Read the full transcript of Episode 49 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which explores how rapidly changing technologies have provided a constant source of inspiration and innovation for two educators. Howard Levin and Stacey Roshan have transformed their practice through exploring the opportunities technology provides to teachers and learners. They join host Tim Fish to talk about how, after beginning as classroom teachers in the fields of social studies and mathematics, each found a new path forward in educational technology.
Tim Fish: Welcome back to New View EDU! You know, almost every season so far, we’ve invited a couple of school heads into the studio with us for a group discussion. Last season, we changed things up a bit, and decided to talk with two incredible students about their experiences with student-led learning. Well, today, we’re inviting the perspectives of some people whose voices definitely belong at the table: true educators.
I’m so excited to spend today chatting with two people whose work, with both students and their fellow faculty, I really admire.
Stacey Roshan worked as a math teacher and innovation director at the Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, for 16 years. She is also the author of Tech with Heart: Leveraging Technology to Empower Student Voice, Ease Anxiety, & Create Compassionate Classrooms. Her current work centers on empowering teachers to harness the potential of technology in the classroom to foster a more inclusive, equitable, and empowering learning environment by transforming the traditional culture that praises the first person to raise their hand into one that gives every individual a platform to make their ideas seen and heard.
Howard Levin is currently the director of technology at San Francisco University High School. He has spent over 36 years in five NAIS schools, including technology leadership at The Urban School and Convent & Stuart Hall Schools in San Francisco. He has led dozens of workshops on ed-tech, oral history, design-thinking, and re-thinking physical space in the 21st century classroom.
Throughout my 25 years working in independent schools, I’ve had the great pleasure of engaging in many thought-provoking conversations with Howard and Stacey. I have learned so much from them and am honored to welcome them into the studio today.
Stacey and Howard, thank you so much for joining us today on New View EDU. It is such an honor to have you both with us today.
Howard Levin: Thank you, Tim.
Stacey Roshan: Thank you for having us.
Tim Fish: You know, I have been so inspired by both of you at various times in my career. We've had conversations, I've had the opportunity to work with you, I've read what you've written and have just, it has, it's really spoken to me. And so I'm going to ask, normally I'm going to ask you both to weigh in on a question, but this time I am, I'm going to ask you both to weigh in on a simple question. Sort of what got you into school? Why did you end up thinking you wanted to work in schools in the first place? What was your journey that led you to an independent school?
Stacey Roshan: I didn't originally know that I wanted to be an independent school teacher, though honestly in my heart, I always wanted to do exactly that. So my mom is a teacher. She was a math teacher for many, many years, retired recently, and she had me growing up with this huge love and appreciation for math. So I've always had that. I always loved math.
I always just loved the journey of understanding how to solve a math problem. And, you know, so many people, I'm not going to even say so many kids, so many people, the one thing you say, you say math, I'm a math teacher. You hear, oh my God, that was my least favorite subject, or like, you know, all these things about math. And I really wanted to change that. I wanted to help people see the beauty in math that I see.
And I did a lot of tutoring growing up. My mom actually worked, she had a second job at a community college and I got to go there and tutor growing up. So I knew that I loved kind of teaching math. And I started, right, I studied economics, did economic consulting for a bit, finally went with what I wanted to do in my gut. And I became an independent school math teacher, and it made me happier than anything I've ever done.
Howard Levin: The story is a little bit complicated, but for whatever crazy reason, I wanted to change the world. I grew up in the sixties and seventies and I had a pivotal experience in college when I was taking a class on the Holocaust, and I was living with a German—one of my roommates was a woman from Germany who had never heard of the Holocaust and thought it was fake. And it was the spark for me to explore that. And it led me to lead a program at the university up in Bellingham, Washington, a week long program in 1980 on the Holocaust. And we brought in survivors.
Tim Fish: Wow.
Howard Levin: It was a whole shebang. And the key, though, was watching the impact of public education on a topic. That is what grabbed me. And that's what shifted me from an interest in photography and into wanting to be a social studies teacher.
