Read the full transcript of Episode 58 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Glenn Whitman, a history teacher at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (MD) and director of the school’s Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning. He joins host Tim Fish to reflect on the evolution of the center, the contributions it has made to the St. Andrew's community, and key learnings from applying research on the neuroscience behind learning in service of improving teaching and learning.
Tim Fish: Welcome back to New View EDU! You know, friends, since the beginning, we’ve been exploring ideas around designing the schools our students need to prepare them for the future they will inherit. We’ve been exploring questions like what is the purpose of school at this moment? How should our classrooms look and function? What's the most important role for teachers at this moment?
Well, today, we are going to continue our journey with a long overdue conversation with my good friend Glenn Whitman. Glenn’s a history teacher and always has been, but he’s also the director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s School in Potomac, Maryland.
Glenn’s work in the center focuses on the integration of Mind, Brain, Education into every aspect of the student experience. Glenn and his team help teachers, coaches, administrators, and others learn about the brain and apply that knowledge to the design of learning and assessment. Glenn, to put it simply, is my brain guru, and I am so excited to introduce him to the New View EDU audience. Let’s get to it.
Glenn, welcome to New View EDU. It is so good to see you.
Glenn Whitman: Great to be here.
Tim Fish: You know, you and I go way back, Glenn, and I was around talking with you when you all created the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew's School. And when I first heard of it and heard you speak, I thought, man, they must've, like, done like, major strategic planning for three years to come up with this center and how they were going to fund it and how they're going to call it into being. And then I had a conversation with you and found that actually that wasn't exactly true.
And yet over the last, what, 12 years or so? You all have built what I think is probably the most successful center that is based in a school, and is doing great work in that school, and yet is also having incredible impact all over the world. So before we jump into talking about the work you do in this center, let's actually talk about the center itself. How did it come into being? What is it? What's its relationship to St. Andrew's School?
Glenn Whitman: Great questions. God, I love how you couched our position amongst other great centers and emerging centers at schools like ours. But you're right, Tim. I love how you couched that. In the age of strategic planning and trying to figure out the next five, 10 years of school, we had no strategic plan.
But I do think at the heart of the work, so the story, it's a great story. In 2007, we asked ourselves a really great question as a school. And I think I would argue all schools should ask the same question. Like, how do you take good teachers and make them great, and great teachers and make them expert?
St. Andrew's Episcopal School is a preschool through 12th grade school. We're just outside of Washington, DC, highly competitive market, right? We have schools in this area who've been here since like colonial America. And we were like in our thirties. But, you know, we asked ourselves this question and we, you know, we have great facilities at the school, but we’re 13 acres. We're not going to win necessarily on the buildings and that.
But we know from the research, it's quite clear the human teacher, and the research has been consistent, really is a difference maker in the life trajectory of kids, right? After parents who are the lifelong teachers of kids, we sort of come probably a close second or third, maybe a medical doctor you throw in there and some other kind of good people.
But so we asked ourselves this question. And then we had like this, this survey, which none of us can even find anymore, which is funny, but we do remember we had a throwaway question in the survey. It was like, have any of us, like, read a book on the learning brain, been to a conference, maybe had an undergraduate or graduate degree in sort of that, a brain related field, because we were saying to ourselves, the organ of learning is the brain and we actually don't know a lot about it.
So we, we make the argument now that what if all of our teachers at St. Andrew's, this was back over a decade ago, knew more about the science of how the brain learns. Could we actually be more effective for all our learners in the everyday work? And not only in the classroom, in the hallways, advisory, on the sport field.
So that's sort of the generative nature of how we at least came up with this idea, like we have to train our faculty. But the irony there is we had no idea or no thinking that we wanted to create a center. Like, that wasn't even on our radar. It was like, let's take care of our faculty and our students and just see what happens. Lo and behold though, we got out in front of this work, which back then was called a lot of different things, brain-based learning, educational neuroscience, neuroscience. And then we started to get sort of like calls from other independent schools, but even groups like Teach for America DC region, or other public schools. And they would ask, do you have any books on this work? We're like, no. Any writing? No. Workshops, got nothing for you. But as a good head of school, Robert Kazasky, who was our head then,
and is bucking the trend of a head of school turnover data and is still our head of school, our radars picked up like maybe there's a there there. Maybe it's something, if we formalized a center in-house, but also could support teachers, school leaders, students externally, maybe there's something there we should consider.
