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COOL CAT TEACHER TALK — Season 5, Episode 9 “Vibe Coding and Agentic AI” FINAL TRANSCRIPT ============================================================ 00:00:00:01 – 00:00:22:10 Vicki Davis Welcome back, educator, to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. I'm Vicki Davis, and today we're talking about something that's changing everything and I mean everything. How we work, how we live, and what we need to do to teach our students. Today's topic how AI changes what we teach our students. Vibe. Coding. agentic AI. 00:00:22:12 – 00:00:35:03 Announcer Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips, and inspiration to elevate your teaching. 00:00:35:05 – 00:01:00:12 Vicki Davis This is Vicki Davis, and today on Cool Cat Teacher Talk will start with vibe coding. That's where you describe what you want a computer to do and it writes the program for you. My friend Donnie Piercey, a fourth grade teacher from Kentucky, is going to show you how any teacher can do this with zero coding experience, and you can make all kinds of exciting things for your classroom. 00:01:00:15 – 00:01:24:17 Vicki Davis But then we're going somewhere bigger. We're going to talk about agentic AI. Now, don't let that word to scare you. It's just a agents artificial intelligence that doesn't just answer your questions. It does work for you. It can open and organize your files and check your calendar and manage your email and run whole workflows while you sleep. 00:01:24:17 – 00:01:48:00 Vicki Davis And when you say, oh, I'm not going to give it permission to do all that, you don't have to, I haven't. It can be a support in draft emails for you, and you can really tamp down how much you want to give it access. Even with limited access, it's massively useful as I'll be sharing in the show. But here's the question I want you to sit with today. 00:01:48:02 – 00:02:16:04 Vicki Davis If AI can now do the entry level work that used to teach people their profession, the spreadsheet building, the junior animation, the first drafts. How do our students get good enough in their field to supervise AI? The answer, I believe, is that we have to move professional language down the same way that calculators move math down those grade levels. 00:02:16:04 – 00:02:43:17 Vicki Davis And I will explain exactly what I mean by that. Plus, we'll talk about a cheating bot called Einstein. Now it only lived less than seven days, but it's an indicator of things to come. It could do students entire college coursework while they slept. And the way that we set up AI access matters more than most people realize. So welcome back, educator. 00:02:43:18 – 00:02:44:23 Vicki Davis Let's get started. 00:02:45:00 – 00:02:48:13 Announcer Okay, teacher talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:02:48:14 – 00:02:59:07 Vicki Davis Think that our guest today, Donnie Piercey, is about to set the record for being on my show the most. I ran into Donnie Piercey again at TC. We were both featured. 00:02:59:07 – 00:03:12:17 Vicki Davis Speakers in the teacher track, and he is the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the year, and he teaches fourth grade in Lexington, Kentucky and is in his 20th year. Well. 00:03:12:18 – 00:03:30:00 Donnie Piercey Somebody told me the other day, because, you know, I've been teaching now for 20 years and always at a public school in Kentucky, really from Massachusetts. I got the Auburn hat on. My wife's from Alabama and married into it. But I realized now that I have taught long enough where somebody told me, like, you know, if you round up, you can retire only 43. 00:03:30:00 – 00:03:40:14 Donnie Piercey I'm like, not thinking that far ahead yet, you know, on Saturday Night Live, like they have like the five timers club jackets kind of thing. I don't know, maybe we could get one of those or something, but I'm definitely excited to share. 00:03:40:15 – 00:03:41:06 Vicki Davis We're going to talk. 00:03:41:07 – 00:03:48:11 Vicki Davis About vibe coding. How do you simply explain what is this vibe coding thing and is it something that normal teacher can do? 00:03:48:12 – 00:04:06:20 Donnie Piercey Oh 100% vibe coding. It almost sounds like, oh gosh, is this like a new computer language? Is this a new thing that like, I have to pretend like I know what I'm talking about, but I can just throw the jargon phrase around and people think I'm smart. In a nutshell, what it is is you use an AI tool, but that's like Google Gemini ChatGPT Claude. 00:04:06:21 – 00:04:29:07 Donnie Piercey It's like, what is this thing? Or BaseHub? Which, by the way, if you're listening to this podcast and you just heard me say those words, you know, it's totally going to pop up on your Facebook feed. Now, basically, you just go into one of those tools like pick your preferred one, tell it that you want to write a code that does blank, and sometimes it might ask you some follow up questions, but it'll write the code for you. 00:04:29:07 – 00:04:48:02 Donnie Piercey And you know, that's nothing new like that's existed in AI really since ChatGPT launched. But what's different right now? You can kind of do the follow up. Now you can say, like, I have this code, I have no idea what I'm doing. Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do with this? Where does it go? Where do I put it? 00:04:48:02 – 00:04:51:02 Donnie Piercey And the AI tool will walk you through it. 00:04:51:03 – 00:05:10:23 Vicki Davis So, Donna, you're talking about this. I was struggling to teach my eighth graders, and last semester I used all the regular, regular tools that we subscribed to, and I was not happy. I had to retest and retest. Well, this semester I took all that content. I uploaded it to my favorite AI tool of choice. It was really, really cold recently. 00:05:11:00 – 00:05:28:10 Vicki Davis And so I'm like, and we're. The Eagles wanted it to be about keeping the Eagle from freezing on the nest. And the more questions you got right, the more it warmed the nest up. And save the eagle right. But here's the thing that happened is I had no retest. The kids made five points higher on average than last semester. 00:05:28:14 – 00:05:40:20 Vicki Davis It was once and done and they loved it. And they had fun sitting there watching him play it. And I could see the results right there. And the results came out in the results. Right. It was like, this is something that is a game changer. 00:05:40:20 – 00:06:00:14 Donnie Piercey We probably all have that one friend who just knows coding. And every now and then, like we might text them or send them a screenshot of like, hey, you know, I'm trying to get this HTML code to work. We would send that person a message and they would write you back and they'd say, oh, just fix this part or make some snarky, you know, like Nick Burns, your company computer guy, you know, comment on it. 00:06:00:14 – 00:06:23:14 Donnie Piercey But, you know, now, like with AI, like, we don't have to pester that person anymore. What's wild is right with the whole idea of vibe coding. It's not perfect, right? Believe it or not, AI makes mistakes. And sometimes the code that it might write for you, or the thing that it might make this change to whatever it's not right, and it'll display when you try to run the program, when you try to run the code. 00:06:23:17 – 00:06:43:20 Donnie Piercey They'll display an error message. And it still kind of breaks my brain sometimes because I remember when would first happen, I'd be like, oh, what am I supposed to do? And then I realized, like, why don't I just like, shot the error message and then just copy and paste the error message into, let's say like Google, Gemini or ChatGPT whatever tool I'm using and say, hey, the code that you wrote, it ain't working. 00:06:43:21 – 00:07:06:20 Donnie Piercey It's given me this message. Can you fix your code? But here's the thing. Right now I like to learn how to do stuff. Anytime that I do that, I'm always trying to read and kind of go through and reading what it says, because eventually, like, I would like to get to the point where I don't always have to copy and paste everything, and now I'm a lot better than I was two and a half years ago when I first started playing around with this. 00:07:06:21 – 00:07:21:10 Donnie Piercey It's still weird and you're like, hey, it's giving me this error message. Make sure you tell me why. Like, what's wrong? So that way if I see this again, I know how to fix it in the future, because sometimes it's just like there's a bracket in the wrong place. One of these variables wrong. It's really fun. Super cool to play around with. 00:07:21:11 – 00:07:29:00 Vicki Davis Okay, so give us some examples of some things that have impacted your day in your classroom using vibe coding. 00:07:29:01 – 00:07:56:07 Donnie Piercey My first advice for teachers if they want to do this is ask yourself like what is one small thing? What is an app or a tool or something that you know that if you could make like a Google doc, do this, maybe it's a translation tool, or if you could make a Google slide do this, that it would make your day a thousand times easier for that small problem, jump into Gemini or whatever you use and say, hey, I need this to happen. 00:07:56:09 – 00:08:15:17 Donnie Piercey But here's the problem can you write some code for me that will fix this problem? When I was first starting out with this, I know what I'm doing now, but I would always put like a little addendum on the end and be like, and I have no idea what I'm doing. So please don't use any technical jargon, just tell me where to copy and paste this. 00:08:15:18 – 00:08:36:03 Donnie Piercey Right? So, you know, simple example like I am I'm a full time fourth grade teacher and I do whole group reading, whole group math, whole group, you know, and then small group reading and small group math. And during small group time, you know what? If I'm not meeting with small group, the other 20 plus students in my classroom always want to know, like, what am I supposed to be doing? 00:08:36:05 – 00:08:54:16 Donnie Piercey And so I would in the past have a slide show up and, you know, on that slide show would be broken down by the different groups and the times. And, hey, here's what you should be doing. And, you know, that slide show was up there. But unless you know, if you've taught if you work to the elementary school kids before, like you don't always, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm working on it. 00:08:54:16 – 00:09:15:17 Donnie Piercey And you go by, it's like you've done nothing like, you know, what are you doing? I took a screenshot of just one of my tasks list, and I removed student names from it because I refuse to train the model. But I took a screenshot of one of my slideshows and I said, hey, I want to make it where I can have like a printable to do list for my students every day. 00:09:15:18 – 00:09:34:02 Donnie Piercey Based off of this, maybe I could put their names on Google Sheets and then maybe I like click a button or something, and it takes the tasks and it turns it into something like a printout and hand them that physical copy. Because again, elementary school, they need something to hold. Right. And then there's still tangible. They can still check off the things. 00:09:34:02 – 00:09:52:20 Donnie Piercey And it said, sure, here's what you need to do. Make a sheet. Make a slide template that you want your your slideshows to look like. And then it formatted the Google Sheet for me, which was wild. Then it said, and now you're going to make some Google Apps Script GIS, which again, still makes you laugh that it says gas, but it said okay in this. 00:09:52:21 – 00:09:53:22 Donnie Piercey Yeah. 00:09:54:00 – 00:09:54:11 Vicki Davis Fourth grade. 00:09:54:12 – 00:10:11:11 Donnie Piercey Yeah. Exactly. Right. And we're learning about the planets this week. So lots of Uranus those jokes anyway. But you know, it walked me through. Now if you want if you want it to be on a separate thing, copy this code and put it there. If you want to have everybody's the same, you know, put this part here and this would walk you through step by step. 00:10:11:11 – 00:10:31:00 Donnie Piercey And when I was first learning, I had so many I have no idea what this means. Like, don't explain to me like I'm 12. Explain to me like I'm six. Okay, now five and kind of back it up more. But it was really cool. And now like at the start of every day, like it's my first task. Usually before I leave, I'll just go in, open up the spreadsheet that it's on. 00:10:31:00 – 00:10:53:23 Donnie Piercey Now, I will type in the assignments that I want my students to do, and then there's a little button on there. I click the button and then it creates these printable tasks lists. For me. It's one of those creative projects that I'm like, okay, that was neat, right? Something that ultimately I put an hour's worth of work into it, but it ended up saving me countless hours of like putting off tasks lists and making sure. 00:10:53:23 – 00:10:56:18 Donnie Piercey And parents love that these things get sent home every day, too. 00:10:56:18 – 00:11:12:05 Vicki Davis That is wonderful. And and so you just hit a button, you know, they're pretty good at all. These different apps and tools are pretty good at writing for the other apps. You know, I know I can write for Google and you just say, hey, I want to write it for this, and I want to do it in this program. 00:11:12:05 – 00:11:13:14 Vicki Davis And there you go. 00:11:13:15 – 00:11:34:11 Donnie Piercey And if your listeners or viewers are looking for like, okay, what's the simple example, maybe you got your slide, maybe you've got your weekly classroom newsletter in Google Slides, right? There's no native translate tool in Google Slides, but there is Google App Script that you can add. You've got in my classroom this year, five different languages. Some of them are not even in Google Translate. 00:11:34:11 – 00:11:53:11 Donnie Piercey Easily. Ask it to create some Google Apps script for you for your newsletter, and say it needs to have these languages and just say I want it. Where when I click this button on Google Slides, it makes takes what's on slide one, translates it to those five languages, and then I can just print it all off or email it in one fell swoop. 00:11:53:11 – 00:12:17:20 Donnie Piercey I've been doing this. Now it's just playing around the vibe coding stuff for over two years. You know, I feel like I know a thousand times more now than I did when I asked it to write a simple Frogger game in HTML, you know, with emojis. But now it's like you can actually make stuff and it's fun. Like, I still use AI to correct errors, but some, you know, now with some of the like the sites and things that I'm building, I just kind of do it myself because I figured it out. 00:12:17:21 – 00:12:45:22 Vicki Davis And a lot of these things you can publish to HTML and then put the link in or publish to all different types of things so that it could be a game that could play, or it could be uploaded all my stats from my podcast and made an HTML dashboard and had it tag every single one of them. Based on topic, I can pull up based on stats like top five in this topic, top five in that topic, and it just makes it really easy for me to kind of figure out, hey! 00:12:46:03 – 00:13:00:16 Vicki Davis Okay, this might be a great one to add to a radio show I'm doing. It's just so powerful. It's like stuff I've never had access to before, whether I'm at school or at home. Are there some other ideas that you've seen teachers do that? You're like, oh yeah. 00:13:00:17 – 00:13:24:01 Donnie Piercey Designing a game. I'm speaking from elementary school perspective here. You can ask like Google Gemini to write some HTML code for you that you can copy and paste onto a Google site, and maybe it's a learn your division facts game. It'll write the code. So after it writes it for the first time, maybe like, oh, I want it to be multiple choice every time. 00:13:24:01 – 00:13:44:06 Donnie Piercey Maybe you want it where your high school teacher and you're trying to have your students balance equations. Hey guess what? Ask it to write some script for you. Or HTML code that you can copy and paste or embed onto, like a Google site or something simple, and then send that Google site to your students and then boom, guys, hey, I want you to play this game that I made for you today. 00:13:44:07 – 00:14:09:06 Donnie Piercey I like to be silly sometimes. Sometimes I've just learned with silly things. It's that's kind of how you learn how this works. My first website that I wrote and published from start to finish again, I'm not going to pull this up now, but if you go to GIF debate, that's GIF debate. It's a site that I put together that I feel like definitively finally answers the question of how to pronounce that word correctly. 