Tim Fish: Wow. The moment, you both, it sounds to me like you both had this sort of flip moment. When you said, Stacey, my father was also a teacher, college professor, computer science. And all my childhood, I was like, I don't want to be a teacher, I don't want to do that. And there was a moment when all of a sudden, it sort of flipped in my mind. And I think it also had, Howard, something to do with this notion of wanting to have an impact, wanting to change the world in a small way.
You know, I'm curious about your journey and what sort of kept you in. What's kept you associated with schools? You know, in the ups and downs, one of the biggest challenges facing the educational industry is that people are not sticking around. The tenure is pretty low, you know, nationally. What made the two of you stay involved?
Howard Levin: Well, I'll jump in and say a part of my journey is that I've not stayed in the same place for more than 12 years. To me, 12 years is like forever. And so having the experience of now entering my fifth independent school in 37 years, that's one of the reasons that, that's what's kept me going. And then discovering, remember I was a history teacher. I was focused just on changing the world through changing student mindsets, about thinking about the world. And then I discovered technology very early on, and that drove me into a different pathway. And it's through the technology lens for me that has really kept me engaged in schools all these years.
Stacey Roshan: I'll go off of that because the technology piece, I think, has also really kept me in the game and kept me so fascinated. But I think originally, what I love so much about being an educator is that I don't know another field that is the same in terms of that continual growth and continual opportunity for growth and continual seeking of growth within just the community. Such a generous community of sharers. That's how I think of teachers.
And I remember when I first became a teacher, and I was coming from the economic consulting world, and just being in absolute awe of the amount of stuff that people were giving me. I mean, they were giving me lesson plans, they were giving me books, they were giving me all this stuff. And it was just things that they had spent hours and hours and hours creating. And they were just like, hey, look at this and that. And I just couldn't believe it. And I was so excited by it. And it's one thing that really inspires me to put out so much stuff publicly and to share, because that is what fueled me at the beginning. And I think that just by sharing, it's like a way of showing that we care and a way that shows also that we just want to grow together, because that's a way to get feedback.
And that's the thing that I think I love the most, is that I get to explore constantly. I try and research constantly too, to back some of the new ideas that I want to do in some grounded research that's been out there. Yes, there might be new technology flashing at us all the time, but we can always back it in the good science of learning.
Tim Fish: So if we flip into this notion, right? One of the things the two of you have done so well, I think you have been, you have been stuff givers, you’re givers back, you are constantly contributing to the conversation, largely about sort of where we're headed. And I think Howard, you're spot on, that technology piece was right for me. That's where I saw, like, the potential to create magic, right, was through how technology could interface with young people.
What I'm curious about now, though, is like you have both seen so many different examples through your careers of what I call the magic. The times in a classroom in an experience, designed experience, doesn't have to be in a classroom with students, where it really works. You're like, this is it, it is happening. This is what we want school to be. I'm curious if we can come up with, as sort of the three of us, what are some of the, like, top five characteristics of magic?
Stacey Roshan: I'll go first. So something that I would love to see more of in schools and something that I have really tried to think about…so when I think about high school personally, I really recall the pressure to achieve top grades for college, and everything seemed to be working towards that end goal of getting into the best university possible. And that really loses sight of most of the things that I want to do as an educator today. I mean, you know, providing that solid academic foundation is absolutely necessary, essential. I want my students to be prepared going into college. You know, none of, I don't want to get away at any of that.
But to me, the preparation is really about ensuring that they have skills and confidence to navigate life with resilience and empathy, that they're critical thinkers, that they're effective communicators and active contributors to their communities. And as a math teacher, I always say that teaching math is the easy part. My most important role is helping students learn how to learn, embrace a growth mindset, take ownership of their learning, and just encouraging a love for the process of learning, I think is so critical. You know, learning new things isn't easy. You take risks, you struggle, you flounder, you fail, but there is joy in doing hard things. And I want students to approach those challenges with curiosity and wonder, rather than just focusing on a
singular outcome. So I'd say that, you know, school should be more about, like, this holistic education and helping students build resilience, lifelong skills, fostering a community of lifelong learners. And I think that in our independent schools, we do a really good job at that. And I really appreciate that, you know, having curious minds, and I'll get back to that critical thinkers. I think that's so essential to what I do.
Tim Fish: Mmm, thank you.