And that's sort of the very like, all right. I think we shook hands by a copier. This is our story. We're going to call it a center for transformative teaching and learning. And I would say if there's one thing we would change, it would probably be, we don't like our name sometimes.
Tim Fish: But you got it. But literally you were standing by a copier. You shook hands and you, and that was it. The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, which now so many people know, and so many people have participated in, and so many folks have read your amazing book, NeuroTeach. You know, they've all, they all think of this center, and it was literally over a copier that you shook hands and you created this thing and then started doing great work.
You know, the thing about it that I find so fascinating is I think sometimes people think, well, we need a business plan or we need a five-year strategic plan or we need a, yeah, someday you probably want those things, but you know, just, sometimes just do it. Just, you know, that's the one of the things that inspires me so much, is you just called it into being. And you also, you aligned it with a need, you aligned it deeply, foundationally in your purpose and your mission as a school.
And in some ways you also said, Hey, this could be a differentiator for St. Andrew's. If we were really, really, really good at this, that would be a differentiator. And that's the other part about it that gets, that I love, is that at St. Andrew's, you've made this commitment that everyone who teaches and coaches at St. Andrew's is going to be knowledgeable and pretty expert, frankly, in mind-brain education. That Job One is to ensure that the St. Andrew's community is fully embracing this and putting it into practice and across the board, not just some of us, but all of us. How did you get to that notion of it's going to be all of us? That's a big commitment.
Glenn Whitman: No, it's certainly the idea of what if we train a hundred percent of our teachers in the science of how the brain learns? And we know the research is always evolving. What could it do for them and their kids they coach and teach and work with every day? It was very much mission aligned. I think you nailed it. Right. It wasn't, and, and, and also wasn't being driven by some, which is always good for schools, parent or alumni who wants to give money, create a center, you know, and that sometimes drives the idea of the center versus the way we did it was like, our mission starts with “to know and inspire each child, dedicated to exceptional teaching and learning,” right? So we define exceptional teaching as you got to sort of know the research behind how the brain learns.
Now you did, right, tactically, how do you do it, right? So we're smart. Always train the middle school teachers first. So, and we did, right? But, you know, we don't, I don't think our, Robert, our head of school does this too often, but he did say, look, this is an all in model. Like it's not going to work if just the English department or the middle school has this lens, and a kid has to get lucky at St. Andrew's to have a teacher who's trained in the science behind how the brain learns, right? So the idea was we're going to train our whole faculty over a couple, couple of years. And then the real challenge was, how do you sustain that growth of those veterans who stay, and then on board your new folks, right?
Because this is where, and we didn't want to make —where schools sort of fall short on an initiative like this or others is it like, it's not just going to be the year of the brain at St. Andrew's. We check the brain box and now we go to diversity or now we go to technology, right? We're on, I can make an argument we're in our 14th year of an initiative.
Tim Fish: No, no, no, no, no, I think you're right. We all would do the brain box for the year, right?
Glenn Whitman: But the challenge though, the real challenge was the idea of, what could we train our whole faculty in, was very limited back then. There was the brain targeted teaching model from Mario Hardiman at Johns Hopkins. There was the all kinds of minds work back then, that a lot of people were looking at. So we knew not only did we have to find something to anchor us in, but we did have in our mind like, we probably need to make something for our own faculty at some point. And that's why the center played a really important role for the school, to incubate certain tools, both printed and in-person delivered, as well as technologically delivered for our faculty. And now that we share with educators around the world.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's so powerful. And it's so powerful also because what it does, it creates that differentiator. It also creates a differentiator in hiring. If I came along and said, look, I don't really want to work at a school that has such a high commitment to this. I don't want to learn about all this stuff. I don't, then you don't choose the school. Like, and that's OK. You're going to find people that are aligned. But I also think that is, I'm guessing, it's also had a real impact on enrollment. It's had a real impact on sort of why parents choose to enroll at St. Andrew's.
Have you all done any research or seen anything that would lead you to believe that having the center and having this clear commitment to mind, brain and education has had any impact at all on enrollment?
