Read the full transcript of Episode 45 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features professor and best-selling author Catlin R. Tucker joining host Tim Fish for a deep discussion of what blended learning truly is (and is not), what opportunities it provides to shift the balance of responsibility in our schools, and how to enact it in a thoughtful, nuanced, and even joyful way.
Tim Fish: Welcome back to New View EDU! You know, ever since the beginning of this podcast, we’ve been talking about preparing students for their future. And if there’s one thing we know, their future is going to be dynamic and unpredictable.
Educators need to help students develop an essential life-long skill: The capacity to independently direct their own learning, in school and beyond.
To get at this, I am thrilled to introduce the New View EDU community to Dr. Catlin Tucker.
Catlin is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, international trainer, and professor in the master’s program in teaching at Pepperdine University. She also taught for 16 years in Sonoma County, California, where she was named teacher of the year in 2010.
And I’ll also say that Catlin has become a friend over the last year, and I just absolutely enjoy my conversations with her, as I’m sure you will as well.
All right, Catlin, thank you so much for joining us. It is so great to see you again and spend some time with our listeners.
Catlin Tucker: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tim Fish: Just to start off, if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about your work and sort of what gets you up in the morning. What are you thinking about right now?
Catlin Tucker: Yeah, I mean, what I am currently thinking about, if I'm honest, is these small shifts that I would love to support educators making right now in classrooms, that I think could have a really big effect. I think the last couple of years, or maybe now three years, I've just been really concerned by the level of burnout and exhaustion and frustration that I see when I work with teachers, and it's so understandable. And yet, you know, I see the way classrooms are operating and I see all these opportunities for shifting workflows that I think could make this work more enjoyable and sustainable. And I don't know. That's where my mind has been the last several months, is just in that space of how do I support teachers in making shifts that can have an impact right now.
Tim Fish: I love it. And so, what I also think is so interesting is so often on this podcast, we get in these conversations about like, structural shifts. Like it all needs to change. We got to reimagine this whole thing. We got to blow it up, you know? And, and yet, what I love so much about what you just said is like, no, let's just talk about some small little things that you can do to help improve learning, but also to help make teaching as a profession more sustainable. Give me an example or two of something a teacher could do, something I could do if I were in the classroom.
Catlin Tucker: I mean, let me be clear. There's a lot about the existing system I am not a fan of. I mean, you and I were on a panel—
Tim Fish: —There's some blowing up. I know.
Catlin Tucker: Yeah, we were on a panel in Dubai, and there were representatives from really outside the box schools. And I got to tell you, it was inspiring to hear from them. I loved it. But at the end of the day, I spend my life supporting mostly teachers in public school settings, traditional classrooms.They're in a system that they quite frankly, don't feel they can change.
And so I think that's why my work is really focused on: How are you approaching the design and facilitation of learning in your classroom? You can't change the whole system. You might not feel like you have a lot of control, but you do have a degree of autonomy and control and creativity in your classroom, and so how are you really positioning learners to do the heavy cognitive lift in that class? Like I go into classrooms all the time, and I still see teachers designing very teacher-centered learning experiences, where they're fairly trapped at the front of the room. Even if they're not talking the whole time, they're orchestrating the parts of the lesson and they're managing student behaviors, and I just want teachers to be thinking about what are my kids really capable of? And if I took some of these everyday tasks that I'm owning, and actually trusted and helped my students skill build so they could share the responsibility of learning, how much pressure and work that that would take off of the teacher.
So for example, we have so many teachers right now who are assigning practice and review. We know students need to practice concept, you know, reviewing concepts, skills, to learn. And yet at the end of the day or after kids come home or come back from home, they scoop it up and the teacher takes the responsibility of looking critically at that work, spending hours giving corrective feedback and putting grades in a grade book. And my thinking is, why aren't we teaching students, when it's review and practice, it's not an assessment. Why aren't we positioning them to look critically at their own work and think about, is it accurate, is it not? What am I learning about myself as a student from this? Where are my strengths? Where are my limitations? Where am I struggling and need more support?