00:14:09:06 – 00:14:10:09 Donnie Piercey So there you go. 00:14:10:10 – 00:14:32:16 Vicki Davis It's remarkable. I mean, we've entered the age of what we used to call citizen programming. Now we call it vibe coding, which is by simply being able to describe the program. You can write the program you want to use, a tool you trust, and you want to protect. That student needs the student data, but it is remarkable and it can boost performance. 00:14:32:18 – 00:14:54:07 Donnie Piercey If you teach CS like maybe she's like an AP C++ course. I mean, I took that in high school. Do not ask me to remember it at all. Maybe you know one thing that I know a lot of those teachers are using is they're having it right code. Like they'll ask Gemini to write code or something and then whatever language that in JavaScript, Python, whatever, they'll ask it, hey, can you make a mistake? 00:14:54:08 – 00:15:12:20 Donnie Piercey Right. And they'll be very, very specific with what that mistake is. And then the teacher will copy that code, put it on like a text file or whatever, and say, hey, you need to debug this and figure out what exactly is going wrong, because this is supposed to display a calendar where whatever year it is, it makes sure it matches everything up. 00:15:12:20 – 00:15:37:05 Donnie Piercey Right. But there's a mistake. You need to fix it, right? Tell me what's wrong, debug it and fix it. The little examples like that, and it's just fun, you know, like sometimes it's like, hey, make me a silly app that does this. Or, you know, something simple with a lot of these coding apps because, you know, like we've said this word Claude a lot, this codex like ChatGPT ones and a lot of these are like separate downloadable apps that you can put on your computer. 00:15:37:06 – 00:15:55:13 Donnie Piercey All of them even like the super high priced paid models, they have a limit like they won't you won't sit there and code forever, you know, which frankly, I think is a good thing because, you know, at one point, as a user, I need to have it like I need to be able to say, okay, stop. Look at what you have. 00:15:55:14 – 00:16:10:04 Donnie Piercey Right. Can I can I at least check to see, like, is this site that I'm building doing what it's supposed to? Is this game working the way that's supposed to? Is this feedback tool doing what it's supposed to. But you know, deep down, like, man, like I don't want to ever reach the point where these machines are like coding. 00:16:10:04 – 00:16:13:19 Donnie Piercey And then they create coding machines on their own and then the world gets taken over. 00:16:13:20 – 00:16:30:13 Vicki Davis I use Claude Cowork and have created some skills that I dictate voice memos on the way to school, and I used to do transcript and then I would try to do something with it, but now I just throw it in a folder and I have a custom skill I run every morning that can take it and turn it into multiple things. 00:16:30:13 – 00:16:47:02 Vicki Davis For me, it's just so powerful, you know, for whatever tool you want. I would say start easy. Starting with HTML is a good way to start for teachers or for whoever. And honestly, I just upload the HTML file as a file in Google Classroom and it works just fine for me. 00:16:47:07 – 00:16:58:02 Donnie Piercey You can just open it up in Chrome and it runs exactly like it's supposed to. And I would say, like for your listeners, if they're listening and they're like, man, that sounds way too complicated. Go to, you know, whatever tool. 00:16:58:05 – 00:17:00:04 Vicki Davis You you can go to Canva code even. 00:17:00:05 – 00:17:18:05 Donnie Piercey Yeah, you go to can you could go in and you just say like write me some code. That's a simple game that checks to see if my students know their multiplication facts. Then all you need to add, it'll write this code and you're probably like, I have no idea what to do with this. So your next prompt, your follow up should be. 00:17:18:06 – 00:17:40:14 Donnie Piercey I have no idea what to do with this. I want it where my students can play this game. Now what do I do? It'll walk you through step by step and it's really wild. One kind of scary easy that it is. It'll also teach you a little bit more about kind of the creative process that goes into coding, because at first you're going to feel like the AI is doing everything. 00:17:40:15 – 00:17:47:09 Donnie Piercey Eventually if you do it for a few months, like, oh, I don't need to ask it to change this number, I can just do this here. I can hop into the code myself. 00:17:47:10 – 00:18:13:02 Vicki Davis It's great for our students to be able to understand how to create the apps in the tools that they need for their lives. So when they get to the level that I teach, which is high school, I teach AP CSP, and I want my students to be able to describe the programs they want. And I really think AP CSP is one of the most valuable courses because I'm biased, of course, but because it enables power vibe coding when you understand just a little bit. 00:18:13:02 – 00:18:27:08 Vicki Davis So Donnie Piercey, so many things we could go into one of my favorite teachers to see present at conferences, and it was great connecting with you at and thanks for coming on the show again. I will have to get you a t shirt or something. 00:18:27:10 – 00:18:34:19 Donnie Piercey So just just look up like the Saturday Night Live, like five timers club. You need like a little card or something, but like a smokers jacket. 00:18:34:20 – 00:18:36:16 Vicki Davis Well, thanks for coming on the show, Donnie. 00:18:36:17 – 00:18:37:23 Donnie Piercey Awesome, I appreciate it. Thank you. 00:18:38:00 – 00:18:42:00 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:18:42:01 – 00:19:10:09 Vicki Davis So Donnie makes it sound easy and it really can be. But let's go further today because what Donnie is doing, describing what he wants and having AI build it. This is being done by districts all over the world, but it's actually the beginning of something much bigger. What we're going to talk about next is agentic AI, and it's going to change what every one of us needs to teach our students. 00:19:10:09 – 00:19:22:00 Vicki Davis So joining me now is our producer, John Davis. And so John and I are going to have a conversation about this, because we've been talking about it a lot here in our studios at the house. 00:19:22:00 – 00:19:37:14 Announcer So what is agentic AI? Because I've heard this term being thrown around. Quite a lot. Is it just an AI agent? Is it like a small little miniature man inside your computer doing tasks for you? What is it? 00:19:37:16 – 00:20:04:21 Vicki Davis Well, that's definitely not a miniature person. So think of an agent as you have a travel agent and they can book travel and they may do a bunch of tasks, but this is smaller than that. So I use Claude Cowork and it has skills that I've created. So I have all these things that I do every week. I plan my lessons playing my meals and what I'm going to go through my email playing these shows, which have a ton of transcripts that I have to go through. 00:20:04:21 – 00:20:23:23 Vicki Davis So like for today's show, I needed to look at Donnie Piercey. I knew we wanted him on the show because we had vibe coding, and then I knew that I wanted Rachelle Dené Poth in a post at the end. Okay, so when we first started, I would print out hundreds of pages of transcripts and I would just have them all over this desk in here. 00:20:23:23 – 00:20:52:03 Vicki Davis And I know you weren't working with me yet, John, but it was very cumbersome. And in some ways I would even cut and paste. Okay, I want this piece here in that piece there. And I was like, figuring out what pieces of transcripts, because we have over 900 of the 10 Minute Teacher episodes. So the whole premise of the show is, I want you to take the best of what we've already recorded, record new people, and put it together on one topic so that somebody could do a deep dive that's driving down the road or fixing their meals. 00:20:52:03 – 00:21:21:23 Vicki Davis It took me hours and hours, probably 10 to 15 hours, to put together what I want you to put on the show. And so now what I can do is I can take those transcripts, I can record on my phone what I'm thinking in the direction I want to go. And then I've trained a skill in Claude coworker that has access to my folder for my Cool Cat Teacher Talk episodes, and then I load the transcripts in there. 00:21:22:00 – 00:21:48:15 Vicki Davis Start talking to the AI, in this case a skill, and I say, okay, I'm preparing season five, episode nine. I want to talk about agentic AI and vibe coding. I'm uploading what I like, the words that I recorded, okay. And then it asks me certain questions. So I've programed in the questions that I've always asked myself, how is this helpful to teachers? 00:21:48:15 – 00:22:06:08 Vicki Davis How is this going to be helpful to anybody who cares about today's kids? How is this going to be helpful for where school goes tomorrow? As well as my own thoughts of what I was doing? I even had Claude describe every single skill that I had created, which is quite a bunch. By this point. I just kind of like walked away. 00:22:06:09 – 00:22:27:11 Vicki Davis I don't know if you remember, you and I were working last night, John, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to walk away and cook dinner because this thing is going to work for a while. So I'm able to open up multiple windows while these different little agents are working. For example, I have what I call a junk drawer for my web browser, and I download all this stuff in there, but some of that stuff is good stuff. 00:22:27:15 – 00:22:49:04 Vicki Davis So I gave it access to just the junk drawer and I said, go through this look and see what's in here, organize it in folders. You do not have permission to delete anything, but you can make a trash folder. And that one, because I had so much in there, probably ran for 20 or 30 minutes. It renamed the stuff and it made folders. 00:22:49:04 – 00:23:05:05 Vicki Davis And then I went through the stuff in the trash that it thought I needed to delete, and I moved stuff here and there. So, for example, I had downloaded a bunch of Veterans Day videos that I had promised my principal I would upload into Google Drive, and I'm like, oh, these are here. I was wondering where they were. 00:23:05:05 – 00:23:38:01 Vicki Davis And so it found everything and put it in there. So these two examples are like the first one was just I had a prompt, I told it to do something and it went off and did it and came back. Okay. So it's like kind of a one off type thing. Second example was a skill that I had made in Claude Cowork, and the difference between Claude Cowork and Claude online and Claude on your phone is that Claude Cowork is installed on your computer, and you can give it access to certain folders. 00:23:38:01 – 00:24:03:17 Vicki Davis So the reason that I like Claude Cowork versus anything else, and honestly, there's not a lot out that really does what Claude Cowork does right now. But by the time you listen to this, there may be other tools. I know ChatGPT is working on their piece, but I'm able to get really granular and and say, okay, when you're in my Gmail, you have permission to read and you have permission to do filters, but you can't write anything. 00:24:03:17 – 00:24:26:15 Vicki Davis So at the end of every day at 415, I have a scheduled agent that runs for me a scheduled skill called daily email triage, and that thing runs at 415 every day. It goes through my email, and it classifies level 1 to 10 of how important it is. And I've trained it. And then it says, hey, here's what's in here. 00:24:26:15 – 00:24:47:16 Vicki Davis Here's what you might want to say. Here's some draft emails or I don't know what to do with this one. I've gotten real detailed with those skills. So these are like almost like John when I had an assistant who did some different things for me, it's almost like I can create these little tiny assistants for all these little tiny jobs, but there's no person in there. 00:24:47:16 – 00:24:50:11 Vicki Davis It's just AI doing what it's been trained. 00:24:50:12 – 00:25:09:20 Announcer So that's a news story that recently happened, where software developers are asked to make a certain amount of their code with AI, and due to these constraints, they and losing the entire database because it concourse out halfway through and just deletes the entire thing. 00:25:09:21 – 00:25:33:05 Vicki Davis That is something I've had as a problem. So when you use Claude inside Excel, so ChatGPT, you can now use inside Excel and Claude, you can use inside Excel. And so I've had two cases. So for example I downloaded all of my recurring subscriptions because I've got way too many and I want to get rid of those. And I was doing this work with Claude to like, categorize them or organize them. 00:25:33:05 – 00:25:50:04 Vicki Davis And one thing you can do is you can add Claude inside your browser. So I would go to a service I wanted to cancel. I would log in so it would know a password rethink. I would click on the Claude Cowork in my browser and I would say find the page where I can click cancel and it would come up with a plan. 00:25:50:04 – 00:26:09:08 Vicki Davis It would say, I'm going to click here, here and here and I'm going to find a page work cancel. Then I would approve the plan and then I give it permission to operate on that site. So if it accidentally goes to another site it has to ask permission again. So then it would cancel. And so I was right in the middle of canceling quite a few services. 00:26:09:09 – 00:26:30:07 Vicki Davis And for some reason Microsoft Excel like installed an update when Excel crashed and it went back into Excel. Everything I had done was gone except the original import of that stuff. I was so frustrated and even went in the automatic backups Excel supposed to make, but for some reason it didn't make those automatic backups. I've had that happen to me twice. 00:26:30:07 – 00:26:52:20 Vicki Davis It's very frustrating. What I do now is if I'm using Claude in Excel or if I was using ChatGPT Excel, I go in and I click File Save and I save and I save and I save because that is one thing. If you run out of credit or there's this thing called a context window. So Anthropic, which does Claude, just doubled what they gave us. 00:26:52:21 – 00:27:15:09 Vicki Davis It's basically the working memory how much it can remember at one time. So one of the tips for example, is I created what's called a meta skill. And that's like a big picture skill. So if I say coach me it invokes my coach skill, okay. On top of whatever else I'm doing. So if I'm like, hey, I'm in my email, hey, coach me, I have too much email when I'm creating that coach skill. 00:27:15:09 – 00:27:28:22 Vicki Davis When I was working on it, we came up with six phases and I went ahead and had it right. The prompts for all those phases that I needed to do, because I had to open up new chats for each of those because it would exceed the window and just kind of crash out. 00:27:28:23 – 00:27:54:01 Announcer So let's get back on original topic a bit. So you talked about AI is taking up all these entry level jobs. So are these people who are coming into the workforce that don't have these experience and can't get into these entry level jobs. Are they just told to stuff it and they can't get in? What's going to happen when all the people that are in like the positions with the experience finally retire? 00:27:54:02 – 00:27:57:07 Announcer Are we just going to not have those professions anymore? 00:27:57:08 – 00:28:22:08 Vicki Davis Okay, so if AI can do better than an entry level professional for the first five years, then we need to look at what we're thinking. So for example, when I went to GT, I was a market planner and I built spreadsheets, and I had a person above me who understood spreadsheets and they talked spreadsheet. And so they would like say, hey, Vicki, go put in a lookup table here or put in a conditional here or there, right. 00:28:22:09 – 00:28:46:17 Vicki Davis They spoke spreadsheet. And then I would go out and do that. I learned spreadsheets by making spreadsheets. So it's like we're losing the training ground where people learn the work. So I believe really in high school we need to teach statistics and data analytics, and we need our students all speaking spreadsheet so that they can supervise spreadsheets. Let me give you another example. 00:28:46:17 – 00:29:12:04 Vicki Davis I was working on the cover of my next book. I was struggling, struggling and trying to get it through all these different AI tools, spending hours. And I couldn't do it. And my sister, who's a graphic designer, sat down, wrote one prompt. It was pretty long and immediately got the book cover I loved immediately. That's because she speaks graphic design, speaking whatever profession like you went to the Christian Worldview Film Festival last week, John. 00:29:12:05 – 00:29:39:14 Vicki Davis And so you're around people who were speaking film. And because of that, when you learn to speak in a profession, then you're able to supervise AI that works in that profession. So all the entry level stuff, we've got to get students using AI in their chosen field so that they can get past that learning curve. And I'll give you another example. 