Glenn Whitman: Oh, I think it has in both the area—I think three things. One is there are lines that look really close together. I think we were in the 500s of enrollment sometime in, when we started this journey. And now we're like 720. There's no question. Our admissions team, which is awesome, collects data every year. And the CTTL is always one of the top three reasons why a prospective family is looking at the school, as well as why they might ultimately decide to attend the school, which is great.
Tim Fish: Now, is that because the parents understand the wonkiness of brain research, or is it because they're inspired by a school that is deeply committed to expert teaching and expert teachers and having that clear consent? Like, what do you think it is about the CTTL that makes parents—?
Glenn Whitman: —Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, the DC region's got a highly educated community we draw from. I don't, I think we actually thought early in the work, remember the CTTL itself by formally launching was 2011, but we were doing the work certainly before then. We thought the wonkiness would matter. I actually think where we, the accessibility of what this actually is, you could get lost in the wonkiness and people won't understand it, right? So can they see it?
Well, they do. Anybody who comes to our campus, we have an internationally distributed publication called Think Differently and Deeply that's written by our faculty and students. We're about to produce our fifth volume. I think we're almost at 30,000 of them, have been distributed around the world. As parents tour the school, on the outside of every classroom door, every teacher has a statement about what area of research they're looking at this year. And again, like, Tim Fish, you go by his classroom, he might be focusing on feedback, but Glenn in his classroom might be looking at metacognition or how do you create even a better sense of academic and social belonging in the classroom.
So I think in one sense, there's no question there is a correlation between the center's presence at St. Andrew's and how we talk in a very digestible, to parents and educational consultants, about what we do every day for kids and our increased enrollment. I interview almost every candidate that interviews at St. Andrew's, and our turnover is pretty low. We have people stay. I think they stay because they're encouraged to keep growing at the school. We had a former assistant head of school, John Holden. It's probably why I chose St. Andrew's when I first in, in 1997, he said, you have to be better in June than you are in September. And I love that culture.
So every year our faculty has like a 10% challenge of like, what 10% of your teaching should you focus on and try to sort of use research to improve. But almost everybody who interviews at St. Andrew's mentions the CTTL, evidence informed school. I have a chance to maybe grow in this space. And that could be from a college counselor candidate to an elementary school teacher. So I think our candidate pool is induced to look at us in a serious way because of this little differentiator of being at a research informed school.
Tim Fish: All right, so now let's flip the coin a little bit. Let's get a little wonky. Tell me, we've now mentioned seven times, mind, brain, education. What exactly is mind, brain, education? I mean, we know it's sort of teaching based in the brain, but tell me more about what it really means and what it really looks like.
Glenn Whitman: Yeah, and I had no clue what it was 15 years ago either. So again, another fortunate moment in our journey, right? So we asked ourselves a good question years back and it led us to, hey, let's think about this brain space. We got connected with a guy named Dr. Kurt Fisher and his team at Harvard's Graduate School of Education pretty early. And Kurt, may he rest in peace and really a pioneer of this work, saw education research was thinking a little too siloed, right?
You know, there’s a whole child who comes to each of our schools, right? You know, if it's just educational theory, if it's just neuroscience and cognitive science and behavioral psychology, and sort of his idea was like, what if you look at these collectively? It's this transdisciplinary field called mind, brain, and education, and it's been sort of expanded upon a bit and that really intrigued us, right? So how do we think about the mind, the brain and education together? And what is the body of research that has emerged in that field that is promising enough that any school or teacher might want to look at in their context with their kids?
So and look, there is, there is wonkiness to it, right? So one of the fun things we do, when I present, I'm from New Jersey, which you know, and there's some sarcasm sometimes in my delivery, but I often will say, I will ask schools, I'll be on the stage or in a theater or somewhere, and I'll say, can you guys show me where your professional word wall is? And there's like this dead silence. And people are like, what did you just say? And I said, I'm assuming you have a professional word wall at your school. No school has a professional word wall.
Tim Fish: No, I was going to say we didn't have a professional word wall.
Glenn Whitman: But this is sort of the one of the ways we get our faculty in the space. We have like 16 to 20 words on our word wall. We finally do have actually a poster, a word wall. But, you know, what common language will allow us to more efficiently think and talk about MBE?