Howard Levin: That's great, really great. So I jotted down five things. I can do them really fast. So first is passion to me, passion is everything. It's how I got involved in education, is by having a real purpose and discovering that I had or have a role that's not just about learning and being sparked by learning, but it's something that comes from within. That's a huge challenge to me. It's the number one piece, especially in the future, in the current and in the future, where information is everywhere.
Another one is the surprise of creating opportunities for kids to discover the surprise of learning from somebody other than the teacher. From each other, from within, from interviewing folks on the outside. The third thing is self agency. I think it's connected to the fourth thing of student production, of sparking students creating opportunities for kids to make and produce real purposeful product, whether it's physical or it's virtual. I can talk more about that later. And the fifth piece is collaboration, creating opportunities to facilitate collaboration, moving the teacher out from the center and getting out of the way, similar to the, the interview that Tim did with these two students at the Stone School, episode 10, season four was awesome. Listen to that one.
Tim Fish: Oh man, Howard, thank you. I love that notion of, I think one of the ones I'm going to jump in on is this notion of production of something, right? So I've quoted, many times, Ron Berger's work, my favorite book by him is An Ethic of Excellence. And he talks about this notion of craftsmanship, this notion of creating beautiful work, right? If no one's seen the YouTube video, Austin's Butterfly with Ron Berger, I would highly recommend it as sort of a way of getting at this notion of beautiful work.
And I think it has a lot to do with this idea of like, we have, I have some control, I'm bought in, I'm connected to this thing, right? That's always been present for me, when there's that element of investment, personal investment in the thing, that is a huge, is a huge lever to getting there.
Howard Levin: We may be going there, but I really believe that these are very new categories in today's world. In the world that I grew up in, the focus was, and in many places still today, the focus is on really good teaching, really good absorption, all kinds of techniques and tricks to get information to stick with students.
And we're living in a completely different world right now. We're at our fingertips with a quick breath of our own speech, that information is just everywhere. And so I think it's a huge challenge for independent schools to really embrace and really look at how different the world is for our students and the future students.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I mean, Howard, you've been in our schools for 30 plus years. Like, what have you seen? Double click on what you just said about the sort of, the transition of the moment in time and all of that, what has been the, some big takeaways for you?
Howard Levin: Well, you know, I've been in really good schools, but I would still say that we are still digging around the edges of really making serious change in most traditional schools. And unfortunately, I think that what I see is limited change in the real foundations of how we go about doing the art of teaching and learning.
And we haven't really fully embraced that notion of that unlimited amount of information that's at our fingertips. So clearly what's changed is…the key thing that's changed, it's really obvious to every anybody that's been around for 30 or 40 years, is that the amount of technology that's available and the information that's available is, it's not even describable, but so many teachers and so many schools are trying to figure out how to contain that access instead of unleashing the access. So that's the change I want to see that I haven't really fully seen anywhere, except in these wonderful small schools.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I think you're spot on. Like One Stone, the school you mentioned where the student interview is from, right? 150 students, Boise, Idaho, completely different model from what we normally have. You know, it is for me, like, all right, so we jump in on this, right? So Howard, your five things, right? It's students learning from students, working in collaboration, teacher's role is different in those, to get to those five things you talked about, from when I started teaching in 1990. And it was all about, like my educational philosophy in 1990, as I’ve said before, was if I'm talking, they must be learning. So if I keep talking, they will keep learning, which is not the way to go at all. What is the role of a teacher? Having teachers is super, super important.
What is the role of teachers at this moment when information is everywhere?
Howard Levin: I would say the current role is that the teacher is still the content expert. The teacher has the broadest sense of what information and where to point students, but that their role should really be shifting to finding ways for students to discover that information through their own independent research and their work with other students, and to craft a whole different way of looking at how students gain information.
Stacey Roshan: I'm going to jump in too, because this one speaks to me. If we take it back to when I started flipping my classroom, I started doing that to really change the dynamic of my class. And I think that something that's challenging—and maybe even more so in the independent school world where we do have really involved parents, right? And a lot of schools that are really looking to make sure that the parents population is very happy with how things are going, it's different. The way that I want to teach my class is different than the way that they, the parents, learned. And sometimes that is very nerve wracking, and it can make it nerve wracking for the school too.