I think that would be so much of a richer experience for learners than having teachers scoop it up, write some comments, allocate some points, throw it in a grade book. 'Cause honestly, I don't think we should be throwing review and practice in a grade book. And so there's just all these little shifts that I think could happen that would really make this work just feel more sustainable from a teacher perspective.
Tim Fish: But there's this thing, right? When I started my career teaching fourth grade, I had this blue bag that I carried around my shoulder, and I'm sure you had the same kind of bag.
And that bag always had paper clipped packets that, of things I had given the students to work on. And there was always eight to 10 of them and everywhere I went, if I was getting my oil changed, if I was waiting in the waiting room at the dentist, if I was, you know, almost sitting at a red light, I would pull that thing out and try to knock out a few different grading. Right? And it was like I, this pressure, I had that bag, that appendage that was with me all the time. And what you're suggesting is, look, yeah, there's some work that we should do to, to evaluate, but we don't have to scoop up every single piece of paper and then take the responsibility on, right?
And so this notion, I love the way you said it, shifting the cognitive load. Because in that classroom you're describing like, who does that work? And so much of your work has been around this idea of blended learning. Right. You've written two amazing books on this topic, your awesome podcast The Balance often talks about elements of blended learning. I often think that folks don't have a really clear understanding of exactly what blended learning even is. So help us, help me understand, what is blended learning?
Catlin Tucker: You are so right, Tim. I encounter— so I've actually written nine books that relate to blended learning, so I've been in this space for a long time.
Tim Fish: I thought it was — wow, you have been on this.
Catlin Tucker: Since 2010 is when my first book was published. And what was interesting during the pandemic is, I think unfortunately the pandemic, which was very hard on everybody, was the first time a lot of teachers really heard the phrase blended learning a lot in the mainstream. Obviously some people have kind of heard of it here and there, or they'd heard of a strategy like flipped classroom, but they weren't real familiar with what this meant.
And so because they were introduced during the pandemic, I think the reaction was very negative. It was like, well, if this whole blended learning thing is related to the pandemic, then I don't want anything to do with it. And I was like, No, it has been here for a long time. I've written so many books on this topic, and when I define blended learning, I am very clear.
Blended learning is simply active, engaged learning online, combined with active, engaged learning offline, with the goal of giving students more control over the time, the place, the pace, and the path of their learning. So within that like, umbrella, that is blended learning, there are lots of different models, lots of different ways to combine the online and offline learning components. But the goal is always to position the learner as the active agent at the center of the experience.
And I think what is really exciting is, blended learning can happen entirely in a classroom, right? I go into a third grade classroom. We might do a station rotation where students are rotating through learning activities, some online, some offline, some with the teacher, and then it can happen in a hybrid scenario where they might come to class certain days of the week and learn online, or it can happen entirely in a remote learning scenario, which was maybe one of the most exciting things to witness during the pandemic, was oh my gosh. These models are flexible enough. You can run a virtual station rotation, you can have kids working self-pacing through a playlist. So it's that flexibility and the positioning the learner at the center of the experience that, for me, is the really exciting part. It's not about just the technology, right?
I think a lot of people assume, oh, I'm one-to-one. It's blended learning. I'm like, well, you can be one-to-one and not give kids any control. And I would argue that's not blended learning.
Tim Fish: So one of the things I love is that in both cases, whether it be online or in person, highly engaged, well-designed experiences is at the center of it. Right? And so even, so I think about like a traditional flipped classroom, right? This idea of like, we're gonna flip it, so I'm gonna just talk at you and you're gonna watch that online, and then you're gonna come to the classroom and do something, right?
Even in that model, that sort of flipped part, the part you do at home, right, is maybe not nearly as engaging and student-centered as it could be. So while flipped is maybe, people will often say it's synonymous with blended, in your design, you need to have a more engaging online component. It's not just passive online consumption.
Catlin Tucker: Exactly. So I think one of the, that's one of the big complaints of the flipped classroom, 'cause it is a blended learning model and it does position students so when we send videos home with them, they have control of the time, the place, and the pace. Right? They can rewatch, rewind, pause. But when I work with educators around designing flipped classroom, they're very focused on what happens when kids come back to class and really trying to allow for that student-centered practice and application, where they can work with peers, get the teacher support, but I'm also, let's like look at what's happening in the home environment.