So words like cognitive load and neuroplasticity and metacognition and myelination, we would argue, and I know there'll be some people in your audience who listen to this might debate, oh, you should put this word on or not. That's part of the fun. But there's certain vocabulary that collectively we would argue all teachers should know, and should be posted next to the coffee maker and the copier in your faculty lounge. And I've been to a lot of schools, I'm not too sure if any of them actually have a professional word wall, but I would encourage your listeners, it's a good thing to build.
And obviously that's, that was one way. Look, we have vocabulary quizzes for kids in every discipline. Why can't we sort of have that for the adult learners in our school? And the fact is, we went after this research around collective teacher efficacy. The idea is that if we have some common language, common frameworks, common North stars, or mountaintops, or drivers that we're all moving towards, then that might make us collectively more effective for all our student population. So MBE is the transdisciplinary field that brings together research and strategies in behavioral psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology and educational theory. I think I've said them all like three times now.
And the question is, are there ways to get it to teachers at scale? And we have figured it out.
Tim Fish: Wow. So, all right, let's jump in on something here. Cause like we say mind, brain, and education. And I think most people, I know I used to think this, that the mind and the brain are just, they're two words for the same thing.
Glenn Whitman: Right, right.That's one of those nuances that, to be honest, I still struggle with. But let's just take the brain for a second, right? Most of us, I think my, before I started teaching, the only time I ever really learned about the brain or talked about it was probably my ninth grade biology class.
Tim Fish: Yep, yep. It was probably like a 30 minute, these are the parts of the brain thing.
Glenn Whitman: Right. But you know, I would, I teach history still. So the one thing about our CTTL team, and I know we haven't said this, is everybody, so it's teacher led, school based. You said that earlier. Every one of our team either teaches or works directly with kids, whether it's in affinity groups, sport coaching, classroom teaching. And I would like to argue, I am exponentially better as a teacher today than I was, certainly in 1991 when I started.
And some of that is because I know a little bit more, I know more about the brain's anatomy. I think about memory better because I know about myelination. Or I know the difference between active working memory and long-term memory, right? I think about stress and anxiety, and how it impacts a student on learning the great history I think I teach, because of how the amygdala and the limbic system sort of respond and react to different life situations that all our kids are experiencing.
So, you know, one thing I would say is that we've done really well for our faculty is really, we do teach them a certain level of neuroanatomy, right? And I really think by having this lens into the brain and its anatomy, it's allowed us to think about some of the decisions we make instruction wise or actually engagement with kids, or thinking about the academic achievement along with the social, emotional and identity development side by side.
Where we've gotten better at talking about things like the mind, the brain, psychology, education theory, is because one thing we've done really well as a center, and I would encourage your audience to do this, is we found friends at the university space who like, this is their sole focus, right? They are the experts in this work, right? So, you know, we reach, and I'm amazed and thankful that so many of our university friends, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at USC and Denise Pope at Stanford and you know, Dan Willingham, first of all, they respond to my emails, which, right? Probably quicker than I respond to them.
So, but by partnering, having school-university friendships and partnerships, that allows our expertise to go up and we get sort of stuck or unclear about some differentiators or what this could really mean for kids.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's, you know, as I was going to say, I remember that was, we talked about this mind brain piece, when we had Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on the podcast. And one of the things she taught me was like, you don't only have neurons in your brain. Right. Like your body, your mind, right? So what I love is you've got this MBE mindset. You've got this look at how you sort of move through space. So, and you've been in hundreds of schools.
So when you walk up and down the hallways, Glenn, right. And you kind of pop into classrooms and you're spending time with teachers. I got to think that whenever you visit a school, there are things you look at and you're like, all right, that's on my stop doing list. If you're using an MBE lens. And you've also got things that are on your start doing list.
What's top five schools should stop doing, and top five schools should start doing, around, if you want to be a little bit more MBE aligned?
Glenn Whitman: So here's some of the good news, right? So much of what we do and we write about and share validates already great teaching and teachers in independent schools or public schools or charter schools, right? I would—look, I know we're an embattled profession and I know there's some challenges for us. I think it's one of the most exciting times to be in education. Like, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm psyched about what AI could mean for personal, individual reform. But what the research always continues to fall back on is the human teacher, and even kids going to schools remains really critical for their growth and development, right? So doubling down on the human teacher is really important to us, right?