00:29:39:15 – 00:29:56:18 Vicki Davis Last week, one of my eighth graders, I asked, hey, what are you doing in your math class? And they said, we're doing Trig like Trig, trigonometry. They said, yeah. And I looked at it. I'm like, yeah, that's Trig. I learned a trick, John. Guess how old I was when I learned trick seven? No, I was a senior in high school. 00:29:56:18 – 00:30:12:17 Vicki Davis That was my it was Trig pre calc and I had that my senior year. And my eighth graders are learning the same thing. I was talking to your dad about this last night John, and he said yeah, we used to spend a whole year, all these lookup tables so that we could even do Trig and all that went away with a calculator. 00:30:12:17 – 00:30:33:15 Vicki Davis So there's a lot of mundane, menial type work that is going away because AI can do it. So we have to understand what it's doing when it writes a spreadsheet. My students need to be able to know, hey, that's a lookup formula. Here's what a lookup formula does. Here's what a conditional does like here's what these different things do. 00:30:33:17 – 00:30:50:08 Vicki Davis That's why I think like my AP CSP class is so important because they know how to speak programming. So then they're able to supervise AI as AI writes programs, knowing the field well enough to direct the AI tool to create these skills and create these agents. 00:30:50:09 – 00:30:56:00 Announcer Yeah, but how do we make sure that education is going to keep up with this, like rapidly advancing field? 00:30:56:00 – 00:30:58:14 Vicki Davis Well, maybe they listen to our show. 00:30:58:16 – 00:30:59:20 Announcer No. 00:30:59:22 – 00:31:22:10 Vicki Davis I think that this is a challenge because, for example, when I started teaching computer science, I pulled the Georgia standards for computer science. And when I started teaching in 2002, in those standards, they had floppy disks. I know floppy disks are all. But even in 2002, they were old. It's like, how long has these standards been updated? And it was like ten years old. 00:31:22:10 – 00:31:44:09 Vicki Davis We have two problems in education. We have too many standards, which we found that we can only implement a limited number of standards and really keep them in our minds. So we have too many standards and we have outdated standards, and then we have to get a handle on this artificial intelligence. And I think a lot of it is we use it for ourselves personally. 00:31:44:09 – 00:32:05:16 Vicki Davis So for example, I created a skill for meal planning and planned our meals for the week and loaded some recipes in there that I like playing it for two weeks and it puts stuff on my calendar and I know what the meals are. We've had some pretty good meals lately because of it, because I'm taking a lot of that stuff that I used to do that just really slowed me down. 00:32:05:16 – 00:32:29:02 Vicki Davis I used to help me figure out how am I going to arrange a room, you know, use this stuff in our personal lives so we can start understanding how are we going to need to use it in our schools? And I do believe that there is a whole season where we're not using AI, where maybe the teacher is using AI to support them to help give feedback faster, but where we don't use AI. 00:32:29:02 – 00:32:57:18 Vicki Davis And then there's a place where we start bringing it in at certain places and not just having them find answers. Too many people think the AI is Google, AI is so not Google. And I know Google puts this AI thing at the top. But like last week, I showed my students how every single thing that an AI said about a particular topic was wrong at the top, and I said, click all the different sources, and they clicked on the sources and it wasn't even quote in the sources. 00:32:57:18 – 00:33:24:15 Vicki Davis Right? So too many people think that AI is always right and that it is a human brain and that it's smarter. And I think there's a lot of people that are talking about artificial intelligence and education, and we never want to play King of the Hill. We always want to make a bigger hill, because there's always room for more people who are wise and discerning, and there's room for disagreement about some things we all have to agree that we want what's better for tomorrow, and we want what's good for kids. 00:33:24:16 – 00:33:51:02 Vicki Davis Like we have to agree on that because that's like part of who we are as teachers. But I think that we've really got struggles and issues, John, because here's the deal. If a teacher is reading a script and those kids are on a computer, the whole class, period, is that teacher really doing what that teacher is called to do, or can that be replaced by some AI tools out there that somebody creates? 00:33:51:02 – 00:34:30:04 Vicki Davis But if a teacher is getting to know their students and relating to their students and helping them move forward with projects and that sort of thing, that's like what we teachers do best and what AI can never replace. So I think a lot of it is valuing what teachers can uniquely do. Let AI support us where it's really good at supporting, not be on screens too much, be really wise and selective about when we're going to be on screens, when they can be supervised, and getting into how AI can really improve our lives, but also understanding things about privacy. 00:34:30:04 – 00:34:58:21 Vicki Davis And that's actually the last piece of this segment is we're going to kind of talk about with Rachelle Dené Poth and a post about like this whole privacy thing and what should you not give AI access to, understanding that there's always these useful things. There's this coaching and I have a daily habit check in. And I have a skill for weekly planning and scheduling and email and all these other things that I have created that make my life better. 00:34:58:21 – 00:35:10:13 Vicki Davis But then there's also I think it's helpful because it's freeing me up to do other things that I would rather spend my time with. So why don't we go now to Rachelle Dené Poth and then we'll come back for the end? 00:35:10:14 – 00:35:14:02 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:35:14:06 – 00:35:44:17 Vicki Davis Today we are talking with Rachelle Dené Poth. She's a celebrated educator at tech consultant at Riverview Junior Senior High School in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. She specializes in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. A lot of us know her from AR and VR and Edu. She's an ISTE certified educator, author of nine books, and has been recognized with so many awards, including the ISTE Make It Happen Award and the Ed Tech Trendsetter of 2020. 00:35:44:19 – 00:36:10:03 Vicki Davis But what I love is that she is actually in the classroom now. Today we're going to talk about AI, literacy and also cybersecurity and what we actually need to be teaching kids, because I know there's a lot out there about what we should be teaching educators and all the educator. Rachelle Dené Poth, a lot of people are just kind of passing it off and saying, okay, first, educators need to get all educated and then we can start talking to kids, but the kids are in it now. 00:36:10:03 – 00:36:35:08 Rachelle Dené Poth That's the scary part of it, is that when I think about when I was younger, and that's what I love about my class, is because I can think of me in their position. I would have never imagined that we had access to so many things, and their whole lives have been surrounded by technology, and they are given, in many cases, a device of some sort, and they just start using tools not unlike some educators as well, because we know there are so many different digital tools out there. 00:36:35:08 – 00:37:01:17 Rachelle Dené Poth And you hear somebody say, oh, did you hear about this? And I use it my classroom and we dive right in. But we really have to make sure that we understand that whatever we're using, whatever information we're putting into it, you never know where it's going to end up, how it's going to be used. We have to kind of start with the basics like what is it, what does it do, what info does it take from us, and just kind of model for our students how to best use some of the different technologies and tools that we're seeing out there. 00:37:01:18 – 00:37:26:22 Rachelle Dené Poth One big thing that has been on the rise, and I've just even in the last couple of weeks, I think 3 or 4 of my friends say that their schools have been victims of cyber attacks and ransomware. Just what a mess that creates. Obviously, it disrupts learning because you can't access your files. I had my own experience with that, and panic sets in because you have all of these years of work and you don't know if you're going to get access back to it. 00:37:26:22 – 00:37:48:10 Rachelle Dené Poth You also don't know what information has been taken and where that's going. I did look into that a little bit with my students, especially in my class, because talking about cybersecurity and phishing scams, and we had a ton of fun looking at some different emails. And we all get that. We get the spam phone calls, we get the emails that look real, has my name, it has some made up email address, and I was surprised to find out. 00:37:48:11 – 00:38:09:22 Rachelle Dené Poth It just I forget the percentage offhand, but it has like tripled this year in such a short span of time. The number of school districts that are being targeted as part of these. For ransomware, that's something that we really need to be careful with that things are locked down also for students to be able to distinguish. It goes back to the whole media literacy, digital literacy, but now it's digital discernment. 00:38:09:22 – 00:38:25:10 Rachelle Dené Poth And that's not a term I made up. There's a book I read, Future Proof by Kevin Roose, and he said that because of all the tech that we're surrounded by, it's not just being able to read it, process it, evaluate. It's like you have to distinguish if it's real or not. There are a lot of layers to it. 00:38:25:11 – 00:38:31:13 Rachelle Dené Poth It is kind of scary how quickly something like that can happen, and just the impact that it has in so many areas. 00:38:31:14 – 00:38:53:13 Vicki Davis The phishing attacks have been excessive against teachers for quite some time. It usually happens on the weekends or when everybody knows we're on break or right when we go on summer, somebody pretending to be the principal emails the teachers. Have you discovered or learned the primary way that these schools are being hacked? Is it through phishing or is it just an unsecured server? 00:38:53:14 – 00:39:17:12 Rachelle Dené Poth A few were as a result of fishing. Just link was clicked. Something just went into the whole system. And then another part of it is because we're using so many different tools in our schools now, especially with all of the AI, that puts a heavy burden on all the IT teams, the tech support in the schools and the network, it's hard to protect to 100% to guarantee everybody's information is safe. 00:39:17:12 – 00:39:37:05 Rachelle Dené Poth And a lot of the I did an audit of some of the different tech tools that I'm using just to see what their policies are and what they have in place. And, you know, there's no guarantee that everything is secure. But a lot of the time it just comes down to looking. And you see, like I laughed when you say the principal email because I got one of those years ago like, can you go buy some gift cards for me? 00:39:37:05 – 00:39:54:23 Rachelle Dené Poth And just the other day a colleague said, did you send me an email that you sent me for photographs? And I said, no. So she walked over and she showed me and it had my name, but it had somebody else's email address. But it was a good teachable moment for my students because we were talking about like, here's what you look for. 00:39:55:00 – 00:40:10:23 Rachelle Dené Poth And later that night, somebody got it and it came through the school email. And so she didn't click on it. Nobody clicked on it. But you wonder, okay, if they clicked like, what does that unleash to all of the contacts? Because that's what happened. And I think about seven years ago I was at home on a Saturday afternoon. 00:40:10:23 – 00:40:32:15 Rachelle Dené Poth I opened up my school email and it was multiplying by the thousands every hour. And it was just this massive and I don't know what the actual source was, but luckily it was just confined to me. So you really have to be careful and read those things really closely. And I think that's a good lesson for everything. Like always read the details because you just never know. 00:40:32:16 – 00:40:49:05 Vicki Davis As I work with it, when I have those forwarded to me, whoever the email sender blacklisted because, you know, some people are better at telling those things are legit than others. You know, student facing what are you teaching your students about AI literacy and in this case, cybersecurity? 00:40:49:10 – 00:41:09:04 Rachelle Dené Poth Yeah. Well, one thing is we did a couple of activities about creating passwords. And I think we've all seen that you can't just have that same old password that you've grown accustomed to. It has to have so many characters, so many special characters, capitals, all of those different things. And so we do some activities about how do you make a safe password. 00:41:09:04 – 00:41:27:18 Rachelle Dené Poth And I actually shared with them the way that I create passwords that went back to a course from ISTE that I took on computational thinking, and I came up with a pattern. And I have my own like mnemonic for for memorizing what the passwords are. So if somebody can hack my passwords, that will be interesting to see. So that's one of the things. 00:41:27:18 – 00:41:48:07 Rachelle Dené Poth And then with students or even adults, educators, whenever you have an opportunity for that two factor authentication, I know my own computer, I have that option to send a text message or an email, or you can use your fingerprint or checking the privacy settings to see if what they're using, if any information is getting sent out to anybody else. 00:41:48:09 – 00:41:56:08 Rachelle Dené Poth Those are pretty much the top things that we talk about. And then just look at some examples, because there are tons of examples out there to explore. 00:41:56:12 – 00:42:14:10 Vicki Davis Okay. So you talk about passwords and I have some some pieces I do on passwords as well. I teach my phishing unit. I actually have like a fishing quiz where it has samples. Is this fishing? Is this not. Would you click on it? Would you not. And and then I have my students write about it. And most of them this is my AP Computer Science Principles course. 00:42:14:10 – 00:42:25:11 Vicki Davis Most of them are like you know, I'm actually not as good at detecting phishing as I thought, you know? So how do we educate other educators as well as students about fishing? 00:42:25:13 – 00:42:41:23 Rachelle Dené Poth Yeah, I think and I love the examples. I just happened to find about a week and a half ago, and I had some that I was using before, but then I found a couple of other ones and the kids really liked it. I put it up on the Promethean and they were they were taking turns reading it in very dramatic ways. 00:42:41:23 – 00:43:00:01 Rachelle Dené Poth And, and I when I first took the one test, I didn't do that well either. And I thought I was pretty good at distinguishing, you know, looking for all of those little markers like the email address and the, the HTTP with the right, you know, for educators just being mindful of sometimes email comes in a lot, but you might get that text message. 00:43:00:06 – 00:43:19:23 Rachelle Dené Poth The Pennsylvania Turnpike sent me a text message, as well as a lot of other people, saying that we were in violation. We owed money. I didn't, but people clicked on it and they went to this site that very much looked like the Turnpike Commission's website. Practicing not being so quick to click is the thing, but sometimes it's hard because you get that email from somebody, one of your colleagues. 00:43:19:23 – 00:43:38:09 Rachelle Dené Poth It's family, friends, and you just assume that they sent it to me. And sure, quick, you don't know what it's going to unleash. There are a lot of problems that may not even happen right away. Whenever you get like the key logging that can go on, which in itself that's kind of scary. I recommend teachers try some of those things with their students. 00:43:38:09 – 00:43:48:13 Rachelle Dené Poth Just even a quick activity to help students. Something we should all do together just to keep making sure, because there's so much more information that's being exchanged in different formats that it's essential. 