Are we trying to actively engage them as they watch the video? And that might be wrapping the video in an EDpuzzle lesson that kind of sprinkles questions that they have to think critically about as they watch the video. It could be pairing the video with a guided note template or a concept map, or even pairing it with an online discussion prompt.
So, even when we send that video home, how are we encouraging that mental active engagement around the content being presented, so they aren't slipping into that passive consumptive role? That is what we're trying to avoid.
Tim Fish: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. I love it. And so then if we flip back to the beginning of this conversation, when you talked about the small shifts that you can make to make the, make the work of being a teacher more sustainable and rewarding. Are there ways that blended learning can actually create that for teachers? Are there ways that blended learning can make it more sustainable and rewarding?
Catlin Tucker: Yes! I’m so glad you asked me that. Yes. So in my last book, The Shift to Student-Led, literally each chapter unpacks what I think is a time consuming, teacher-led, often frustratingly ineffective workflow, and reimagine it from a student-led, student paced, kind of sustainable approach. And so the first chapter is all about moving from information transfer, right? That pressure that teachers feel to just cover content, present information in lectures and mini lessons, and really explore a collection of strategies they can lean on to again, put students at the center of that experience. Things like the reciprocal teaching strategy, right? Getting students to engage with each other around media in meaningful ways.
And part of what I think is why it's so helpful to have blended learning as kind of the foundation of this, is it creates more time and space for the teacher to build those student-centered experiences in. So, when I work with teachers, I'm like, well, you feel like you need to cover this content. I think the first question we need to ask is, would you say it the same way for all students, or is it a more complex, nuanced kind of skill or explanation you feel like you need to differentiate for different learners?
If it's gonna be the same thing for everybody, make a video, let them self pace through it. That can happen in an online station. We can pull it into a playlist model. And then reserve that teacher-led instructional time for small differentiated group experiences, where we can be much more targeted and thoughtful about the vocabulary we use, the text we choose, the problems and prompts we present, the scaffolds we supply, like, let's really maximize time with learners.
So I think there are all these little shifts, but if teachers are still trapped at the front of the room, feeling like my job is to transfer information, there's no time and space to really position students at the center, give them more responsibility and let them engage in the messy work that is learning.
It is not quick, it is not tidy. It is not easy. It takes time.
Tim Fish: You know, it's so funny. In the last season I talked about when I was teaching fourth grade and we were doing a lesson on density in liquids, and how I would stay at school till 9:30 at night before the liquid layers activity, and I would make a little tray for every pair of students and I would put all the little things, all the salt, all the water, all the little things in their nice little tidy places.
So then when they came up, they could just come get their little tray and they could go back and everything was premeasured. And guaranteed success. Right? And, did my students learn anything? It was tidy. But did my students learn anything about density? No. Right? Did they experiment? No. Did they follow a prescribed sort of thing? Yes. Because that's what I thought quality looked like, right? I thought quality is when each group has perfect layers in their little test tube at the end of the unit. And I think that we, I, as a teacher would often do that. I would like, take on the work, right? And—
Catlin Tucker: —Yes. This is what most teachers are doing.
Tim Fish: Right. And,now I'm kind of in this frame of mind that what I should have done is given them bucket of water in a box of salt and say, tell me what density is and how can you tell, how can you explain what density is using salt and water, right? Now that might've been a little abstract for fourth graders, but you get the point, right, that that's this notion of where construction and constructivist thinking comes in and creating a context for that to happen.
So now I'm so interested in this, in your Shift to Student-Led. Love the title, it's a huge thing that we've talked about on this podcast since the beginning. In your mind, sort of what are those critical components? Because what I love also is, we've talked about it at a high level, but you are giving practical advice for how a teacher in a classroom can start moving very targeted behaviors from one teacher-led mode to a more student-led mode.
And what do you find when, when teachers are able to really successfully make that transition, what's in place in their own mind? What do they have to either believe, how do they have to shift some of their own thinking?
