we're still seeing matriculate up through the system. The uh you've you've actually talked about um rigor as well, and um, I like that you said that rigor doesn't usually mean more content or going faster. Tell me what is uh what is true rigor when it comes to um, you know, learning in the classroom and what what what is good rigor look like for a teacher out there?

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, really effective rigor in a classroom looks like challenging a student's thinking, not challenging in terms of how many hours they're gonna spend reading or taking notes or answering questions or doing projects. It's how much quality thinking time is that student going to uh, you know, take part in. Because rigor is essentially challenging students' thinking and helping a student, you know, expand their thinking, helping students, you know, build thinking skills creatively, um, how to process through materials effectively. So when a teacher is looking at the rigor of their instruction and they're going, well, I've assigned all this content, I'm I'm I'm giving students all these projects, that's that's not the way to do it. You know, they need to be looking and seeing, well, how engaged are their students? Are their students making mistakes and then not making the same mistake next the next time? Are they are they learning to think effectively? Um, that's to me true rigor. And it's hard to do. I mean, it true rigor is very difficult for teachers to achieve, specifically new teachers, and even better and teachers sometimes fall into fall into ruts.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

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 supportedtutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. And then when it comes to layering on the executive functioning skills, talk to us about time management or um what do you I mean, is it just time management or what do you see as the biggest deficit in our kids today when it comes to executive functioning?

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, I I think it's you know, we'll start with a student's ability to plan out how they're gonna get from point A to point B. You know, so a student's got a got a summative assessment, a unit test at the end of the week. What are they doing to prepare for that? And and we can, as educators, assume a tea a student is gonna know A, how to prepare for it, and then how to create a plan to prepare for it. And that's, I think, a big piece of executive function is understanding really, I call it adulting. Executive function is just adulting. And and it, you know, it's adult thing as far as learning how to prepare, uh, learning how to plan, you know, learning how to do the things uh that make you successful. And educators just can't assume any of that stuff is already in place, specifically because you're asking high school students to be successful in a college-level course doing college-like things when they're not yet in college. So I think those pieces are really important.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Yeah, I mean, it's the explicit, it's it's being explicit in terms of what you want, but it's it has to be by design because it doesn't just happen anymore. And so, you know, I think that gap is very, very important that you you call out there because you're expecting that level and that no one actually shows it. I mean, I did you do much work uh as a principal with PIS at all? Or was that before, like before you no, I didn't okay. So, like positive behavior. So basically the behavioral management uh tier.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Oh, positive behavior. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Yeah. So I mean, basically, is that you know, one of the core principles that I like is if you're expecting a certain behavior, you actually have to teach what the behavior looks like. You can't just expect kids to know 100% what to do. So it's the same with rigorous expectations, especially executive functioning skills, is you're expecting these things, but if you're not, I mean, even it comes down to like note-taking, right? There's so many different ways to note-take. But I think that's like a lost art now. Teachers just glaze over, especially high school, just glaze over note-taking and just or the dig or the digital medium. We're not we're not taking the time to actually teach the trans, not that transfer is the high order thinking skill, but there is no processing of the information happening.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

A hundred percent. And I think it's a couple things. I think it's number one, um uh teachers feeling like they don't have time. They've got to teach all the content, they've got to cover every single unit and the entire course. That's that's their number one thing. They've got to go fast. And, you know, they're they're not, they're leaving out some critical, critical things and doing that, like you mentioned, note-taking and actually explicitly showing students how to take notes effectively, but then watching them do it and then following up to say, hey, that looks great, but hey, here's an here's here's what you're missing here. You know, whether it be teaching a specific technique like Hornell note-taking. I mean, there's there's lots of different note-taking techniques, and don't just teach them once and just assume that I know how to do it, because doing it one time remotely enough, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

There's a lot of resources and information in the test prep space right now. Um, free resources, expensive tutoring, question banks, courses for families that are feeling overwhelmed. Um, how should they think about what actually moves the needle and where should they start with test prep?

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Yeah, that's a good question. And then it is, it is very, very uh crowded out there and very, there's lots of disinformation. Um, there's a lot of resources out there. Free resources are great. And I always tell people free resources are great for, you know, one category of free resources is release practice tests. And release practice tests have an absolute place in preparation. You know, typically you want to take a practice test before you start preparing for something to kind of gauge where you're at. And you also want to take a practice test at some point during your journey to, you know, really help establish um, you know, that you've got the uh, you know, ability to get through an entire test. And it kind of lets you know that all your prep paid off and you're kind of ready to go. But free resources typically, you know, don't provide the quality that you need. Um, and and that's where I think parents really need to do their research and they need to make sure that whatever tool they're providing for their child matches the exam and doesn't dummy down content that actually keeps that rigor up there. And if it's not giving them immediate feedback, it's not helping that student learn anything, then it's not the resource, you know, for them. Tutoring is great. I mean, I I would I Would say tutoring is great, but tutoring is really great for the accountability stuff. It's exceptionally expensive. And I think a lot of times parents go to it because they they set up a tutoring session that the student requires them to go to. And the downfall of relying on tutoring in that regard is once a student goes off to college, they're in charge of themselves. You know, they're not going, they're not going to have their parents, well, hopefully not going to have their parents setting up tutoring sessions for them. So, you know, students eventually have got to become self-reliant and they have to learn how to do things on their own. And I think when a parent's role in that is to provide good resources and to provide encouragement and to formulate a plan with their child. So don't set them free and just figure out, you know, have the child figure out what to do, but work with the child, even if the parent has no idea about the content. You don't need to know AP calculus to help a student plan out studying for an AP calculus calculus exam. You know, there's things that parents can do uh, you know, not only with resources, but with planning that get students there.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

With AI, where is the future of prep heading in the next five years?