But your question is great. Look, I walk through our hallways all the time. So we have teachers who teach two-year-olds to 18-year-olds. So things that I look for, right? I think one I would say is, I think in a recent study, the average wait time of a teacher asking a question is about the length of a heartbeat. It's about 0.7 seconds.
Tim Fish: Wow! Man, I think I probably got to 1.5 before I jumped in.
Glenn Whitman: And I see this, and why I start there, because I do see this across, whether it's lower school, middle school, or high school, I see this pretty consistently. Some of it is the teacher's enthusiasm for the work. All of us love our stuff. But if you think about it, if we know things about processing, right? And thinking, and even emotions and how kids are receiving, the importance of prior knowledge. A kid with prior knowledge might be able to answer a question, and prior knowledge could be they actually did the homework the night before. But so again, I think wait time is something that I score a lot and think about a lot with our teachers and others. I just think we should just increase it. Give the kids time to process.
Tim Fish: It's amazing though, like as soon as we do that, like there's something about silence in the room that just like, all of a sudden we're like, ah, I got to fill it. But I think you're so right. I think you're so right. When we don't give that wait time, we are tipping the scales to the kids who, who can process and respond that quickly. And the kids who need some more time are just getting left behind. That's a really good one.
Glenn Whitman: Yeah, so that's one. I got four, I got my list here. This is bullets. So I think there's been a lot of discussions around the science of reading across America, and there's been some reading, I don't like home reading more, so there's been reading debates, and debate’s healthy, right? What I look for though is, I think where we were missing something significantly is, I think we expect that kids coming out of elementary schools, lower schools, you know, knowing how to read. And it seems like that process is really focused on the elementary school.
But I think what we're starting to see is, we need to start thinking about a secondary science of reading, which is more disciplinarily focused. And there are some schools that I'm noticing are playing in this space. I think this is an opportunity for most of the schools out there. Kids are reading differently. They're exposed to word levels and rigorous words differently than we might have done. So I think there's a space to, I look for, so when I work with elementary, when our team goes to elementary schools, we're always interested in what science of reading program or reading program that looks at both, you know, science of reading and knowledge acquisition and, but also that transition from that elementary to being a reader in very subject specific ways is something that's got, got our attention.
Homework is really interesting to us. I'm sure—we're pro-homework, we give homework, and there's research about good homework and lousy homework and most kids know the difference.
Tim Fish: What's a key? What's a key to the difference between good homework and lousy homework?
Glenn Whitman: Well, I think one of the keys is what I was going to say, is we, we've been trying to encourage our faculty here at St. Andrew's, and there's been some interesting research around stating the purpose of homework correlates a bit to a kid's, one, understanding what the task is, as well as intrinsic motivation. Right?
Because like I just taught a class before this webinar. So it's 10 o 'clock to like 11. Right. I don't see this class again until tomorrow, and they're not going to touch the homework until about
8 p.m. There's a lot of hours in between to figure out like, come back to like, what did he really want? So to reduce sort of cognitive load stress, you know, I would think like, looking at how we sort of state the purpose. And if you don't have a purpose for your homework, if you write, read Macbeth page act three, and that's your homework posting. Don't give it. Like, if you can't state the purpose of a homework—So it goes to your question. Homework needs to be purposeful and relevant.
To extend learning or practice with the learning or to embed learning. That's some of the good evidence. Great opportunity for retrieval. But again, you know, I used to think when I first started teaching, that giving homework was based, determined whether I was a good teacher or not. And I'll just say to the audience, like, the amount of homework you give should not be any determinant of the quality or effectiveness of a teacher.
But here's an irony. One year, Tim, I decided I'd do a study with myself and my students. I didn't give homework for two weeks. Right. I just wanted to see if I could do it. And I got complaints from parents in my class, asking like, am I getting soft? What are you doing? And I run a center. But I had, I did my own little, little study on it.
So I think, you know, wait time is interesting to me. Science of reading is interesting to me. How we make homework more useful or not. I'll get on my horse for one second about homework. You know, we have our kids, we are privileged to have our kids for eight or more hours a day in all our schools, especially when they get to high school, right? I once had an AP history student ask if we were violating child labor laws because then they still had to go home and do two more hours of homework. I thought that was interesting.