Catlin Tucker: I will say, the very fundamental thing that I wrestle with the most is mindset, right? I meet so many teachers who, you know, we went through school, we were taught a particular way. We must have had a pretty good experience 'cause we decided to come back, right? Make this our whole lives.
And I think there is this assumption about what teaching looks like, which is transferring information, being the expert, guiding students along a prescribed path, and what student, like what learning looks like, right? Which is them sitting in desks, staring in our general direction, maybe taking some notes.
And for me, it's really trying to dismantle some of those mental models about what teaching and learning look like and encouraging teachers to, one, trust in their students' ability first. Like do we feel students are capable of being our partners in this work? If the answer is no, then that means we need to do some fundamental skill building around, you know, some of those SEL competencies of self-awareness and you know, self-regulation, self-management, responsible decision making.
We might need to do, invest some time in some metacognitive skill building around goal setting and tracking progress and reflecting on learning to really re engage students who quite frankly have been trained to kind of sit and listen. But the teachers I see who kind of make this leap, they're like, what, what I'm doing isn't working. It's not yielding the outcomes that I'm looking for. Students aren't engaged or seem particularly motivated. Once they make this leap, they know, one, they're not gonna be able to cover as much content as they used to. You know, you're not gonna cover as much if you're not just standing in front of kids, like burning through information.
But what they start to realize is when they position students to ask questions, discover, explore, engage in conversations with each other, understand that like, mistakes are something we talk about and we troubleshoot and we, we try to learn from, and then they get more confident making choices and owning the learning experience. Most of the teachers that get over that hump and start to make these shifts and lean on technology strategically, they're like, This is crazy. I'm like not doing very much, right? I'm, I'm sitting alongside learners. I'm asking questions. I'm, I'm observing their work and supporting them with individual kind of scaffolds.
I am, you know, encouraging conversation. It's like, It's so freeing, and they almost in the beginning, I think feel like, is this OK? Is it OK that they're doing the work and I'm not doing the work? And I'm like, yes. The person doing the work in the classroom is the person learning in the classroom. We absolutely want them doing the work.
Tim Fish: And it, the question is though, what is what is the work, right? And the work, I always thought the work was making the tray and putting the salt in the little cups, right? That was the work. And the work is really, right. Madeline Hunter, teaching is diagnosing and diagnosing is teaching, right? It's this whole idea of like, I'm engaging, I'm assessing, I'm nudging, I'm asking a follow-up question, right? It's this magic I call the power of get out of the way. Right? Like, design the right experience.There's a masterful design and then there's a, I got to step back, right?
And what I'm hearing you say is that in order to get to that shift, there's a, there's a re-imagination of the paradigm. There's a sort of, what is teaching, what does it look like? What does learning look like? And folks who kind of shift in that concept are folks who then can make the shift to a more student-centered approach.
Catlin Tucker: And I think one of the things that's really interesting is I often equate, 'cause you're absolutely right, it is, design work is critical to these shifts, right? You, you have to be so much more intentional with how you design lessons, and that's why I often will refer to teachers as architects of student-centered learning experiences.
And the reason I use the, the kind of comparison to an architect is the architect gets to know who they're designing for, how they use a space, what are their preferences, what are their needs, and then they create a blueprint for a structure that is going to meet those specific needs and preferences.
And the architect does not go to the building site and pick up a, a hammer and start building the structure. It is the builders and the contractors and the subcontractors doing that actual work. And those builders are the students, right? So our job is to architect these learning experiences that have enough structure and support that then the students can do the heavy lift of making meaning and building that conceptual knowledge and skillset.
And so for me, when I work with teachers who are a little reluctant, they're like, wait a second, but like if I don't say it, how will they learn it? And I just take, like, a deep breath and I'm like, OK, let's evaluate what technology does well. Technology does transfer of information really well. You can read an article, you can listen to a podcast, you can watch a video, you can interact with a website, go on a virtual tour.