00:43:48:14 – 00:44:10:08 Vicki Davis Key logging for those listening is just where somebody just watching every key you're entering, which allows them to capture all kinds of things. Even Wi-Fi had a student who had his bank account information taken, and I was teaching this lesson and it just happened. I was teaching the lesson about using a VPN, not joining free Wi-Fi, being being wary. 00:44:10:09 – 00:44:31:14 Vicki Davis He had had it taken at at a Starbucks and there had been a like a Starbucks Wi-Fi. But then there was a free, fast, super free fast Wi-Fi or something he had joined and he had logged into his bank account. And so even the conversation of secure Wi-Fi, because they all have phones and some of them are already banking and using debit cards. 00:44:31:16 – 00:44:54:20 Rachelle Dené Poth Had an incident. I've had a lot of incidents I realized in the last like 6 or 9 months, but we rely on it so much. So especially when you're traveling at the airports, hotels, everywhere, you have to really be careful if you're logging into banking or any of that information you don't want anybody to get to. But I did have somebody figure out that there was a hotel when I traveled in Nashville, I always say, at the same place. 00:44:54:20 – 00:45:17:06 Rachelle Dené Poth And so I looked at my credit card bill and there was a pending charge for this hotel. So I called them, and they had no record of my name, but there was a hotel booked using my card. The only time that I wasn't on my own network or my hotspot was when I was in an airport, and for a brief period of time, I think I may have used my credit card or made a reservation or did something, but it was. 00:45:17:06 – 00:45:39:19 Rachelle Dené Poth It was kind of scary. And then of course, it caused new credit cards to be issued. And then you have to change all that information everywhere you have it stored. It's the easiest thing is just to really be careful about what information you share, where you're posting it, what fee you're using. Changing passwords frequently is another key, even though it's it's annoying sometimes, but it's necessary now. 00:45:39:20 – 00:45:55:22 Vicki Davis I use a tool to help you manage passwords, and it alerts me when certain passwords have been taken. But I know a lot of kids who use the same password for everything when I travel. It's just the VPN went and got a VPN for all of us, because we had started having trouble with some people in our family being hacked on free Wi-Fi. 00:45:55:22 – 00:46:07:08 Vicki Davis And how do you tell you can't? So our policy is when you when you leave the house, I don't care where you are, you're going to be on a VPN because that's just the way it has to happen. This is just digital living, isn't it? 00:46:07:09 – 00:46:28:09 Rachelle Dené Poth And it's it's kind of scary. Even Google, when I say to the students, how many times do you just Google one thing really quickly and the next thing you know, it's in your social media feed? I had a conversation with somebody the one day, and it's probably just coincidence, but it was a very creepy coincidence that they literally just said about something about this one company. 00:46:28:11 – 00:46:43:17 Rachelle Dené Poth I heard my email do the little ding, and I looked and it was an email from the company. I had never looked up the company, so I'm thinking, how did that actually happen? I'm talking it up to just a random coincidence, because otherwise that's a little bit scary to think about. Any alternative reason for that? 00:46:43:18 – 00:46:59:09 Vicki Davis There's microphones on, you know, learning to go in your settings and turn off microphones, and there's just so many different ways that we can compromise security. And there's also some literacy that has to do with artificial intelligence. What are a few of the things that you teach your middle and high schoolers about AI literacy? 00:46:59:10 – 00:47:24:17 Rachelle Dené Poth With my older students in my Spanish classes, a lot of them are sophomores and juniors, and they're very much aware of ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, and all of those. They don't understand sometimes that it's like the answer that you're given from this thing is not necessarily accurate. Your teachers may very well know that you've used this. And so what I've tried to do is give them opportunities in my classroom to use some of the different tools that are out there. 00:47:24:17 – 00:47:41:05 Rachelle Dené Poth And I'll share with them. You know, I use this tool to create this activity. What do you think? Just to show that I'm using it kind of as a thought partner, had some students actually contribute to a blog post I had written about what they thought about some of the tools. I forget how one of the students said it. 00:47:41:06 – 00:48:02:08 Rachelle Dené Poth We were using the sidekick of school AI, and I prompted it to engage with them in conversation based on the vocab and verbs that they were using. Didn't know what to say about it. And I said, well, just give me some ideas. And the one quote that he had was something to the effect of I. It gave me a chance to practice the language and adjusted its questions based on my responses. 00:48:02:09 – 00:48:23:22 Rachelle Dené Poth But yeah, I kind of like that because for each student having in their hands learning, how is it working? What is it doing for you, what are the benefits, what are any concerns and just bringing it into any classroom? Something quick and simple. It doesn't have to take a lot of time because there's so many things out there, but showing them where it can enhance and support your learning, but not replace and take away your opportunity for your own learning. 00:48:23:22 – 00:48:29:08 Rachelle Dené Poth And I think that's like the key distinction is what we want our students to do is to see. It's just a tool. 00:48:29:09 – 00:48:54:17 Vicki Davis There's so many things we could talk about, but I think the important point we have is that all of us should be looking at what are these essential things that our students need to know so that they can be successful and safe and productive and healthy in today's world, whether it's understanding how a tool works like AI and it's appropriate place that as a tool and not as it's not human. 00:48:54:18 – 00:49:11:06 Vicki Davis You know, sometimes kids get very confused. We've talked about the Eliza effect before. We've got to be wise about how we're talking about that, as well as all these cyber security issues. And, Rachelle Dené Poth, you've really brought up some great ones and supportive ones that people need to be talking about. Thanks, Rachelle Dené Poth. 00:49:11:07 – 00:49:26:00 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. So as we finish up the show, can you just give us a recap? What do schools need to change as we just go and get all this new technology regarding AI agents? 00:49:26:01 – 00:49:44:14 Vicki Davis The first thing is really a very practical thing file management, knowing how to organize folders, move files, filing things on your computer. It sounds really basic, but it's very critical when you're working with agentic AI. If your files are a mess and you don't know where you have things, you don't know where you're putting things, it makes it really hard to have AI help you. 00:49:44:14 – 00:50:06:01 Vicki Davis So even on a Chromebook, you can set that up. After you get organized, you're still going to be the one saving those files. So you need to like, know where they are. You need to know a little bit about how you organize your files. There is something called OpenClaw that is open source that I do not recommend that people get. 00:50:06:01 – 00:50:27:14 Vicki Davis And it requires access to your whole hard drive, like your whole hard drive. I don't recommend getting that, but that is what and I talked about this at the beginning of the show. The Einstein app was built on. This app was open job for like five days. Okay. They released it for five days. And the first release of it, I blogged it on Cool Cat Teacher. 00:50:27:16 – 00:50:48:04 Vicki Davis It said it will log in for you, watch the videos, do your homework, write your papers all for you while you're sleep. Supposedly the people who tested it said it worked because it basically has access to your whole hard drive and everything. Like it can click on the web browser. It like it has access to the whole thing. 00:50:48:04 – 00:50:55:23 Vicki Davis It's called OpenClaw, and I believe the guy who created OpenClaw and it had multiple names. It was like multiple. 00:50:56:00 – 00:50:59:03 Announcer Book is the AI social media. 00:50:59:05 – 00:51:22:05 Vicki Davis Book is with OpenClaw. It evolved. It had a name that was too close, close to Claude. And so they asked him to change it. So it only lasted like 5 or 6 days. I think they got so many to cease and desist letters they didn't want to do it. But the fact is that this stuff is out there, and if we're not interacting and if we're not going to class and if we're not talking to people, how are you going to know that there are real person? 00:51:22:05 – 00:51:27:20 Vicki Davis So much of education now is kind of move into where you talk about things in oral reports and all that kind of stuff. 00:51:27:21 – 00:51:45:06 Announcer It makes a lot of sense. But I have heard of mult book and it is a major security issue because these are AI's that are talking to each other and they have access to your hard drive. AI is not known for its internet security. 00:51:45:07 – 00:52:05:20 Vicki Davis They just failed. There are these extensions that are what they call keyloggers. So a lot of the shopping extensions, people out of their web browsers that are supposedly going to find them, good prices are actually keyloggers, a key logger like looks at every single thing that you type. Because of that, it's looking at every single thing you type and every single thing that it types back to you. 00:52:05:21 – 00:52:34:00 Vicki Davis Somebody broke into the databases of a couple of the key loggers and a bunch of prompts that people gave to AI and got back information were disclosed, like, for example, one of the posts was only 13 and I'm pregnant. What do I do? I'm scared. Even though it's supposed to be anonymized, it had enough information where those people could be. 00:52:34:01 – 00:53:03:02 Vicki Davis They saw that people who are under HIPAA, which is the Health Information Privacy and Protection Act, actually had pasted full patient information into AI tools. So we really have to go through our extensions, because if you have one of those shopping apps, possibly a lot of that stuff is going in to some key logger somewhere. That's one thing I like about Claude Cowork. 00:53:03:02 – 00:53:29:23 Vicki Davis It's not on the web, it's separate. Now, if I had Grammarly on, could it track it? Perhaps these are all concerns you have as we're dealing in AI world. We have to understand the privacy. We have to understand how AI works. So second, we need to teach the language of professions earlier. So things like graphic design, spreadsheet logic and data analytics, maybe statistics with AI supported spreadsheets in high school filmmaking vocabulary or whatever the field. 00:53:29:23 – 00:53:50:03 Vicki Davis Students need enough language to supervise the eyes that's doing the execution, and they need to learn to cue in on that vocabulary. If I'm job shadowing at a hospital, what are the words that they're using and how are they using those words? And write down those words and figure out what they are. Language is actually become more important, not less important. 00:53:50:03 – 00:54:09:16 Vicki Davis So just like you have to know how to type stuff in a calculator, you have to know how to type the right words in AI to get the right output. So it's learning the words of your profession. Third, computational thinking, which we can push all the way down to kindergarten. Being able to describe what you want clearly enough for something else to execute it. 00:54:09:17 – 00:54:27:00 Vicki Davis It's probably the most valuable skill of the next decade, but this is not a new thing. I do think that AP Computer Science principles and I yes, I teach it, is one of the most valuable courses we can offer. Because when you understand a little bit about programs work, your vibe coding gets exponentially more powerful. 00:54:27:00 – 00:54:33:13 Announcer So if you had to boil this down to one big question, what would it be? 00:54:33:15 – 00:54:57:04 Vicki Davis What is the role of the human and how does their thinking shine through? We always have to come back to your students thinking their expertise, their language. What's driving the work. Because AI can go off the rails. Just because it looks good or sounds good doesn't mean it represents any knowledge. That's why oral reports and oral conversations becomes so important. 00:54:57:06 – 00:55:35:00 Vicki Davis If it does truly reflect what students are thinking and doing, then I can amplify them. But if it doesn't truly reflect what students are thinking and learning, it diminishes them. This is the real crux of what we're dealing with. Is I being an amplifier or a diminish? Or the only way to really get at that is to get to know your students, to have conversations about your topic, to interact, get past this gotcha thing, and you're really have the real conversations because the fact is, OpenClaw, Einstein and these other things that we've mentioned are in our future. 00:55:35:00 – 00:55:51:10 Vicki Davis So a former pastor of ours, John Steven Durbin, used to say, a half truth is a whole lot. I can see that some people are justifying what I can do to, quote, help them learn when in reality there handing their future over to a bot. AI is a tool. It's not a person. We don't call it a he or she, it's an it. 00:55:51:10 – 00:56:13:16 Vicki Davis When we start treating AI like it's a friend or a companion, we start getting into trouble. And it's just like people pretended that social media was really social and it helped us be less lonely. The fact is, that's not what happened. Social media made people more lonely. We've got to be really careful about listening to the marketing of those who are selling things to us. 00:56:13:17 – 00:56:27:16 Vicki Davis I really like Claude Cowork. I can set exactly what it can access, read only, or write approval required for anything sensitive, one folder at a time. But Einstein, for example, used OpenClaw. It had access to everything. No guardrails, no oversight. 00:56:27:16 – 00:56:32:15 Announcer And something we need to remember is if something is free, you are the product. 00:56:32:15 – 00:56:52:08 Vicki Davis That is absolutely right, John. I hope that it has you thinking so that you can be part of the conversation. As I said earlier, we don't play King of the Hill. We make a bigger hill. And this is one of those hills we need. A whole lot of educators have conversations on educated conversations and understanding that AI is different for all of us because we all use it differently. 00:56:52:10 – 00:57:13:05 Vicki Davis And the only way forward is to have this conversation and to speak up. And yes, some legislation is coming and it needs to come quickly. But until then, we need to know what our students are doing on their phones, on their computers. Parents need to be seeing what are the kids doing and involved so that we can protect kids. 00:57:13:05 – 00:57:32:07 Vicki Davis Because AI, as I said before, is an amplifier or diminish or you don't want to have your kid. Just like the pandemic, those kids stayed home and really lost a year. So you have kids that are gaining because of AI and learning more, and you have kids that are losing years. We don't have 2 or 3 years to figure this out. 00:57:32:07 – 00:57:48:00 Vicki Davis We have kids in our classroom today who need us to understand AI, artificial intelligence itself as well as coding. So thanks for listening to today's Cool Cat Teacher Talk. As always, you can get the show notes at coolcatteacher.com, thanks for joining me, John. 00:57:48:02 – 00:57:51:00 Announcer Remember to say see you later. 00:57:51:02 – 00:58:04:16 Announcer See you later. Educator. Leave that in. (laughter) Stay in the loop. Visit. Follow at cool cat. Teacher. Everywhere you connect. 00:58:04:18 – 00:58:08:01 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:05): Today's episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you're a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom-tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving professional development, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32): Terra Tarango is the Chief Education Officer at Van Andel Institute for Education, where she works with teachers to design inquiry-rich, hands-on learning that is realistic in today's classrooms. Terra has spent more than two decades in curriculum, PD, nonprofit work, helping educators turn curiosity into meaningful projects, rather than just one more thing on our to-do list.