But I think when we look at what the real purpose is, right? And we dive back into how, like, what do we have available now that we didn't have available then to really transform school in a way that enhances the learning in the classroom, right? And so that's what I think about a lot, that how do we make the most meaningful use of our face-to-face time? And I think that we can leverage technology to do just that.
And so, you know, for me, when I started flipping my classroom, like I started with these two main pain points in my AP calculus class. One, that students were feeling really anxious about difficulty of homework that they needed to do at home. And two, like Howard was referring to, I felt really trapped at the front of the room lecturing for so much of class time, and I didn't have time to sit with individual students, get to see them really working, understand their personal needs.
So you know, I identified, and I think this has been very key in my personal success, that I clearly identified a problem, my goals, and then I was able to find some solutions that really fit my class and my school community and also my personal style. I think that's very important too. But, you know, as we get back to this shift, I think that's something that worried parents early on. And luckily I was at a great school that helped me communicate this message to parents well, and I was able to meet with them and communicate as well. Is that flipping my classroom, and I'll just take that as an example here, flipping my classroom doesn't mean that I am, you know, making students learn all the content on their own, right? And then just helping them with problems. Like that is a big misconception there. It is about, what are we doing with the most important part of the learning, is the problem solving, the collaboration. I'm freeing up all this class time in order to do that. Me getting the material across is not the part that's going to be interactive.
And so I think that by offloading that to homework in the way that I did my flipped classroom, really transitioned my, my flipped classroom into creating a space that is not just student centered, but also really student driven about their needs, about their questions, and about them teaching one another instead of me being the one that's always telling. Now they are, you know, sparking questions, they're asking each other questions, they're answering one another's questions, and I'm there to facilitate. And it's very different.
Tim Fish: Yeah, you know, I released an article in the fall issue of Independent School magazine called Strand Theory. And we're recording this before it comes out, but it'll come, it comes out in the fall and, and basically what I said is like, I think schools, we need to weave together four strands, right? Strand one is what I call curricular learning. Curricular learning is largely teacher centered. It's largely sort of constructed by the teacher.
Normally when we think of school, we think of what I call strand one learning, right? It's kind of what we normally, or a vision of what school is. Howard, it's what you said has not really changed, actually, not that much. Strand two is what I call flow learning, where the individual student is all in on either a topic, something they're studying, a product they're building, writing they're doing, a video they're making, but they are in, they're in the zone, they're in the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow, deep focus, where they're building self-concept, self-efficacy, their sort of self-image is being constructed as well as knowledge.
Three is this interpersonal, interdependent learning, right? Matthew Barzun's notion of a constellation, working in a collaborative small group, doing something that's never been done before, right? It's this, like, team doing a thing, right? And then strand four is what I call community learning, and community learning is sort of getting at David Brook’s work where he talks about so much of what we do in our lives is building resume virtues. And he says we need to be more also focused on eulogy virtues. It's about giving to others as being part of a community. It's about something larger than me. It's about selflessness, as opposed to selfishness. It's less about career and it's more about community, right?
And what I argue when I look at my own journey as a teacher is that I was way too much strand one. That strand one was like, all I did. And my theory is that school is too much strand one. And that we have to design intentionally to put a lot more strand two, three, and four, and that's going to mean we gotta walk away from a bunch of one. I wonder if that makes any sense at all, and I wonder what your sense is of that concept.
Howard Levin: Your strand one is obvious. All three of those other strands are critically important, especially now and into the future, far more than it is in the past. I completely agree with that. I hate to keep pulling us negatively, but how do we get out of that strand one? And it's all about all of the history of teaching, teaching teachers to teach and the histories of schools and how we hire people based upon content expertise. That's the biggest challenge, I think. And we're holding on to that strand one.
So it's a great concept, but how do we really make that change? My focus as I get older is, I find myself getting really frustrated because I've been, you and I have been talking about this for 20 some years. Right?
Tim Fish: Yeah, yeah we have.
Howard Levin: And, and it's how to really make an impact. And you're, this podcast is a great tool to help do that, but it's just a little, you know, tool.