There are lots of ways to learn with technology. And whoever is interacting with those kinds of resources has more control. You can make the font bigger. You can pause a video, you can re-listen to an audio track. And so for me, why would we spend our limited precious time? Time that teachers always say they don't have enough of, with our students, talking at them? I think it's because we still believe our value, fundamentally, is in being the expert, and I think that is incorrect. As you just said, I think our value is in the human side of this work, facilitating learning, listening, observing, organically responding to students. Assessing, supporting, empathizing, being compassionate. Like, the more technology explodes and AI advances, it's like we have to embrace that human side of this work to make sure we are doing the best job we can for students.
So for me, that technology piece really just should free us up to do more of that connecting with our actual learners.
Tim Fish: That's so great because it, what it says to us is like, look, the role of the teacher is even more essential than it has ever been. This is not about like, you know, bringing in the self checkout machine, right? That's not, that's not what we're talking about here. We're not saying we don't need teachers. We need teachers way more than we ever did.
So I'm curious if we were to sort of boil it down, the thing that got this whole podcast started is what's the purpose of school? At this moment, why do we have school?
Catlin Tucker: Well, I think we have school to prepare these young people to thrive, hopefully, in what is a very unpredictable future. And I worry that kids coming out of school are not necessarily leaving with that real adaptable skillset, right? Like I work with a lot of teachers where, for example, we'll talk about using the reciprocal teaching strategy to get four to six students actively engaging with a complex text.
And teachers will often say to me like, oh, my kids don't like to read. I don't think they're gonna do this. And I just have to take this deep breath, 'cause I think, how many times in a week do I hit something that I'm unsure of, that I need to find out more about? And most of the time I might stumble on like a YouTube video, but a lot of times I'm reading something. I'm reading articles, I'm reading research, and if we're kind of shuttling kids through school where they are not learning how to think critically, how to question, how to evaluate bias, how to, you know, learn from mistakes, I just, I don't understand how they're gonna feel confident navigating a world where, you know, like a year ago, AI was part of the conversation….
Tim Fish: Yeah, but it wasn’t consequential.
Catlin Tucker: No, but now it's like, OK, now there's this totally new thing that's gonna disrupt so many aspects of our lives. I don't necessarily all think in negative ways. I think there's a lot of positive to it, but are kids prepared to leverage a tool like that?
'Cause in so many schools, even right now, it's like, Ooh, that's scary. These are all the things that could go wrong. Let's block it from our filter. We're never gonna use it here. We're gonna tell kids it's bad. And I'm just like, OK. That's one approach. Or we could really work with learners around how do you interact with a technology like this? How could it be a thought partner? How could it give you feedback? Not just using it to write, you know, something you don't care about, but really leaning on it to maximize your power and potential as a human being. Right?
And so those are the things I worry about, that the classroom doesn't model the kind of real world kind of scenarios that kids are gonna encounter, and they're not cultivating the skills that are necessarily gonna help them be super successful when they land in the quote unquote real world.
Tim Fish: You know, I'd love to get, to sort of riff back on what you said. I mean, this notion of, schools should be when you walk in the door, schools should, it should say you're entering a construction zone, right? Students are constructing here. And we have architects who, the teacher is the architect. I love that.
So if you were to imagine, or maybe there's places you've been where this is happening really well. When you go into a classroom, if you're going, if you are designing the Tucker School, right, and you were to walk into a classroom in the Tucker School, what would it look like? When you see it really working, what do you see? What does it look like?
Catlin Tucker: It's so, you know, you said your early impression of teaching was, if I'm talking, they're learning, and I think one of the early misconceptions I had was, a quiet classroom is a focused classroom where kids are learning. And if I walk into a classroom and it's totally quiet or it's quiet and the teacher's up at the front, that's kind of the exact opposite of what I would dream about as my perfect, like, reality, walking into a classroom.
I think for me, I imagine a room where the space is being used flexibly by learners. Some may be on their own, some might be hovered together with other classmates. They're chatting, they're tinkering, they might be leaning on technology, and you scan the room. And this was my experience in the, probably the last chunk of my career. You don't know where the teacher is. Like, I remember being in my classroom in my last seven years or so in high school English class, and I got rid of my teacher desk. I was like, this is so cumbersome. I don't want to sit here. Instead, I had a little two-seater on wheels and I would just like, shuffle around my class, like just moving, like moseying on up next to students and working with them.