So Terra, let's start off. So you have Educator's Studio. So do you have all of these like theme ideas right there in the studio?

Terra Tarango (01:08): Yeah, so we're a nonprofit. So really all we're about is trying to help educators' jobs be a smidge easier. I'd like to say if I can be a teacher fairy godmother, that's what I want to be because the job is just too hard — too important to be as hard as it is. We put everything that we have in there. Whether it's these timely topics, things like March Madness.

Terra Tarango (01:25): All those are in there for timely topics, as well as just games and activities. Another fun one is Beat the Bot. If you ever did Beat the Calculator in school, this is the new version. Now students are going to be asked to demonstrate how they can bring value that AI can't. We put a bunch of prompts into it in just different content areas. You can pick content areas — math, ELA, science — and then there's questions and we ask the students, which of these questions do you think you could answer better than AI?

And then we show them AI's response and not hide from it. Let's let them look at it and see, okay, how can I bring my humaneness to this? Because that's what I'm going to need to bring to show my value going forward.

Vicki Davis (02:00): So you have a lot more than science in there. You have other subjects.

Terra Tarango (02:03): A lot of it's cross-curricular because if you think about, especially K-5, we're teaching all of the content areas. So sometimes it's just a matter of how do you sneak the broccoli into the broccoli cheese casserole kind of thing? How do you get some science in there? Especially if you feel like you don't have time for science — like I get that we're a science place. Of course I want that. But remember that's what the scientists said was most important: critical thinking, creative thinking, perseverance. So if you're doing those skills, you are actually helping teach science.

Terra Tarango (02:29): I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find time to put in that content as well. And we do offer science lessons, but we offer project-based learning units, things that you can get all the different content areas in around one authentic purpose. Sometimes it's a matter of there's just not enough time in the day. So if we can sneak in those skills, sneak in a little bit of science content here and there, let's call that a win.

Vicki Davis (02:47): Let's take one typical class period, 30, 45 minutes, depending on the age. Take us through a single inquiry-rich lesson that you just love.

Terra Tarango (02:56): I have to go one step further and do one that's a five-lesson series, a way to make project-based learning, which can sometimes feel so overwhelming and so burdensome. And we kind of created these ones that are just five lessons and each lesson focuses on a different content area. So it's a way to have one authentic context, but still get that cross-curricular feel. So this one's on — it's a kindergarten lesson and it's on saving the bees.

And so the first lesson is all about science. So you're learning about bees and pollination and why that's important for the earth. And then the second lesson is they get into math. They get to actually pretend to be bees and go around and count how many flowers they could get and things like that. And then they end up learning social-emotional learning as they get to — well, then we go into actually building their houses. They're going to build some mason bee houses. So we do a day of that.

Then the social-emotional learning piece comes in and giving feedback. We often treat that like a content area. So the fourth lesson is, all right, let's give each other feedback on our houses, a little protocol for that so we learn how to communicate with one another. And then ELA is the last day, the fifth lesson, where they get to share these mason bee houses with their community, with their family as they come in. We like to say, let's do something where we make the world a better place. And they're invested in that.

Terra Tarango (04:09): But you were able to teach math, science, social studies, and ELA, and social-emotional learning along the way.

Vicki Davis (04:14): What does ethical PD look like and how does it shape what you do?

Terra Tarango (04:18): One is that our folks that do professional development are in the classroom. They're trying these things with their own students and able to share what works best.

And then two is being very mindful of the teacher's time. In a PD session, I just think teacher time is infinitely more valuable than regular people time. We're checking in and we're making sure at the beginning that we're all on the same page about what is it that you need to be useful — to come out of something that you can use.

The favorite thing that teachers have always liked when we do our professional development, or for lack of better word, just the strategies, just quick ideas. Here's a protocol — giving just little things like that. One of my favorite things we did is put all of those — there's like 300 of them — in something called a Teacher Strategy Vault, where you can search it. I want things to help with creative thinking, or I want things to help with classroom management. Just all those ideas that I just feel like as a collective of great teachers.

Terra Tarango (05:05): Over decades and decades, or new ideas as well, all kind of in a place to just find those. So I think if PD spends too much time on theory, or it spends too much time on ideas that are great but not practical in the classroom, that's just unethical. It's not a good use of a teacher's time. And so making sure it's relevant and practical is key.

Vicki Davis (05:23): Well, I love teachers to come out of any session I do with something they can use tomorrow or something they can use next week because otherwise sitting in PD for four hours, they've just made more work because they have more work to grade and they have all their lesson plans to do. And so you're right. The best PD takes a load off. The worst PD doesn't model what it teaches — listening to six hours of lecture about differentiated instruction.

Or project-based learning. Like, seriously? And I think teachers know that. I think the other thing that I think is really good is there are so many places that you can get lesson plans now. And of course you can get AI to write lesson plans, but that human filter of actually having scientists look at the lesson plans and help with the lesson plans and then test them with kids — and that means there's a real human element.

To all these ideas that you're giving of, okay, we've actually done this, but this also holds water with the science community of, this is something we need to teach. This is how we need to teach. And this really reflects true science. I think that valuing humans — the human role in education — is just so important. And that's what I like about what you're describing to me.

Terra, and you and I talked about this before the show. So many people are coming into education without an education background. I was one of those 24 years ago. I think it's important to be connecting with people who do this and do this well. I mean, what concerns you as you look at science education today? Like you said, all those people with big hearts. We have people with great big hearts who want to do a great big job, right?

Vicki Davis (07:02): But there's some practical things that we have to do with our PD, don't we?

Terra Tarango (07:06): When you asked sort of what concerns me the most, I don't have a great answer for it, but I will just share it in a spirit of acknowledgment — is that I do feel like something has really changed in the way we as a society view teachers. Teachers used to be revered and respected in a way that I just feel like isn't quite there anymore. It was a hard job and now it's even harder because you don't feel like the community is behind you the way it used to.

Terra Tarango (07:30): I'll give you an example. It was something that we were talking about and I got an interview question from a parent just saying, what can I do to help my child? And I said, listen to their teacher. They know your child best. They spend a lot of time with them, ask them what you can do and then take that advice. And I thought that was a pretty harmless comment. It got a lot of heat just from saying — I would never trust teachers. I was floored by the sort of public response to something like that.

Terra Tarango (07:52): That feeling teachers are out there, whether it's political indoctrination or whether it's all sorts of stereotypes or things that are out there. And I just think that teachers have a really hard and important job. And it worries me that we aren't respecting that in the way we once did.

Vicki Davis (08:08): The respect has to start with us. It has to start with how we work with our colleagues. I will never let students speak ill of another colleague in front of me. I'm just not going to do that. Not that teachers are perfect — they're still going to make mistakes.

But we do have to respect this profession. We've got 3% of the population training 100% of tomorrow's workforce. I think that's pretty doggone important.

Terra Tarango (08:30): It's really important. I've often used that example to say teachers have the most important job in the world. And it's because they are training every other job that is to come.

Vicki Davis (08:38): And science is more important than ever. Something in computer science we talk about all the time is that computational thinking is something that you can put into every single age and grade level. I teach my kindergarten teachers, when you teach your classroom procedures, number them. First you do this, then you do this. And that computational thinking and that inquiry-based learning is something that is not only applicable to the regular hands-on science we're used to, but also computer science. We need to have that computational thinking and that inquiry-based learning that we've been talking about today.

So as we finish up, let's kind of talk to teachers who want to start. They want to start on their journey of, hey, I want to have more inquiry. I want to bring science in, but maybe blend it in with reading. Where do they start?

Terra Tarango (09:25): So I think there's a few places to start. Again, it is about starting small. Don't set yourself up for failure. Don't set yourself up to be disappointed. Just try a little thing. So some small things you can start — something like a pledge form, something like that. So you bring a little bit of authenticity. A step up from that might be if the kids are working on some kind of culminating project to have them pitch it to industry experts. And these experts are happy to come into your classroom.

We have had no trouble finding those. Whether they're coming up with some kind of solution and they're going to pitch it like a pitch tank sort of thing, that's a little place to start. Another is flipping the order of the instruction. Have them do before they learn to mimic the way scientists are doing things a little bit more. Or you can also flip the way you plan. So instead of thinking, I have to teach X, how can I make it interesting? Start with, what will my kids find really interesting to do?

And then how can I connect X to it? I always like to take on this challenge — if we have this interesting project, the kids are going to — for example, one we do is a project called Moments to Remember, where the kids are going to befriend a senior citizen and they end up writing a biography of their life. And it's a really powerful project. But then, so you start with that and then say, well, how can I teach math?

Terra Tarango (10:36): Well, the person's life is a timeline. Let's use anything I'm going to do on a timeline I could use on that person's timeline. Or science — how can we weave that in? Well, younger kids, we could bring them a plant and let's talk about what a plant needs to survive. Or a little bit older, we can pair them up with a senior citizen who has the same birth month. They can learn the patterns of the night sky — the sky was the same, even though they're born 60 years apart if it's the same month. So thinking about what's going to be interesting and then how do I connect content?

Vicki Davis (11:03): So Terra, could you tell us, where can people go to see these resources?

Terra Tarango (11:08): The best way is to go to vaieducation.org. You can explore all sorts of freebies there and check out different types that we have. Everything from full-on science lessons and full-on project-based learning units to these small 15-minutes-at-a-time games and activities that can be a lot of fun for building that classroom culture.

Vicki Davis (11:26): What a conversation with Terra Tarango, the Chief Education Officer at the Van Andel Institute for Education. She's been sharing all these ideas of inquiry-rich and hands-on learning that really helps to spring science into all the different subjects for K through eight. While a lot of these even apply with older students, getting them excited about science — kids make their minds up at a pretty young age if they're going to love science or not, don't they, Terra?