Tim Fish: Yeah, you know, it's, it is, it is for me, like, there's some times when you need strand one, right? Like I'm not saying, I'm not like this person who says we should actually throw it out. There's no world for that, da da da da da, like I don't believe that. And I think Howard, you're spot on. I think I think if you do a like, shadow a student in a lot of schools, it's a lot of strand one.
Right. And even if it's collaborative or project-based learning, it's still heavily engineered and controlled by the teacher, right. And not bad people. Want to do good work. Want to care deeply for kids, but there's this thing we got where we are just, we are just holding on to that model. I think very heavily. Stacey, I don't know. What do you, what do you think about the model and where we're, where we are?
Stacey Roshan: OK, so a light bulb moment for me was when Alan November, I was sitting at his conference and he said, who owns the learning? And if you know Alan November, you've heard that question before, you might've read his book. And that was a light bulb moment for me because it really made me think, you know, I just felt like at the beginning of my teaching journey, like so many teachers, I was responsible for getting all this content into kids' heads. And so that was my main responsibility, was how I was thinking at the beginning.
And then that question was such a light bulb for me because I was thinking, and Howard was kind of getting at this before too, if I didn't say something, kids were missing out, right? And then when I'm sitting there and I'm thinking who owns the learning, I'm like, well, that's wrong. Like I'm thinking about that wrong. Because I need to give them some foundational material, but I need them to discover it. Like that is my role. And so when I was able to think of that, like give students ownership of the learning in terms of allowing them to have the time and space, which you're not giving them if you are always talking, I need to give them the time and space to make these discoveries and to teach one another. And that takes time.
How was I going to do that? And so that was, to me, just like, that went off in my head. And you know, I'm not going to say, like, I'm not this huge like inquiry based teacher. I think some people are absolutely great at that. Like that isn't even what I'm getting at here. I think sometimes when I start talking about this, teachers think in terms of like, needing to make this great transition in how they're teaching. To me it was actually way simpler. It was just about creating like, how could I create space and time for that to happen? I still do a lot of telling honestly, I do, but I was able to offload that through video so that I could change the dynamic of what the class looked like, and to me that changed who I was as a teacher too.
It also—something very importantly that I talk a lot about, taking anxiety away from the classroom in terms of the student, but something I don't talk about as much and I want to bring out now is the amount of anxiety it allowed me to let go of, because I wasn't walking in anymore to class thinking I have this agenda that I need to get through. I have all this content that I need to get through. I was able to, I don't want to say flip, but I was able to flip the mentality for myself because I knew that I had done that on video. I got that anxious part of my personality kind of out of the way a little bit. So in the classroom, I was able to just be much more responsive to what was happening. I was able to be a listener, because I wasn't in my head about what I need to say. It was much more about what students were saying and how I was going to coach them, how I was going to facilitate that deeper learning for them, how, you know, they would start asking the questions, but how I could get them to probe a little bit deeper.
So that was as important as anything to me, was making myself just more flexible in the classroom, and to shift that from, the mindset from, what content do I need to deliver today to what questions are students asking and what are they walking into the classroom needing?
Howard Levin: I just, I want to make sure that you're clear, that you're both clear, that I might be talking the game of the three other strands a lot, but when I was a full-time teacher 24, 26, 27 years ago, I was thinking about these things, but I'm not saying that that's how my classes were. So I can look back in the mirror—
Tim Fish: —Right on, Howard, right on. I'm right there with you. I have not lived it perfectly. Spot on.
Howard Levin: And, you know, I've lived it to a great extent through teaching oral history and working with students on oral history. So that's been the pinnacle of my experience. But those are outliers in terms of my history as a teacher. They're the things I look to that I really, that I look back on with the greatest pride. But there's a lot of self-flagellation about how I was not able to do that throughout an entire semester or throughout an entire year of teaching.
Tim Fish: Yeah, you know, I mean, the first project, Howard, that introduced me to your work was tellingstories.org, the work you did when you were at the Urban School of San Francisco, where students interviewed Holocaust or started with interviewing Holocaust survivors in San Francisco. For our listeners, can you just give them a quick overview of that project? Cause I want to, I want to click in on that for a second and talk about sort of those five elements that you described and how were they present in that project?