Tim Fish: Pretty interesting.
Glenn Whitman: The only other thing I would say, I think we could build in more metacognitive moments into our lessons. I think we know for kids to be not only college ready, which is a very short term goal for a lot of our students, but to be life ready, right? To borrow, I think McDonough is talking about readiness. You know, they're going to have to be constant learners and relearners in this world. I mean, that's, that's the prediction, right?
So, understanding how they're thinking and how they approach a problem or their learning, I think is a skill we probably really want to double down on in terms of building metacognitive moments into our, our daily practice with kids. You know, I think is really critically important.
Tim Fish: So what's a metacognitive moment, Glenn? Is that when I think about the big picture, when I apply something in a different context, when I try to think about my own learning and what I'm learning and how I can be a better learner, all the above?
Glenn Whitman: Metacognition by definition is you're thinking about your thinking, right? So, you know, I think a lot of teachers, I see great examples of prior to some type of assessment, whether it's a project, a paper, or, you know, maybe in the elementary school, it's choosing which station rotation you want to go to first. You know, kids say, like, what are they making? Why are they making these decisions? You know, what, what are they thinking? What's going on in their brain that's saying, I'm going to make flashcards to study for this history test?
Or could you ask a fourth grader, which we do, you know, what is something you want to get better at and why? Right. And then maybe go to that station first in the classroom. So a lot of people, people could end an assessment like, you know, how did your strategy work on this assessment? And so again, thinking about your thinking is just, I think we, our kids, our kids sometimes say enough, we get it.
Tim Fish: I was talking with a teacher the other day, you know, who had been experimenting, experimenting quite a bit with AI. And the, and the teacher said to me, like, look, I mean, I'm just wondering, are we really even going to need to teach kids to write in the future? Right. And, or is AI just going to do it all, kind of thing. Right. And it has led me to a lot of thinking on my own, right?
And I recently was writing a piece that was going to be published somewhere, and I decided to try to just let AI do it, right? I just thought like, what would that look like, right? So I just dictated into a Google Doc and then I took all this stuff I dictated in the Google Doc and I gave it to AI and I said, write a chapter on a book about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it did it. Like it wrote a bunch of stuff.
Then I read that stuff and I was like, well, that's not actually how I want to say it. So then I started rewriting the AI and trying to like, adapt it and it got to a point where I was like, no, I just need to write this freaking thing. And I wrote it, right? Why? Because for me, writing is thinking.
And so writing is, through the writing process, I have to form what I believe, form my ideas, defend my argument, make sure my thinking is clear, et cetera. And so for me, like is AI, do we have to teach writing? Maybe we will, it'll be slightly different how we teach writing, but we darn well better teach thinking. Right?
And, and so for me, it's like, how does AI, in your mind, impact really good MBE teaching? Right? How could it be an asset in this, right? And how do we not just sort of like, give it all away and assume that AI is going to do it? Because I think, yes, we need to teach writing, and we need, because we need to teach deep thinking and the construction of our own ideas.
Glenn Whitman: Yeah, no, I'm—Ethan Malik at UPenn has done, has written some really interesting stuff about AI and connecting it to the science of teaching, learning. That's probably the stuff we've been leaning on the most. You know, I think there is probably, well, first of all, I feel like AI is now like a co-teacher for my class, right?
Tim Fish: Now tell me more about that.
Glenn Whitman: My students recently submitted some papers on, we read the crucible in history class and it's a great book because I think you could look at, you know, obviously the 1690s, the 1950s and today. And I, you know, feedback is really important research in the MBE space. So I collected all these essays, right? And it would probably take me a good week to get 19 essays back. So I thought about something. I heard somebody else do this. I thought, I put this sort of the rubric, the essay prompt, in the AI, and then I put all the essays in there, right? I merged them. And I said, I want to give whole class feedback to five themes of strengths in these essays, and five sort of themes of like, what are areas of improvement? Minutes, seconds, I got the whole class feedback.
Tim Fish: Wow, was it good?
Glenn Whitman: It was good. And then I started to look through a few. I started to pull some, but within sort of the boundaries that I probably would have gotten to. But here's why my experiment continued. Normally I would have graded those rough drafts, first drafts, and given it back a week later.
So I thought, you know what? I'm just going to do whole class feedback.