Terra Tarango (11:54): They do. But that doesn't stop us from trying later on. I think if they've had exposure to that sense of discovery, that usually starts early and lasts a lifetime. But if they haven't, that's really cool to be that person that brings it to them kind of later in life — that middle school kid who finally sees like, that's what that feels like to discover something. That's really powerful as well.

Vicki Davis (12:12): Science is just such an important topic, like all of these STEM and STEAM topics. Terra, thanks for coming on the show.

Vicki Davis (12:20): Before you go, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, the VAI Educator's Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. Do you know how it feels when you just find that perfect lesson that works? The VAI Educator's Studio is packed with classroom-tested lessons, hands-on projects, and skill-building activities designed specifically for K through eight teachers. Plus you get on-demand professional development and a community of educators who get it. I've been exploring their resources and love how they're built to save you time while sparking real creativity in your classroom. You can get 50% off membership to the Educator's Studio by using the promo code COOLCAT when you sign up. So head over to coolcatteacher.com/vai. The VAI Educator's Studio — because great teaching should not mean endless prep. And remember, use the promo code COOLCAT.

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain.

Vicki Davis (00:05): Today's episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you're a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving resources, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32): So excited today to be talking to Malia Hollowell. We're going to be talking about reading. Her website is Playdough to Plato dot com. She is the author of the Science of Reading in Action Brain Friendly Strategies Every Teacher Needs to Know. So what are these brain friendly strategies for reading?

Malia Hollowell (00:54): This is my favorite subject, Vicki, and I'm so excited to share just a couple of them. One of them is taking our sight words or our spelling words and actually sorting them by phonics and spelling rule. When I learned how to teach reading, I didn't learn a whole lot. I'm of the era back in the early 2000s where we were told that students can magically learn how to read by just looking at books that they're interested in.

Of course, now we know that is not true. We have seven decades of research that have proven that is just not the way that most students will learn how to read. They really need us as teachers to help them connect the dots. So taking our sight words in our spelling lists and sorting them is one of these simple little tweaks that we can make that will help them connect the dots a lot faster and a lot easier. So what you're going to do is take your list and rather than having students learn these words in the order that you're given them, you are going to sort them by the phonics or spelling rule that is the primary focus of that word. So let's take a word like can. We would teach that word can when we are teaching students about the short a sound. And not only would we teach them the word can, we would also practice the word am or and all of those short vowel words that have that short a sound.

Now it sounds really simple sorting it can take some time, but I promise the payoff is going to blow your socks off. It really helps students focus on just one phonics or spelling rule rather than having to stretch their brain and understand the huge range of phonics and spelling rules that we usually throw at them.

Vicki Davis (02:29): So I was a child of the phonics era. And I remember if it was an we had pan and can and man we had all those at the same time. I never remember getting the word list by the rules, but I remember learning them that way. So it just makes sense. Can you get these word lists just already pre-sorted for teachers? I know one thing about AI, it's terrible at alphabetic and it cannot do the phonics.

Malia Hollowell (02:48): Yes. We've actually tried to use AI for writing decodable passages based on one phonics or spelling rule, and it is a — I agree with you. We're not there yet. But yes, we have pre-sorted lists that teachers are able to download from our site and they will do all of the heavy lifting for them. So they don't have to sit for hours and try and figure out where the word said belongs in the sequence.

Vicki Davis (02:56): So what's another brain friendly rule?

Malia Hollowell (03:16): Well, let's stick with sight words here because I know that a lot of teachers are required to teach them in their classroom, either sight words or spelling words, and this will work for both. So I was taught that when we are having students learn these words and memorize these words so that they can recognize them when they see them in books or in text, that we need to give them a stack of flashcards and we need them to drill those flashcards five times a day, every single day, all week long. And what we now know is that is not how students memorize words. We do not use our visual memory. Instead, we have a human superpower for spoken language. We have this magical ability as humans we're born, to be placed in the middle of a home and listen to the people around us speaking and communicating. And we can naturally learn how to understand what they're saying and then speak back to them.

So we want to use that to our advantage as teachers. We want to take our human superpower for spoken language and apply it to this new skill called written language. And so what we're going to do is have them actually listen for the sounds in the words first. So if we're practicing the word can, we would have them say the sounds, k-a-n. We can make this by having them actually tap on the table or on their hands. So k-tap, a-n, tap, nn, tap. Now we're going to have them connect those sounds to the written letters. So we're going to have them again, say each sound, kk, and this time they're going to write the letter C. When they say a, they will write the letter A, and nn, they will write the letter N. And now their brain has been warmed up. It started with superpower for being able to hear those spoken sounds, those tiny little parts of the word, and we're bridging it and connecting it to written language.

Vicki Davis (04:57): One of my children is dyslexic. One thing that we learned to do, because, you know, it did take him longer to learn to read, he's a great reader now. But I like how you're breaking it down and you're giving the steps because it just makes sense.

Malia Hollowell (05:11): Once you learn about the research, it does make sense. It's almost like you hear these facts and you think, why aren't we doing it that way?

Vicki Davis (05:18): Yeah, okay, you got a —

Malia Hollowell (05:19): Yes, I'll actually stick with dyslexia since that is personally relevant to you and your family. So what we actually know is that on average, 20% of our human population will be affected by some level of dyslexia. That is important for educators in particular to know because learning how to support our dyslexic students is essential. We're going to have one out of five students on average in any classroom affected by dyslexia. So it's really important that every single teacher on this planet is able to effectively support them. And the good news is that dyslexia support is actually going to benefit all kids.

What we know helps them is to focus on the sounds. Dyslexia is actually largely an auditory processing difficulty. When babies are born, within hours they can put wiring on their head and measure how the baby is processing sound. They'll be able to predict with incredible accuracy whether or not that child will be affected by dyslexia because they will process the sound differently.

Malia Hollowell (06:20): So as classroom teachers, we can help students by giving them opportunities to practice hearing sounds and words and moving those sounds around. And you'll notice here, I did not say we're gonna have them practice looking at letters and moving those sounds around. This is not a visual activity. We are just focusing on hearing. So if I gave that word again, can, to the class, I would ask them to break that word apart into its individual sounds. C-A-N.

Then I might say, let's change the k in can to mm. What's the new word? Man. Then I might say, let's change the n in man to d. What's the new word? Mad. And now we could keep going down the list, creating this word ladder, we like to call it, where we're changing just one sound at a time and having students get practice, not only hearing the sounds, but moving those sounds around.

And that it's going to help, again, every student in class, but especially those students with dyslexia who have a difficult time hearing that sound and moving it around. We want them to have the opportunity to practice over and over and over again, get lots of review, lots of opportunities to strengthen that skill.

Vicki Davis (07:28): Let me ask you this. You have something really interesting on your book byline. You said that Instagram doesn't always get it right. Now we know that's true, but could you give me some specific examples of like, okay, I think Instagram is getting this wrong.

Malia Hollowell (07:45): Yes, I'll give you one that I certainly believed for years and years and years. I believed that using leveled reader books was the way to go. And when I say leveled reading books, these are books that are published by publishers like Fontus and Penel. They have an entire series of these leveled reading books. And you'll know they're leveled readers because they'll usually say a number on the cover. So it'll say level A, level B, level C. Now, what's interesting about these books is when you open them up, to any page, you'll notice a couple of things. If they're a book that's designed for new readers, so a level A book, you'll notice that very words are going to repeat. So it will say, I see a red dog. And there will be a big red dog on top of those words. And it will give those picture clues to students about what the words actually say. And you'll turn the page, and it will again say the same words. I see a green frog. And there will be a big green frog.

Now, what we now know is that number one, it's not really reading. That is not giving students the chance to figure out how to sound out words they haven't seen before. It's giving them a chance to memorize patterns, notice patterns, apply repetition to their reading. It's also giving them great practice at gathering picture clues. But again, that's not reading. What we want to do is we want students to really focus on gathering and strengthening the skills they need to sound out unfamiliar words. And the best way we can do that is to make sure we're giving them the chance to read words that reinforce the phonics and spelling rules we are teaching them. So if we are teaching that short a lesson in our class, we want students to read books that are filled with short a words. We want them to be reading man can stand.

So that's one example of again, so many I could give you where Instagram does not always get it right. And I will say literacy curriculums don't always get it right. And teacher trainings don't always get it right. I am shocked at the number of times that I've gotten a DM or an email from a teacher who has taken a picture of their teaching manual and it's showing outdated strategies and outdated tips that we now know are not only not based on science, but they actually go completely against the research.

Vicki Davis (09:58): Wow. You know, reading is just so important because it unlocks everything else. But it seems like… How do I say this? So Instagram is all about selling, we have to be really careful as educators getting our knowledge off of an Instagram or social media type site because there's a recency bias. And a lot of times the time tested research just aren't being talked about because old stuff doesn't usually go viral, right? So where are the communities that reading teachers are congregating these days?

Malia Hollowell (10:26): While Instagram does not always get it right, there are several Instagram accounts that do get it right. In fact, I would say there are probably more than several. There are probably a hundred or more. It's doing your due diligence and finding the sources that you can trust that are backing up their statements by being able to give you the source or the research or the citation of the scholarly article that defends what they're saying. And if you are ever in doubt, do not feel shy about reaching out to that Instagram influencer or creator and asking where they got this knowledge. They will be able to very quickly send you the link to the article or the study if that is in fact how they got the fact or that recommendation.

Vicki Davis (11:08): So let's give a pep talk to reading teachers everywhere and even parents. What's your encouragement for that?

Malia Hollowell (11:15): I find great comfort in the research that shows that with brain-friendly strategies and tools in place, 95% of students can learn to read by the end of first grade. Knowing that with the right research-based strategies, we are able to help every single child in class become a thriving, successful reader is incredibly empowering, and it gives us hope.

Yes, we may need to lean into the research. We may need to learn about the science of reading and make some tweaks and changes to our curriculum and our lesson plans. But once we do that, once we have our system in place, we will be able to benefit these children not only this year, but for years to come. Every class that comes through our doors is going to benefit from the time that we're taking now to learn what is best practice.

Vicki Davis (12:02): So your website Playdough to Plato has a lot of free resources. What are some of your most popular free resources that people can go in the show notes, follow it to your site and download?

Malia Hollowell (12:15): Well, I will make sure to send all these links to you. One of my favorites is our editable sight word games, and we have a lot of them. The reason I love them is because, as we were talking about earlier, we know it's really important to give students the opportunity to practice reading and writing words that they are actually learning about. So when we're teaching that short A lesson, we want them to read and write those short A words. Well, traditionally, before we had technology, you would probably have to go and make one short A game to use in your literacy centers and a different short E game. That takes a lot of time and we know teachers are busy. So we wanted to make it really fast and easy for you to take the same game and pop in the words that you need students to practice that week, print it off. And then if you have a different group of students who needs to practice a different phonics skill or a different spelling rule, you can very easily pop in those new words and print off the same game that is highly targeted and differentiated for a different need.

Vicki Davis (13:10): Awesome. Have you tested any of the AI reading tools out there? There's a free one from Google, free one from Microsoft. Other folks have free ones. Have you tested any of those?

Malia Hollowell (13:21): I have not. My focus is really on pre-K through second grade. One of my core beliefs is that it's really important for us to give students the opportunity to have as much hands-on experience as possible. I am a huge advocate for giving students the chance to interact and engage and play literacy games with their classmates and sit across from each other at the table and roll a die, and move their little, you know, five spaces and come to the new word. So for me, that is my soul. And I am just a fierce advocate for that hands on engaging practice.

Vicki Davis (13:55): We have to be so careful about too much screen time for younger kids. So there may be a place, but it's not every place. And they're also learning a lot more than reading. They're learning how to collaborate, cooperate, get along with other human beings. And that's still as important as it's ever been. Malia Hollowell, her book is The Science of Reading in Action, Brain-Friendly Strategies Every Teacher Needs to Know. I know you have a podcast. You have a website. Thanks for coming on and talking about reading and the science of reading. It's just such an important subject.

Malia Hollowell (14:24): Thank you so much for having me.

Vicki Davis (14:25): Before you go, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, the VAI Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. Do you know how it feels when you just find that perfect lesson that works? The VAI Educators Studio is packed with classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and skill building activities designed specifically for K through eight teachers. Plus you get on demand professional development and a community of educators who get it. I've been exploring their resources and love how they're built to save you time while sparking real creativity in your classroom. You can get 50% off membership to the Educators Studio by using the promo code COOLCAT when you sign up. So head over to coolcatteacher.com/vai. The VAI Educators Studio, because great teaching should not mean endless prep. And remember, use the promo code COOLCAT.

00:00:00:02 – 00:00:12:15: Vicki Davis This is cool cat teacher talk where we talk about what matters in the classroom. Today is part one of a STEAM Super series. We're talking about the STEAM mindset.

Announcer: Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat. Teacher talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Vicki Davis: Welcome back, educator, to a special two part STEAM Super Series, sponsored by the Van Andel Institute for education and their new Educator Studio of Computer Science teacher Vicki Davis. And over the next two weeks, you'll hear from more than 25 educators, scientists and artists. And they all said the same surprising thing. We'll get to that in a moment.