Howard Levin: Well, I started doing, I started having kids interview survivors 35 years ago, using cassette tapes back when I was at the Overlake school in Redmond, Washington. And, it was, we had a, you know, a lot of fun. It was part of a part of the world history curriculum. But they sat in a, they still sit in a box in my garage. I don't know what to do with these things.
Fast forward, the technology had rapidly changed and I was able to pull off this dream of having students interview Holocaust survivors. That was my primary interest back then. Because those stories were dying away, and that's how I developed this idea that having students be content capturers through oral history, capturing on video and audio in high quality, not only were they learning a tremendous amount of information, but they were truly authentically contributing to the world through their research that they were publishing, that we published on telling stories. And so telling stories evolved for several years after that, interviewing concentration camp liberators, Japanese internees, then it finished with a multi-year project on interviewing civil rights activists and victims of civil rights abuse in a town in Mississippi.
Tim Fish: And the part that got me about it was that the students had a high, it was very authentic. There, there was a voice, there was a real audience. This was going to go out. They were going to tell the stories that never would have been told. That were going to be on the internet for anyone to see. There's a high level of responsibility. And you also, if I'm not mistaken, you kind of like, look, this team, you're running this thing.
Like you're doing the interview questions, you're transcribing it, you're putting it on the website, you're editing the video, like all that stuff, they were responsible for it, if I'm not mistaken.
Howard Levin: They were responsible for all that, but I took a lot more control than I would want to admit. But in the end, yes, the students can still look back and see that their work is still published.
The key component here is that there was this magic of students who were 17, 18 years old, interviewing folks that had traumatic experiences at the same age. And that connection, and I think there's lots of opportunities to find similar connections in classes from kindergarten all the way up. Find this opportunity for kids to interact with people who had pivotal moments at the same age that they are.
And what it does is it brings out a very different kind of conversation, and it brings the interviewee back into the shoes of that 16 or 17 year old. And that's part of the magic that happened. And we had many people who had never told their story at all, in particular Holocaust survivors, that the only time they ever told the story was to our students, in a cathartic emotional cleansing kind of way.
Tim Fish: Yeah, for me, that kind of connection, right? One of the things that Matthew Barzun talked about in the podcast that we did was when students in, when they're in a constellation, they are seen, they are known and they are needed, they feel that their contribution is needed. And that was a, like you talk about these pivotable, like groundbreaking, like the Alan November thing, Stacey, right? I totally agree with you about his work. That flipped a light bulb for me, because it made me say, when do our students, in a largely Strand One environment, feel needed, right? I think what Strand One often does is it takes out the needed part.
And I think Stacey, I love the way you use the flipped classroom. Because you're like, look, there's this math stuff. They got, we got to, you got to do this stuff. We got to get through, this is AP Calc you were talking about. And you thought, I need a way to create more time. I need a way to allow me to do something different in my classroom. And to use video and tech of the, of the lesson to do that. And you then used that in lots of ways. It drove you to reduce your anxiety, reduce students' anxiety, reduce their anxiety about homework, had a lot of other benefits, but then it gave you this opening to redesign how you were going to use the classroom time. I'm curious, when you did that, what were some of the things that you did that kind of allowed you to interact and allowed students to interact differently with the material?
Stacey Roshan: I want to start by saying that my flipped classroom has been a huge evolution. I think a lot of times when I talk about it, I talk about it from this space of, you know, 10 years in. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking like, I want to flip my classroom and you're thinking, I need to do all these things. If I thought I had to do all these things, it would be very intimidating. For me, it was an evolution. I started with this essential thing of like,how can I free up class time by creating the videos? And that's all I did at the beginning, was create videos. Year one, created videos.
Year two, I was like, oh my God, they're doing all this book work in class. I need to make that a little bit more interesting for myself and for the students, right? So I worked a lot on what I wanted the in-class activities to look like. And from there, I did it with another class. I thought about how I was going to embed quizzing into the videos to make it more interactive for students, but also to get little learning checks for students so that they could self-assess. That was a big skill that I wanted to help them improve. And also for me to get a real temperature check before students even walked into the classroom, of what they needed for the day.