So the next day I gave the kids their papers back, and I did some cursory, like, in about an hour and a half. I looked through all 19 papers just to see, but then I said, here are five—and I told them what I did. So here are five themes that came up from analyzing your papers. Here are five areas of things that can be improved. Look at your papers, see if there's any mistakes or, or validations from this, and then what I want you to do is resubmit it and then I'll grade that one. So within 24 hours, I've given them some feedback that I thought was really—and I got better second first drafts, so to speak.
So there I felt the AI and I were co-teachers in ways I could never have done on my own. Now it brings up good questions, right? But I thought, and I asked the kids what was that like? And they were really intrigued, this idea of how quickly—they say they hand in papers at schools and they get it back two or three weeks later. Well we know that doesn't—
Tim Fish: —That's not good at all. No, we know that. And so then you asked this question like, well, then I'm thinking about like the sustainability of teaching. And I'm thinking about how do we actually sort of, and how do we spend more time? How do I spend more time designing, right?
When we had Catlin Tucker on the podcast, Catlin Tucker was talking about this whole notion of the teacher as the architect, right? The designer of the learning experience. I would much rather have a teacher if you had, only had an hour you could give to getting ready, really spending an hour designing both what is the assessment going to be? And then Jay McTighe's stuff, I'm going to backward design to figure out how, what my structure of the experience is going to look like to ensure that students are going to be, they're going to arrive prepared at that assessment. Right? Yeah, let's put some time into that. As opposed to like, I remember reading 24 essays and like, and by the 18th, everyone knows you are a different reader than you were on the first one, right?
Glenn Whitman: To go to your point, the MBE field. Things like feedback and metacognition or, you know, I can create formative assessments, you know, if I don't have a lot of time, you know, I want to create a quick formative assessment. I can ask the AI for an early draft. I can edit it around. And look, every kid can get immediate feedback too, using these tools, right?
Now, you're right though. Learning happens when you think hard. And generationally, I think our kids don't want to think as hard as we, maybe we were willing, and maybe we were foolish, but we know learning doesn't stick unless you think hard about things you're either intaking or doing or building or pondering. And again, I think that's going to be a little, a healthy tension point to figure out.
Tim Fish: Let's play on this. Let's take this thing and say, all right, well, if we got this, now we have the world of AI. It's going to be there. We know now through your work on MBE that we have to be, I need, as a teacher, I need to be a deep, I have a deep understanding of how the brain works, how learning works, how I construct an environment that's conducive to learning. What is the role?
Cause I agree with you, the human interaction, the adult human interaction with a student is the thing that has the most impact on learning. And so I'm a huge believer that our teachers have never been more important than they are today. This is not about self checkout machines and the disappearance of teachers, right?
But I think we all know, there's, the role of the teacher is not carrying around the bag I used to carry around and grading papers all the time, right? We're probably going to move to some other thing. So what is the teacher? What are the most, what's the Glenn top three things that a teacher should have, right? What are the three, what are, what's going to be essential for teachers in the future, or now even? Not even in the future, the future is here, right?
Glenn Whitman: Yeah, no, I, you must be watching like reruns of Letterman, top 10, top three, top five. What are you doing to me?
Tim Fish: One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity with John Cusack and it's a big top five movie.
Glenn Whitman: That's a good movie. I know you ask a, certainly a great question. So, you know, when the center designs any experience or tools, whether it's in person, printed or digital, and you know this because I've showed these to you, you know, we always had sort of the cognitive demands of learning, right? Side by side, the social, the emotional, the sort of space, right? They, emotion and cognition go very much together, right?
Tim Fish: Yeah, that's Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, right? You can't learn about something you don't care about.
Glenn Whitman: Or if you don't feel in a safe space for, if you don't feel your identities or the teacher doesn't believe actually in neuroplasticity, your brain can change and get better. Another one of those wonky words. That one's on our vocabulary word wall.
But I think you asked, yeah, look, we've learned from COVID, right? Sitting behind screens like this are nice, but I think the value proposition of a lot of independent schools and schools in general, but I think we have an advantage because we generally have smaller populations and smaller class size, is the relational connections we make for kids. I'm amazed, because my kids know I like them, what they will do for me and for the work I assign. There's a, there's a trust that I'm actually, I'm giving them stuff that matters, right?