And so I think it's that space where it's learner owned, it's learner driven, it's learner energy buzzing and conversations and you know, the teacher somewhere in the mix, but not the focus of the learning happening. Like for me, that's an exciting classroom to walk into.
Tim Fish: Yeah. So the job then is to sort of design for that, right? My job as a teacher is design for that and then to lightly facilitate it as much as possible, right? And to, and to sort of back away as, as we move forward.
So I'm curious now, as I think about that, and I do a lot of work with boards of trustees and do a lot of work with parent groups and so on, as I'm sure you do as well.
And one of the things that as we start talking about student led learning, student design, agency, you know, increasing engagement activity, often what people get worried about is like, OK. We're going to hippie dippy. Here goes excellence. Excellence just left the building. Rigor just left the building, right? And now we're just doing free for all. Like, like whatever you want. And these kids, these kids are in that kind of room. They're not getting into Harvard, right? And so tell me about sort of how you help teachers, do you find that teachers and others struggle with that notion of the move to engaged learning often is perceived as losing excellence?
Catlin Tucker: I don’t know if I butt up against that as much with teachers. I think teachers, they're, the biggest hurdle that I hear about when we talk about this shift is one, time, and the reason, and second is the curriculum. So it's really about them feeling an immense amount of pressure to cover a certain amount of curriculum in a certain amount of time, whether it's because there's a district adopted pacing guide or there is a certain test that they're responsible for preparing kids for at a certain point of the year. Those tend to be the hurdles teachers are worried about and concerned about.
I read a really interesting interview with Peter Senge, who did a bunch of work around, you know, change and leadership, and he said that the reason it's so hard to sustain innovation in schools is, one of the biggest factors is parents, right? Parents reinforcing the status quo. And this perception that, well, in college they're gonna have to sit and quietly listen in lectures and take notes. And for me, when we really think about the skills that are prioritized in a classroom, when the teacher does the talking and the students do the listening and the writing, there's so little higher order thinking happening in that moment.
And I understand that the engagement in student-centered kind of approach to learning looks a little more chaotic, but like, that is what learning is. As we said earlier, it is not neat and tidy. And I think at the end of the day, if you are frustrated as an educator or a school because your kids are underperforming, they're, you have discipline issues, they are lacking motivation and they're not engaged in classrooms, something has to change.
And I try to put myself now as an adult in the seat of some of these students, where they spend seven hours a day at school, and they don't get to make a single decision about how they learn, what they learn, what they create to demonstrate their learning. Like that is not a space that most kids want to be in. And it shouldn't surprise anybody that a huge, I want to say it's over 70% of students were, report like negative feelings with school. And it's things like anxiety, being tired and bored, like that's where we're keeping them all day. It's heartbreaking.
Tim Fish: Ugh. If we go back to the, the architect and the construction site, this notion of imagine…A, number one, I think you would lose the rigor and the excellence on a construction site if the plans were not well drawn out, right? So if you just kind of handed a sketch and said, build this, people don't know what they're doing. They're walking around, they're, they're aimless. So the architecture is essential to designing for excellence, right? So if you want to build an amazing building like the Burj Khalifa that you and I both went up in when we were in Dubai, then, then you have to get that.
But the other part I love is this notion of the cognitive load. And I was recently listening to an episode of your awesome podcast, The Balance, and on it you were talking with your guests, and I can't remember if you or your guest brought it up, but you mentioned Ron Berger's work of Austin's Butterfly.
Catlin Tucker: Oh, that was Katie Novak. Yes.
Tim Fish: It was Katie Novak. And you, and you talked about the— but can you tell us, talk a little bit about that project? Or I certainly can if you don’t remember everything.
Catlin Tucker: Oh, you do it. She, she brought it up and I was like, oh, I love that she brought it up, but it—
Tim Fish: —It's so good. It's this. It's Ron Berger. It's a video if any, no one's ever seen. It's called Austin's Butterfly, and it's this, it's basically him taking some young learners through a process of eval—of helping a student make a drawing of a butterfly much, much better by using the model of an actual image of a butterfly. And then just asking questions, not judging the, the first draft, but asking questions about places where it could improve. And then showing the students the subsequent drafts. And what I love so much about Berger's work is this idea of, of getting to beauty and craftsmanship, but it happens through multiple, multiple, multiple drafts.