And so it's just been an evolution over time, but I think that's something that really sparked even that next level of excitement for me was a big question that I've always had, about how can we make every student’s ideas seen and heard? So I'm very much an introvert. And also, I need time to process and think. And so participation in the classroom was always a really challenging point for me. And I have never been the best participant, I would say, even as an adult. I have a lot of ideas, a lot of things that I want to say, but being an on the spot thinker is just not where I'm going to shine.
And so I was able to really think about how, in my classroom, I could shift that up and change that. And that's where I looked at a lot of technology tools and I was like, OK, just speaking verbally, just having to raise your hand isn't the only way to contribute. And beyond that, so it started with just like, how could students contribute to the discussion we were having in class, but then beyond that, like how can they be contributors to the world? So this really was sparked by, I was creating videos, I was putting them on YouTube and I was like, oh my God, I'm touching thousands more students than I ever will be able to in a classroom, by putting my videos out on YouTube and all these kids are consuming it from high school to college. And it's helping them.
And so I wanted my students to be able to do something like that. And so, you know, I explored having them create videos. I explored having them write on discussion forums, math solutions, things like this, where they could get to that point of being contributors in a way, and seeing that what they had to say could help others, could impact others, and really get that idea to them that it's very important for them to contribute beyond the walls of our classroom and how can we do a little bit of that?
Tim Fish: For me, it's, it's this idea, right. And for, as I switch gears a little bit, I want to jump into, like, technology because both of you come from that world. I spent a lot of time, continue to spend a lot of time thinking about technology and Stacey, your book title has always intrigued me. Tech With Heart, this idea, right?
So if you could just give our listeners a little bit of a summary of some of your ideas and how you think about this, I think you have through your description of your blended learning experience, but also this like how can tech have heart? And in this moment with not only sort of AI but I also think social media and where kids are and addiction to their phone and other devices.
Help me understand a little tech with heart, because I'll tell you, there are days when I'm not loving tech right now. So I'm curious about that.
Stacey Roshan: Oh, yes, I feel all of that. I think technology can be overwhelming and a lot. But to me, the thing that I'm most fascinated about with technology is how it can help us understand one another better, and really this idea of how it can empower all voices in the room. So how we can have more inclusive, empowering conversations.
And I think this holds not just for students, but also something that I'm hoping that education leaders that are listening are taking this in, too, because I think a big thing about how we have meetings, for example, you hear the same people in faculty meetings time and time again, who are the ones who are contributing. How are we making sure that what we're hearing is representative of everyone in the room? We can think we're having this dynamic, fantastic conversation and really it's just happening with a couple of hand raisers or a couple of strong loud voices.
So to me, that's a real interest spot of technology for me. How can we ask a question, provide wait time, give everybody a chance to chime in, before we start having that conversation? How can we display what everybody's thinking, sometimes anonymously, so that we're not calling any individual out, that we're giving everybody a safe space to try to experiment, to think, to maybe say something that they're a little bit afraid of putting their name to. How can we do that? And I think technology is a tool that allows us to very easily do that. We can do this through collaboration boards. We can do this through certain tech tools that allow us to ask questions and then present answers without names attached. But it really does require us to think, as teachers, about how we're structuring these conversations.
And when I say this, it's not just about the tech, because I like to start it with the tech. I like to start it by giving everybody a chance to formulate a response, to think, and to type behind a screen, maybe draw behind their screen. But then, just as important, more important probably, is that conversation piece, where I'm shining the spotlight on what everybody has to say. We can see a diversity of thought represented on the board, and then we discuss it. And then, you know, the students who are very verbal, they are going to chime in and maybe that's where their voice is better than what's written up on the screen behind me. But also, I think it brings out the voice of a lot of people whose ideas wouldn't have been heard. And sometimes that comes in the form of because their answer’s up there, you know, their response is up there, and I, you know, want to talk about it.
All of a sudden they're like, OK, I want to chime in. I'm very proud that my answer is being spotlighted right now and I want to talk about it. Maybe it's because they have the time and the space to think for a moment before we started talking about it. There's so many reasons why, but this is one of my biggest ideas from the Tech with Heart message that's just kind of taken on a new thought for me, even just in the last couple of years, and even since I published my book, is just I think there's more tech coming out that enables us to do this.