Vicki Davis: This is part one, The STEAM Mindset. I sat down with more than a dozen educators for this series, and I hope as you listen to these interviews, you're going to get excited because they said, stop starting with answers. Start with questions. Terra Tarango said it about science and Dan said it about math. Susan Riley said it about creativity.

Vicki Davis: And Tim Needles says it about art. Even the neuroscience backs it up. Dr. Michael Rousell found that when you surprise a student with a question instead of an answer, their brain literally rewires itself. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity, says Dorothy Parker. But I'd like to add my own saying curious kids seeking answers don't get bored.

Vicki Davis: Bored kids might really struggle to become scientists, engineering artists, or mathematicians. So this two part series is about what happens when teachers believe that every child is important enough to help spark their curiosity. So first we're going to start with Terra Tarango, chief education officer at the Van Andel Institute for education. Tara went directly to scientists and engineers and asked them, what do you actually want from the students we're sending you?

Vicki Davis: Let's hear it.

Announcer: Kat teacher talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: So when you look at.

Vicki Davis: Classrooms right now, what do you feel like is the most urgent to change about how we typically do science? And for those of you who can't see me, I'm putting Du in quotes with my fingers.

Terra Tarango: So what do you think? Tara, it's funny because I actually would go to something that doesn't seem so quote sciency at first, and that is really to think about what we value in schools, what sort of the future generation of employers values. So we actually did this. We did a research study. We asked these scientists and engineers from different kinds of industries, what do they value most, whether it was things like critical thinking, curiosity, creative thinking or things like memorization, good grades, test scores.

Terra Tarango: As you can imagine, they're going to value things like critical thinking. But then we turned around and asked, you know, teachers, what do you think schools value? And when you color code this, it's almost inverse. You know, they value good grades, memorization, and the teachers feel like the schools don't value as much. Things like critical thinking. So what I wish we could change and it's not as easy as it sounds.

Terra Tarango: I realize that is just what we value in schools and realizing that yes, we have to teach our content, we have to teach science skills and history and all those things. But it's really those skills, those perennial skills I think should rise to the forefront and be put in their place in the classroom.

Vicki Davis: I've just always.

Terra Tarango: Observed that the best science.

Vicki Davis: Teachers in my observation, the ones where the kids run to class because they're so excited. Are typically hands on. Is that true? They're doing experiments. They're crafting ideas. They're doing science fairs like they're doing. Do you feel like doing is a big part of that equation?

Terra Tarango: I do think doing is a big part of the equation. I mean, we all know most kids have a lot of energy. They need to be active. They need to be engaged physically as well as cognitively. But I would say it's more than just doing sometimes. It's the order of that doing. I think a lot of times maybe we think we get to check off that box because we got them in the lab doing something.

Terra Tarango: But a lot of times that looks like, for example, we're teaching circuits and we might say, let's teach. Here's what a circuit is, here's how it works. Here's all the serial circuits, all the different things. And then you go in the lab to prove it. It's hands on. It's doing. But that's not really mimicking what scientists are doing.

Terra Tarango: They're not going into their lab with an investigation plan to follow. They have a question to figure out. So if we flip it sometimes and do the doing first, let's give them a battery and a bulb and some wires and see if you can light it. And then if you can, would you like to know why then here's something to read to learn the content behind it.

Terra Tarango: Or if you didn't, would you like to know some information that would help you light it? Well, here's some information. So you still have to do the reading to doing helps, but also the doing in a way that makes the reading purposeful. So this.

Vicki Davis: Whole inquiry based learning, what is it and how does it fit in. Because, you know, having that question that is part of what science is, how can we cure cancer? I mean, that's the big question. Then you have little tiny questions that scientists are working on. So how can we move to inquiry based learning? What is it and how does it fit into science?

Terra Tarango: I think one thing is just understanding that how scientists do work, you know, they don't come in with learning at first and then testing it. Right? So like you mentioned that flipping the order of things. So give the students a chance to be curious about something. Give them a chance to ask some open questions and to be able to figure out how would you go about answering that question, because that mimics what the scientists are doing.

Terra Tarango: They have to not only come up with a question, come up with a plan for how you would test that question, and then do the testing, which then leads to another question. So realizing that it is this iterative process, and I know we have so much content to get through. So I'm super big on being practical. So it's not like we can just dedicate a whole month to let's just explore some questions, you know, so it's finding those small ways within something you're already doing to say what questions do you have?

Terra Tarango: And just honoring the fact that you have questions and even talking about how would you go about answering that question even if you don't have time to go through that, at least giving them practice thinking that way is really important. Okay.

Vicki Davis: So could you give me an example of a little 15 to 20 minute thing that you could insert into a lesson? Yeah.

Terra Tarango: A lot of times we'll do things. One of my favorite places to weave this in is, is finding ways to build that skill focused culture. So when you have just small transition times or I love to look at holidays. So for example, Valentine's Day, maybe we could just sort of make some cute hearts and and give them to one another, find some team building.

Terra Tarango: But different thing that we're going to do with them next week is look at animal hearts. So we have just like a thing link, we call it where it's just something they can explore and click on different animals and learn that, oh, the whales heart is 400 pounds or a jellyfish doesn't have a heart, just a way to bring in something a little bit more.

Terra Tarango: I hate to use the word rigor, but a little bit more rigorous, a little bit more thinking going on and what otherwise might just be a 10 to 15 minutes left time, just building little things like that. So we'd like to do it around calendar events because it's something that feels kind of obligatory. You have to do something to acknowledge, you know, Thanksgiving or whatever, so might as well put a little Stem focus on it or a little critical thinking, focus on it.

Terra Tarango: So those are some fun ways to weave it in.

Vicki Davis: Let's just take a couple of calendar things okay. So you said Valentine's. What do we have in the in the springtime and then getting towards summer. Do you have a couple of events that you really like to plan things around. So we.

Terra Tarango: Are really big on. March is coming up as March is reading month. So we have actually a calendar of little activities you can do there. All no prep. We're really big on making sure this is not adding anything, but again, just giving teachers something that they can do a quick calendar of something you could do morning meetings 15 minutes or something like that.

Terra Tarango: Another one that's fun is March Madness coming up. And you can make basically a bracket out of anything, you know, favorite books, you can make it out of there, something related to the content you're going to teach. Maybe you're teaching history and you're teaching about wars or something. And you could kind of which war had the biggest impact on the future and you could do a bracket sort of situation.

Terra Tarango: So just taking things that are already happening in pop culture, then kind of weaving, how can I add my content into some of those same things is pretty fun.

Vicki Davis: Okay, so you have educator studios, so do you have all of these like theme ideas right there in the studio?

Terra Tarango: Yeah, in the studio. So we're a nonprofit. So really all we're about is trying to help educators job be a smidge easier. I'd like to say if I can be a teacher, fairy godmother, that's what I want to be. Because the job, it's too important to be as hard as it is. And so, yeah, we put everything that we have in there.

Terra Tarango: So whether it's these timely topics, things like the Valentine's Day, STEAM or the March Madness, all of those are in there for timely topics as well as just games and activities. Another fun one is Beat the Bot. If you ever did beat the calculator in school, this is like from now on, you know students are going to demonstrate how they can bring value that AI can't.

Terra Tarango: We put a bunch of prompts into in just different content areas so you can pick content areas, math, Ela, science. And then there's questions and we ask the students which of these questions do you think you could answer better than AI. And then we show them AI's response and they have a chance to say, what did I do?

Terra Tarango: Well, what did it? So not hide from it, you know, let's let them look at it and see how can I bring my humanness to this? Because that's what I'm going to need to bring to show my value going forward. So yeah, all of those kinds of activities are in there.

Vicki Davis: So you have a lot more than science in there. You have other subjects.

Terra Tarango: Yeah, a lot of it's cross curricular. Because if you think about especially K-5, we're teaching all of the content areas. So sometimes it's just a matter of how do you sneak the broccoli into the broccoli cheese casserole kind of thing. How do you get some science in there? So that's why I say, especially if you feel like you don't have time for science.

Terra Tarango: Like, I get that we're a science place. Of course I want that. But remember, that's what the scientist said was most important was critical thinking, creative thinking, perseverance. So if you're doing those skills, you are actually helping teach science. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find time to put in that content as well. And we do offer science lessons, but we offer project based learning units, things that you can get all the different content areas in around one authentic purpose.

Terra Tarango: So I think sometimes it's a matter of there's just not enough time of the day. So if we can sneak in those skills, sneak in a little bit of science content here and there, let's call that a win.

Vicki Davis: Okay. So you've given us lots of examples. Let's take like one typical class period 30 45 minutes depending on the age. Take us through a single inquiry rich lesson that you just love. Maybe you've seen it recently, or maybe you're like, hey, this is always a winner. Well, I'll tell you.

Terra Tarango: I'll have to go one step further and do one that. It's a five lesson series, but it's a way to make project based learning, which can sometimes feel so overwhelming and so just like, burdensome. And we kind of created these ones that are just five lessons. And each lesson focuses on a different content area. So it's a way to have one authentic context but still get across that cross curricular feel.

Terra Tarango: So this one's on. It's a kindergarten lesson and it's saving the bees. And so the first lesson is all about science. So you're learning about bees and pollination and why that's important for the earth. And then the second lesson is they get into math. They get to actually pretend to be, you know, pollinators and go around and count how many flowers they could get and things like that.

Terra Tarango: And then they end up learning some social emotional learning as they get to. Then we go into they actually build their houses, they're going to build some mason bee houses. So we do a day of that. And then the social emotional learning piece comes in and giving feedback. We often treat that like a content area. So the fourth lesson is all right.

Terra Tarango: Let's give each other feedback on our houses a little protocol for that. So we learn how to communicate with one another. And then Ela is the last day, the fifth lesson where they get to share these masonry houses with their community, with their family as they come in. So it's a way to have one project that they can focus on.

Terra Tarango: We like to say, let's do something where we make the world a better place, and they're invested in that. But you were able to teach math, science, social studies and Ela all and social emotional learning along the way.

Vicki Davis: In that interview, Tara described what scientists and engineers are looking for.

Vicki Davis: And it isn't memorized facts. It's thinkers. They in. Finkle, mathematician and founder of math for love, has spent his career.

Vicki Davis: Proving that when math starts with play instead of procedures, those thinkers emerge.

Announcer: Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: So, Dan, we want to talk about math and making it exciting. What gets you going about this topic?

Dan Finkel: Math is a topic I personally was just drawn to it as a young kid, but but I had a kind of awakening around it thanks to a math camp when I was in high school, where I started to see it as a really different type of subject, just something that was much more deep and beautiful and profound than I had ever realized before.

Vicki Davis: You talk about Mathis play, you really believe that? Like, how can we bring that to every classroom because so many people don't see Mathis play or fun or exciting?

Dan Finkel: Yeah, I think it's well understood. The young children learn through playing, you know, pre-K kids, definitely. There's no disputes about that. I think everyone understands that. But then you also have some of my mathematical heroes, John Conway or Martin Gardner, or people who connect mathematics and games and playing. And it just seems like it's a strange thing that we basically say there's all these really fun, playful, amazing experiences in math, but you have to do like 13 years of drudge work before you're allowed to see them.

Dan Finkel: And we've rooted out so many people who I think would respond to that. So my experience is that when you can let mathematics be, when you can essentially invite students into playing with the mathematics, they have a qualitatively different kind of experience, and they learn more deeply, they learn more powerfully, and they're more likely to just like math, like being there.

Dan Finkel: Like what? People who I take this approach and use our lesson plans and what we hear is the kids wanted to stay in a recess to finish doing whatever we were doing in Massachusetts. Do you know what I mean? Like, and it's not okay, now you're done with this so you can go play. It's like you are playing and you don't want to let the play go.

Vicki Davis: You say this great thing, you talk about that most math classes start with answers and that we're starting the wrong way. How should we be starting math?

Dan Finkel: You should start with a question because or a prompt that elicits a question from students, because what you really want is to help students get curious, you know, to the binary number point. Right? I think there's a lot of fun ideas of like, you know, we use a base ten system because we have ten fingers, but what what would the alien do that only has one finger on each hand?

Dan Finkel: What is their number system look like? That's just a question. It's a playful question. It's almost a goofy question. And the idea that you can take something like that and say, oh, that's really interesting. Give a little bit of space to actually pose the question, as opposed to just saying, I'm going to teach you about binary numbers here.

Dan Finkel: So it works. There's a little bit of question like what? Why? Why are we even thinking about this in the first place? Like you start with questions. It just contextualizes what you're doing the way of doing math that humans have always done math, which is they get curious about something and they figure it out. And it brings up the curiosity of the students, which is somehow the fuel for learning in the first place.

Dan Finkel: And it's very hard to drive the classroom forward when when you don't have that fuel in the tank, which is kids being interested, being curious about how things work and what's going on. An example that I like is the Pythagorean theorem, which is often given as an answer to no question. For some reason there's this relationship a squared plus b squared equals squared.

Dan Finkel: There's a bunch of people walking around with a squared plus b squared equals c squared. And there's a head. And they don't even know what it's connected to originally. That's a statement about triangles but it's really about the relationship between squares. I found that you can have a beautiful experience with students that leads them to the Pythagorean theorem.