And I'm curious about, as you've seen this sort of shift to student led, do you also see a role for this idea of having students both learn to critique their own work and that of others, and, and also to sort of go through that process of sitting in the ambiguity, in the angst, and, and that sort of what, what Tyler Thigpen calls and others have called productive struggle. And being able to sit in that and then move that forward, that discomfort that we often feel.
Catlin Tucker: Yeah. Well, I love that you asked that, 'cause I think one of the things that's really challenging when we start to shift our pedagogical approach, is teachers who have been in the classroom for any number of years have developed a degree of confidence in their ability. And when they try something new, it doesn't always go super smoothly.
Kids, especially those who have not had the opportunity to really own their learning and play a very proactive role in the learning experience, they're not just going to emerge out of the gates when we shift responsibility to them and do an amazing job. And as a coach, when I go into a classroom with a teacher, and this happens all the time, I really encourage them, with your students, start with why. Explain why we're doing this. It's obviously different from what they've done in the past or even how the teachers worked with them in the past. So what do we think is the purpose and benefit? I think often we as educators know that answer, but we don't share it really explicitly with learners.
So start there. Then if you want to onboard students, so for example, one of the strategies, each chapter in that book has somewhere between three and six, because we know different teachers are gonna get excited about different ones. And so one of the strategies is that reciprocal teaching strategy. And I had a history teacher who wanted to try it. And so we started with why. She jumped right in and had kids in small groups doing it, and I thought we should have dialed this back and had a conversation about the strategy itself, kind of a fishbowl where an inner circle modeled it, and the outer circle asked questions and made comments and highlighted strong strategies used, and then kind of gradually release the strategy over to the small groups of learners.
And then in the beginning, really always asking them at the end of trying anything that is fairly new, how did that go? What did you, how did you show up in that strategy? What do you think you did well? What did you struggle with? What's a goal you have for yourself next time we engage in this particular strategy?
Or, for example, one of the chapters is from teacher-led whole group discussion to student-led small group instruction. And so really slowly onboarding students to a variety of discussion techniques so that eventually, they as a group can say, which of these techniques do we want to use for our discussion? What questions are we interested in talking about? And then at the end of the discussion, let's engage in a self-assessment. How did I show up in this discussion? What did I do well? What strategy was I particularly focusing on? Was it eye contact? Building on ideas shared? Complimenting specific points made? And really getting them to think about how am I doing in this class, and where are my areas of growth? Where are my areas of strength? Where are my limitations?
Tim Fish: And so in that model, what I'm hearing you talk about, and one of the things I love so much about your work and about your books, and particularly the student led book, The Shift to Student Led, is that... it kind of makes me think about the architect role because there is the architect role, but there's also a little bit of construction manager, right?
It isn't just this sort of like I architect and then I just say, OK, go do it. Right? And assume that they're all professional contract workers, right? We have to, we have to be that apprentice. We have to help students apprentice in those skills. Right? And so there's that dual role, right? There's the, the designer, and the sort of coach and guide that helps and sets up that experience.
Catlin Tucker: Yeah, the facilitator, right? You're there kind of facilitating, yeah.
Tim Fish: The facilitator, right? But what, what I've loved so much about your work is that there are a lot of different strategies, and the great teachers are folks who understand how to apply a wealth of different strategies. There's a, to push this metaphor to the point of breaking probably, right? There's a tool belt, if you will. Right?
Catlin Tucker: Yep. I use that all the time, that language, all the time.
Tim Fish: Do you? Yes. Right. But there's a tool belt that I use, and I know how to use different things and different tools on the site.
Right? And that's an important role that we have to play, because as students go out into their future, we have to make sure they've got a great tool belt that they feel very confident using.
What's the impact? You know, one of the things we talk a lot about is student wellbeing, student anxiety, student depression, disconnection, loneliness. When you move to student led, what happens to some of those things that are such a crisis for our communities?