And, you know, seeing me every day and coming into the space. So one thing I want to say is like, I think AI can do a lot of things. I'm not so confident it can do what the humans do best. And that's that social, emotional, relational work. That is a pedagogy that all of us need to continue to, to, to embrace.
Tim Fish: Yes, yes, yes. Let's keep getting, and I think naturally we are good at that. I agree with you. And I think there are opportunities for us to double down on that. And I think our kids need it.
Glenn Whitman: But I was thinking about this word, like pedagogies of the future. I'm sure somebody else has trademarked it. So, but like, what is the teacher in the future? I, look, I think the teacher still, teachers, you still, we still got to know our stuff. Like I have to know history, my math colleagues, my elementary teachers, my middle school, they got, you got to know your stuff. And the reason why you have to know your stuff is, is because you have to, I would argue, now is my 31st year in independent school teaching.
By knowing my stuff so well, it frees up space in my active working memory. When I work the room, right. To be able to engage in what that student, I don't need to think about my content very much, right. Cause I know it so well. So if there's early career teachers out there, really work hard on knowing your stuff, and knowledge is going to matter for the teacher as much as the kid. The kid needs knowledge, like, you can't ask and prompt the AI without knowledge. How do you ask it the right questions or the right follow -up questions?
So, one of the things I think, when I, you asked this earlier, this would be my number five, what I look for in classrooms, the teacher of the future has to do a better job working the room and working among the students. I still see too many times, when I'm in schools, students working independently, and teachers retreating to their laptop and missing—This is the best time to ask deeper questions, to see what kid, is it sticking or working.
So I think more and more, you know, working the room and moving amongst kids, as opposed to being in the front of the room. So I think teachers, I'm just going to say heads of school, a new line item budget should be better shoes for teachers.
Tim Fish: I love it, more steps! Get more steps, right? That's really, would be an interesting thing.
Glenn Whitman: Well, actually I know a couple of heads have bought, like Apple Watches for teachers and they're doing like counting steps, but to ask about what, what the teacher in an AI world, they're going to have to know their stuff. They're going to have to know their kids well, because here's what I think the AI can do. If I know little Tim Fish and little Glenn Whitman and you know, well enough. I, the AI is going to do something we all think we want. And I could create a personalized lesson almost every day for you. If I wanted to.
I can plug in some conditions into an AI at the end of every class and say, can I have 19 different lessons? I'm imagining that that's going to, AI is going to solve personalization and differentiation, right? In ways we knew it was too time consuming and too hard to do it without the technology, right? So, and knowing you well, and having an emotional connection with you, I know your passions, like I'm a soccer guy, right? That only comes from that human moments in my, in our classes.
Tim Fish: Know your stuff and know your kids. And work the room. Those are great. Those are actually really good. If we really focus on those, that would, that would make a lot of, and I would think a lot of teachers do a lot of those do pretty well, but could we do them even better? Yes. Right. I think we always can do these things better. And I think, Glenn, this has been, as I knew it would be, a great conversation.
So I end often with this notion of one hope for the future. One thing that you'd look out on schools and you look at education and you look at the world we live in today. Do you have a hope for the future? Something that you, you would love to see two, three, five years from now.
Glenn Whitman: Yeah, you know, it goes back to, you invited me on thankfully to talk about this amazing Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning that we have, right? And I'll just tell you one of my hopes, a lot of schools have, so many schools—public, private, charter—are doing amazing things, right? And I'm just like, my hope for the future is that we are all on an amazing learning trajectory as individual teachers and schools. And, you know, at a speed we can never have imagined.
And I would just like us to continue, whether it's through webinars or podcasts like this, Tim, to keep sharing as not only a priority, but as a responsibility and also across educational ecosystems. That's my hope for the future, because we are going to learn, together, an amazing amount in the next couple of years around AI, what the future of teaching looks like, what kids truly need to be college and life ready. It's really exciting.
Tim Fish: Really exciting. Glenn, that's an awesome way to end. Let's keep sharing. I know you and I personally will keep sharing, and what a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for taking some time.
Glenn Whitman: Always a privilege my friend, and you inspire me, and I hope this inspires a few teachers and school leaders and policymakers out there today.
Tim Fish: I'm sure it will.