Howard Levin: Yeah, just to riff on that briefly, I completely support this idea that technology supports different learning styles, different learning abilities. You know, just simply giving students the ability to voice compose, which has been around for a long, long time. But even that little piece is a, is an opportunity teachers could utilize and really push students who might be poor writers, they may discover that kid is an incredible writer with their voice and not in the processing that they're doing with their hand.
So it dramatically, used correctly, can dramatically support multiple learning styles. It dramatically provides information access, which I believe should drive further research, that especially with older students, that the focus should be on student research and students developing their own projects, because all of the information's out there. And the key is, to me, is using technology to promote production. Students as producers using all the digital tools to do everything that's, whether it's just straight text or it's just using your voice, using amazing transcription tools that have now come out. Those are just three very simple ideas that I think also speaks to what Stacey's saying in her wonderful book.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I think you're right on, Howard. And Stacey, this notion also, Stacey, I want to go back to something. And I think both of you had this and have expressed it. And I think it's a key element is this curiosity. So two things. One is a curiosity as an educator to how can I make this better? How can I make this more relevant? You've both been motivated by some guiding questions that have sent you on a journey as an educator to continually evolve your practice.
And that's one of the things that I'd put on our list of top five things of where the magic happens, right? Is this notion of, it's in constant evolution. It's not just this one thing. I just like, jump, to make this huge jump, Stacey, right? Where you're like, I didn't just change everything. I made these little tweaks. I took myself out of my comfort zone a little bit. I tried something new.
And where I've been around the country, and I've seen schools and I've seen magic happening, I think that evolution has been present. There's a disposition of the educator to sort of always be striving to help make it better for what they're trying to do. There isn't one size that fits all, but there's been that sort of sense of I'm on a quest. I'm always trying, which I love.
You know, we're kind of getting into the end of this conversation and I'm going to sort of bring back a question I normally ask at the beginning of an episode, which is this idea of what is the purpose? Like right now, like we've got all this tech, we've got chat GPT, we've got this sort of new Apple headset thing that's sort of VR and AI and everything else coming, right? What is the role of school? Why do we even need to have school anymore? I'm a big believer that we do. I'm a big believer that it's never been more important. But what really should school be about? Stacey, I think you answered this a little bit in the beginning, but I just want to just close out on just what is it that we should really be going after in school?
Howard Levin: I think the key role of schools today should be to spark students to discover passion and their incentive to drive themselves further and explore the things… and school should be designed to help students find their passion. Most students don't have it, that you know, you ask them and that they don't really have it yet.
I believe that's the real key in the future is, if schools can help students discover passion, that will drive their success in the future, regardless of what they do.
And that passion really can't be to get all A's or to get into Harvard. The passion has to be something that is much more personally intrinsic to contributing to the world in some way.
Stacey Roshan: Yeah, I so agree with that. And also, I think that was kind of part of what I was getting at when we started. I wanted to add on, school being this place where students really do feel safe, supported, and empowered to both learn and share. And I think another real key is just this holistic well-being and growth of every student. I think that has to be core to everything that we do.
And I think that especially in the independent school world, we have a real privilege of being able to put more attention on that. We have smaller class sizes and we have more independence in the way that we teach. And I just think that's really important. Recognizing that well-being is fundamental to learning.
And to me, you know, technology is one of the tools that is going to allow us to get there, embracing that technology with heart, to use tech to empower students' voice, to amplify their creativity, to celebrate that diversity of thought, give every learner a safe space to make their ideas seen and heard.
Tim Fish: Yeah, thank you both for that. I'm just, I could not ask for a better conversation to take us out and to help us think about where we're headed in the future. The two of you have been so generous with your time and with your ideas.
And I look forward to continuing to think with you about how we evolve our schools. And I agree with you, Howard. I think this podcast is one small little thing that hopefully is getting some thoughts out in the world and getting some people with some ideas, but it by itself can't do it. It's going to be a collaborative effort for all of us to be thinking about in schools as we really move to the next step. So thank you, thank you, thank you to both of you for your time today.
Howard Levin: And thank you, Tim, for doing this. This is a wonderful tool that NAIS provides. Thank you.