Catlin Tucker: I mean, the thing I hope for students is when a teacher wants to make these shifts, really you cannot make them alone. You're making them with a community, and hopefully you are nurturing this learning community. You know, we don't just throw kids in a group for small group discussions without thinking about, have we helped students to form relationships?
So just a small example. When I'm gonna put students into a group for a discussion, small group, student led. The first thing they chat about is not academic at all. It is like a little SEL check-in or an icebreaker, something fun where they can make a connection with the group. They can share something about their lives, interests, preferences beyond the classroom, before they launch into this academic discourse.
And I think so, you know, there's so many interconnected pieces of this, but that social emotional learning component and always being, always asking ourselves, are we helping students to develop relationships with each other? And that's not just always a bunch of fun icebreaker activities, but it is a real focus on, am I engaging them in conversations? Are they having opportunities to support one another and lean on each other as they do this work? Do they get to collaborate and be creative? Can they join interest based groups at times and work with people who have common interests and things that light them up?
And so I really, I really hope that as we shift from that teacher led approach where quite frankly, that feels like the Swiss Army knife of education. It's like whatever the learners’, you know, needs and preferences and abilities, and no matter what the learning objectives, we're just gonna keep marching out this one model. And, and hope it works for everybody.
But with the tool belt kind of comparison, we know that's not true. Teachers need a variety of models and strategies so they can be strategic and think about what does this group of learners need? What is the learning objective? And hopefully as they position students to do the work to actively engage, the byproduct of them working together and using each other as valuable resources is that they feel more connected to each other. They feel more supported by one another, and that doesn't happen overnight. Right? And it does require that we really take the community building beyond week two of the school year and thread it through every single day that students are in our classrooms.
Tim Fish: Hmm. It's so true. It gets back to what you said, right? In this world that we're in today, this is human work. We're in human classrooms. We're developing, you know, there's human beings developing all around us. We all are developing on that pathway. We've got to acknowledge that. You know, I think just that little strategy right there, Catlin, I mean, I could have used that so much as a classroom teacher because I, you know, it's like, oh, time on task, right? Time on task was the big thing, right? So like, no, no fun here, right? Like, we're only gonna talk, like, we're only gonna talk about, you know, photosynthesis. That's it. That's all we're talking about today, right? And, and the, and yet that's not the world. That's not who we are as humans. And if we're gonna sort of inspire, create the community where that learning can happen, where they can rely on each other, that's, that is so important to do.
You know, what an awesome conversation. I'm curious as we sort of start to tie this up, what your hopes are for the future. If you were to give a, lots of teachers listen to this, to this podcast, I think, or I hope, a few listen to this podcast, what are some things you might say? Hopes for teaching in the future?
Catlin Tucker: I want teachers to rediscover, if they're not feeling it right now, their joy in this work, and there's so many, it's a, it's a challenging profession. It is complex and multifaceted. And for me, I want teachers to realize that now that we have literally limitless access to information and resources in our classroom, that we are allowed to reimagine our role.
And when you look at those little people and all the diversity of backgrounds and language proficiencies and needs in a classroom, that we don't see that as a challenge, as something that is stressful and overwhelming, that we see it as this beautiful gift and really a design opportunity. That we can, if we're feeling a pain point, if something is draining us of our energy and our time and our engagement, we need to be honest about it and then target it and reimagine it, because our learners are incredibly capable. Yes, they need support. Yes, they need skill building, but the more we allow them and trust them to own the learning, drive the learning, I think the more we can focus our time and energy on the aspects of this work that truly bring us joy.
Tim Fish: Oh, I love it. Catlin, this has been a great conversation. I'm gonna hold onto this construction site thing and keep thinking about it. I don't know if it's worth it or not, but there’s something there. Maybe we'll write a book together about the construction zone.
Catlin Tucker: I am ready. This class is a construction zone.
Tim Fish: But I'm so grateful for you spending some time with our listeners, and good luck with everything that you’re doing.
Catlin Tucker: Thank you for having me.
Tim Fish: It has been such a joy to talk with you once again. Sure thing.