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Oh man, that's a really great question. And I think a lot of folks um are wondering that and and and really navigating at. I know for us, we utilize AI all the time. Um, and we utilize it, I I like to call it, you know, almost like a really, really helpful intern because it certainly makes uh certain tasks much more efficient. Um it is it is not something if you're having AI write all your content and not having that human touch in there, that's really disturbing to me because you've got to have a human touch with AI. And if you pair those things together, it certainly allows us to create some really fantastic content in a very efficient manner. And I think that you know, it's changing every day. We use it, we use it consistently. We do workshops together, we try to find new ways where it can help us uh improve the content that we're building for students, for teachers, uh, and in that way it's exciting. And I think, you know, for people like me and industries like ours, if you're not looking at ways to utilize it to help create super high quality, efficient content, you're missing the you're missing the vote.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

For a family who's has a kid right now struggling or you're struggling with APs and juggling four to five exams uh coming up, or maybe they're preparing for the SAT and they're just feeling burned out. What's the most important thing they should focus on?

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Yeah, that's you know, it's uh very that question hits me a little bit differently because I've got a son who's a senior in high school. And, you know, it's it's very interesting to be in this industry and do what I do when you've got a son who's experiencing all this. And so, you know, last year, for example, when he was, it was critical that he get the very, very best score he could on the SAT, um, making sure he understood that you don't need to prepare four hours a night for the SAT. Like that's not an effective way to prepare for any, you know, exam like the SAT. And so getting him to be very disciplined about, you know, 30 minutes a night, 10 questions a day, you know, making sure we read through U-world explanations and learn something, having an error log and doing breaking it down for my son was really, really effective. And it's what we we we tell all of our students, but actually having one living in my home where I could kind of watch him go through things and really prove to myself that all these things that we we tell you know our students that we work with really truly work. I mean, he increased his SAT score by almost 200 points from the first time he took it. So that that was exciting for me and kind of rewarding in a selfish way that the things that we're doing actually are you know benefiting students. In terms of AP, you know, it's taking you, you know, students that we work with that have four, five, six AP exams in May, it's helping them understand how to break that down. And you're not gonna study the same for all these exams for logical reasons. You really've got to put a plan together specific to that course and that exam because you've got to figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are. Because you're not gonna be able to put committed time into all of them uh as much as you'd like. So it's going, all right, this exam is gonna really take me this amount of effort. Here's how I did in the class, here's what I'm weak in. And hopefully it might be, well, I'm only weak at, you know, document-based FRQs and AP history. Well, let's focus there. You know, you're gonna be fine everywhere else. And then having a goal for a score. I mean, if you, if you your goal is to get a four, great, what's that what's that gonna take? You only need a three on the exam because you're going to college here and that you'll take a three on the exam. Really kind of balancing all that, uh, and and once again, working with your teachers, working with your parents, you know, talking to people that can help you put together a plan. They not, they might not know the content, but they can assist, they can assist you in ways to break things down and not make it so overwhelming. Because when students get overwhelmed, they're just like adults. We just shut, they shut down. And so keeping keeping them from burning out, keeping them from shutting down, and helping them balance uh the preparation in a smart way.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

Well, are you ready for rapid fire? This will be just a five, five to six questions. No, no explanation needed. All right. One study habit every student should adopt.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

I would say um seeking immediate feedback. And if they aren't getting that immediate feedback, going and explicitly asking for it, knowing what they did wrong.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Worst advice you hear given to students about test prep.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Oh my gosh. I would say that you've got to do every single question known to man in order to be effective. Because if you don't do every single question, then you're not gonna be ready for the the all the questions on the exam, which is the worst advice of all time.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

One thing parents overthink about their kids' exam prep.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

I think that there's to not be confident that their student cares as much as they do. I think sometimes parents think that they care more than their student does, and they don't give their student enough credit for them wanting to do well.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

If you could change one thing about how schools prepare students for exams, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

I would say uh we test kids too much. And we throw summative assessments out like crazy without even having a purpose for them, without even, you know, analyzing the data, without even, you know, having a method to the madness that we feel like I think formative assessments, you can't do enough formative assessments. Man, that's so important. And that should happen on the daily, actually multiple times in a class period. But summative assessments, we just beat kids down with them.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Well put. Well, Philip, thank you so much for your time coming on the podcast today. Sorry about the couple technical difficulties, but um, if there's one thing you want families uh to leave this show, this episode knowing, what should it be?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

I think that uh you can go out there and find instructional content to support your child that you can count on and trust, and that it doesn't have to be this big mystery. And if you work with your child to not only find that content, but to lay it out in a way that gives them a good plan that they feel good about, that that can relieve stress not only for the parent, but for the child.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

And um before we wrap, for families out there that want to learn more about what uWorld offers, where can they find you, or more information about the company?

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah, absolutely. So uh uWorld.com, uh, you can you can go on there and you know really get a good idea about what we build and what we create to support students, SAT, ACT, and AP. Um, you know, maybe you're fortunate enough where your child uh, you know, attends a school that we work with across the country that utilizes UWorld. That's great. If you want to learn more about what your student is experiencing in their classroom, you can certainly go to the website. Um, and then, you know, podcasts is great. You know, a lot of not just educators listen to our podcast, but a lot of parents listen to it as well. Because I'm a parent of an 18-year-old, a 21-year-old, and we just talk about the challenges that that come with um, you know, uh parenting teenagers and supporting uh, you know, students in really tumultuous times of their lives. Exciting but tumultuous.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Right, well, we'll put those links um as well as the podcast link in the description and in the show notes as well. And again, Philp, thank you so much for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Yeah, thank you, Dr. I appreciate it, man.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Great to meet you. Absolutely. And we'll see you all next time on the Supported Learning Podcast. 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.