Dan Finkel: If you just start by saying, let's try to find how big the squares are that we can draw on a grid, and some of the squares are just right side up, and it's one four, which is two by two square, nine, which is a three by three square. But if you start tilting them, it becomes very interesting to say, well, how could we figure out how big those squares are?

Dan Finkel: And maybe you cut them into pieces and it gets a little laborious and a little technical to try to figure out what it is. But you start to find patterns in a structure underneath, and you can actually very naturally go to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem from that. The people who experience it that way don't have this disconnected fact of, oh, for some reason a squared plus b squared equals c squared.

Dan Finkel: They actually have a connection of ideas and arguments leading them to understand what's really happening there. A professor of mine once said memorize arguments, not facts. Anyway, that's what we want to do, is this isn't just some disconnected thing. This is a body of knowledge where each new idea is motivated by the question.

Vicki Davis: So far in.

Vicki Davis: Today's show on the STEAM mindset, we're talking about how to spark a love for science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. And we've learned about starting class with questions and how to build a thinking culture. But this isn't just for high school and middle school. Our littles need it too. We're now going to an interview with one of my favorite kindergarten teachers I've ever known, Mrs. Sharon Howard.

Vicki Davis: She spent 44 years teaching kindergarten, and one thing that amazed me about her classroom was the high standards, she said. While understanding that every kindergartner is different and this is part of the STEAM mindset to right.

Mrs. Sharon Howard: From the very first day of school, I set high standards for my children, and I think a lot of it has to do with the way that I talk to them and come across meaning business, that this is big school now, this is not daycare. I give them a sense of confidence, excitement for what we're going to do, what we're going to learn, the idea of expecting high standards and high ideals for my children, it's a transition from AK4 class to a K-5 class.

Mrs. Sharon Howard: There's a big difference in that child. They're coming out of that playtime. They're coming in to what I call real schools, because not many students in K-5 learn to read, to write, learned their numbers. So we were a structured educational school, and that was part of setting high standards for the children. Getting them to make that transition was a big life change, not only for them, but also for their parents.

Vicki Davis: 44 years of kindergarten and Mrs. Howard never lost the wonder. I love seeing her buy new books for her book collection and her collection of birds. She modeled wonder every day in her classroom. And we can do that too. I can say she was one of the most excited teachers about new technology, even up until the moment she retired.

Vicki Davis: This mindset of wonder is such an important part of the STEAM mindset. But we also have to remember the impact of creativity as we inspire the science, technology, engineering, arts and math mindset that we're talking about on today's show.

Vicki Davis: Susan M Riley. She is a former.

Vicki Davis: Music teacher and the founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM, where she has spent more than two decades helping schools move beyond rigid.

Vicki Davis: Content silos and into innovative, student centered classrooms. She is the host of artworks for teachers podcast and author of the new book Creativity Edge. So in this book, she gives educators practical ways to use creativity as a hidden advantage in an AI driven world. Her work is featured by The Education Week and asked, and she now reaches millions of teachers looking for fresh, doable ideas they can use tomorrow.

Vicki Davis: So Susan Innocent is for two. How would you explain to a tired classroom teacher? While creativity is not just one more thing, but it's actually our greatest advantage in the age of AI when.

Susan Riley: AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters. The things that matter most are creativity. The things that we need to teach our students to be able to think and do and be curious and create are the things that I can't do. And so in a future that is unknown, I am a true believer that creativity is the thing that's going to set us apart.

Vicki Davis: You know, my students are very often nervous about where are we going to borrow, when will I have a job? And I say, okay, if you learn how to think, if you learn how to be creative, if you learn to get along with other people. Those are things no machine will ever be able to do, and they would come even more important in the classroom.

Vicki Davis: But you're not just talking the art classroom, you're talking math and science and all these other subjects. So what are some of the ideas you give all these different subjects for integrating creativity into their lessons, like math. Math teachers are going to go, really, Susan.

Susan Riley: I know, but you know what? Math is where some of the best creative ideas come from there, especially for students who struggle in math. Those students like me, I'm one of those people that believes that letters should not be with numbers. That's just not right. So algebra is never my thing. But when you encourage creative problem solving, that is creativity being worked through in a math class.

Susan Riley: And so when we're looking at creativity, it's not just skills of creativity. There's lots of different ways that people can be creative. In fact, I call it the four branches of creativity. We have skills sure that we can work on in the art classroom, but then there's also application. And so looking at how do we pair maybe math and music together to learn fractions, it makes a beautiful pairing, but we have to be intentional about it.

Susan Riley: That's application of creativity. Then we've got creative thinking. And then the last branch is creative expression. So how do we interpret what we're feeling, what we're seeing, who we are in a creative way? Creativity doesn't just live in isolation, it lives all around us. And so it's learning how to leverage that with the classroom or the the content that we're teaching.

Vicki Davis: You connect creativity with neuroscience. So what is a brain based insight about creative work that should change how we structure our class time in projects? Is it that we need to introduce thinking routines or what would you add there?

Susan Riley: Thinking routines is a great immediate step. It's a bridge between. Think about when your kids are walking into the classroom, to the time they sit in the seat, to the time they have to learn. It needs to be a bridge between that section, right? Because they're not going to be immediately ready to learn, and you want them to open up their capacity for creative thought.

Susan Riley: What's happening in your brain when creativity emerges, when you're engaging with creativity in any capacity, it could be watercolor. It could be a creative thinking routine. It does not matter. What's happening is that your brain starts to light up in various areas. We have the area that's responsible for analytical thought, and then we have the area that's responsible for all of the functions that's going on in our body at any given time.

Susan Riley: And typically one is active and then the other is quiet. But what happens when we're engaging in the arts in any capacity is that they both start to work simultaneously, and they work like a jazz improvization it's not like Bach. Like if you're thinking of a typical classical symphony, and it's more like this side is going to play with a little bit, and then this side is going to respond a little bit.

Susan Riley: And you have these two systems that are working in tandem. And when that happens, this kind of creative cocktail emerges in the space in our brains, dopamine that starts to hit. We have endorphins that start to to emerge. And then all of a sudden we get into this practice of flow where time disappears, right? And you get engaged in something, you're like, yes, that's when we talk about student engagement.

Susan Riley: What we're really talking about is we want them in flow. We want them so immersed in what they're doing that it's almost like time doesn't exist for them, and they are learning at a rapid rate. This all can happen in the matter of seconds. It doesn't have to be the whole classroom. Think about your best creative ideas. There's a reason that they come when you're in the shower, or you're out for a run, or you've had space and time, right?

Susan Riley: Developing thinking routines that offer that bridge to give the brain time to go from whatever it was going through out in the hallway five seconds ago to what you're preparing it to learn. It means that bridge. So those thinking routines offer that it starts to spark those areas in the brain, and then your students are much more capable of thinking convergent and divergent when you're trying to get them to think through problem solving or a new idea that you want them to grapple with.

Vicki Davis: Susan Riley just showed us the science of why creativity matters. My friend Tim Needles and I sat down at Fitzy and he just lives. The stay mindset we're talking about today.

Vicki Davis: Tim is an artist, a NASA solar system ambassador, an improv performer, and an art teacher. And he believes creativity isn't just a gift, but that creativity is a skill that you can build.

Announcer: Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: You.

Vicki Davis: Talked about how one lesson can change a life in your Ted style. Talk at NYSCATE. So looking back, what was that single classroom moment that changed the trajectory of how you teach.

Vicki Davis: Creativity and technology?

Tim Needles: I was.

Tim Needles: Go to school in the 80s when you just didn't have that much tech. So sort of having one of those moments where teacher, your typical of the time, really gave us some say in what we're doing in a science project. I'm an art person, so it allowed me to kind of merge some of what I was doing in art and bring it to the science, and like that was really exciting.

Tim Needles: It was nice to have the teacher give us that opportunity. You know, the technology we're using at the time was very, very minimal, like early computers. But I do remember the excitement and, you know, you put so much more effort into the project when you have a sense of freedom as a student. And I remember that, and I try to bring that to my students and make sure that they always have agency in terms of helping to to plan projects, you know, to really have a say in terms of the curriculum, you know, is it a teacher?

Tim Needles: Like, I really try to base everything on the students I'm working with. So, you know, I don't come in with a fixed idea of exactly what we're going to do. You know, you'd have to hit a couple points of curriculum, but there's lots of ways to do that.

Vicki Davis: So one thing you talk about are these amazing long projects extended. So what are some of your favorite projects that you're like, okay, this is what I think it's about.

Tim Needles: One of the ones is we started doing an idea for like students for designing a graphic. I'm on Long Island, so we were talking about the water because that's just a big when you live on an island, the water is like a big factor. So what we're talking about keeping the water clean. And then I started collaborating with science teachers in the building, and we made the individual project into a mural project that was collaborative.

Tim Needles: And then we said, like, let's continue to scale this. And we brought it out into the community. It took quite a bit with the students were part of every single step where we presented to the mayor of the town, we presented to the ecology board, worked with a paint company that was making the paint for the roads. We got permission.

Tim Needles: It took a year and a half to actually create murals for the local storm drains that actually tell the community about why it's important to keep it clean, but it also beautifying the neighborhood. When you do a project that starts in the classroom, kind of like bridges into the community, I think it's really powerful. We do one a year now.

Tim Needles: You know, we started doing it at all the different schools and make sure that the students that were at those schools were part of it. But it became a legacy project. Not only does it teach and emerges different subjects together, but like students come back from college now to work on them because it's that important to them.

Vicki Davis: If people ever say, but you're an art teacher, like, does anybody ever say that?

Tim Needles: Nothing more. I used to get it, but not anymore. It's been a while because a curious person, and I think curiosity is what you lead with as a teacher. I'm an art teacher and I process things through that lens, but I'm really interested in technology and quantum physics. I just took a class in quantum physics because I know it's going to be important for AI the future.

Tim Needles: And when I go into an English classroom, I'm like, oh, what are you guys reading about? And I'm just as curious to learn what they're doing. So I just bring that creative lens to whatever I'm doing. I think I've established enough of reputation now. They always see me as an art teacher. I think that's the core of what I do.

Tim Needles: But it's nice to kind of, you know, not get relegated to that space necessarily.

Vicki Davis: We're creative creatures and encouraging our students. So what are the kind of habits you teach your students in class? You have they have art journals.

Tim Needles: Having a journal is just a really helpful thing. It might be just for yourself. It might not be something that is going to end up in the art. But I always believe in having a journal, and I also believe in having freedom with that journal. So you want to cloche in there? Go for it. Do you want to write?

Tim Needles: Absolutely. You want to draw and write. Fantastic. You know, you want to tape in pictures whatever you want to do. I think it's an idea that came out a couple years ago about this journal where you specifically kind of will actually, you know, drip coffee on it and then find a way to make it creative. So I think one of the things you really need to do is push your own creativity.

Tim Needles: I think creativity is a skill you could build. So you need to challenge yourself. So like it can't always be easy, you have to sometimes put yourself in a box so you can find a creative way out of it. I give students creative exercises every week where like it's really specifically just to build your creativity. One of my favorites is to create a self-portrait without using any art materials whatsoever.

Tim Needles: So find things around the room, sort of draw with objects or nature or something like that.

Vicki Davis: Welcome back to our STEAM Super series. Today we're talking about the mindset for STEAM subjects. You might be surprised to learn what is going on inside our students brains as we talk about mindset. Let's tune in to some educators who have some insight for us.

Announcer: Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: So today we're talking with Dr. Michael Rousell about the surprising science of life changing moments. So, Mike, you have studied these tiny personal moments that we look back and we say, you know, somebody said such and such to me when I was in sixth grade or this happened when I was in ninth grade, and it changes their life.

Vicki Davis: How would you describe these moments?

Dr. Michael Rousell: I describe these moments as dramatic, profound changes in how you feel about yourself, or how you understand yourself and beliefs about how you act in the world and how you see the world.

Vicki Davis: We want to be authentic in our compliments.

Dr. Michael Rousell: Absolutely.

Vicki Davis: But how do we nurture this sort of internal transformation towards positive things?

Dr. Michael Rousell: Vicki, you raised some really interesting points, and you sound like the veteran, the veteran of positive influence. The way you talk about that, and certainly praise does not work. Praise looks phony and artificial. And it's just it's empty calories for kids. And so one of the nuances of using surprise is when you deliver a comment, make sure it sounds declarative because praise can sound empty.

Dr. Michael Rousell: So make it so you're stating the facts, just the facts. So when somebody is struggling with math, instead of saying, you sure struggle with math, you say something like, oh, you're a bill! Your ability to work through your math problems is a sure sign of strong learner. Now, if little Johnny was working at math and third grade or something, if he's working at math and he's struggling, he's going to give up easily because his dopamine level is motivator neurotransmitter.

Dr. Michael Rousell: Dopamine drops a little bit every time he does math, because why waste time here? The payoff isn't that good. But if you say your struggles, there's a sure sign of a strong learner or your ability to stick with your struggles. It's a sure sign of a strong learner. That little comment now boost to stop me levels. Why? Because you just mentioned that he's a he's a strong learner who doesn't want to be a strong learner.

Dr. Michael Rousell: So he associates because the way you did the comment, he is struggling with being a strong learner. And so as dopamine level boosts a little bit now if you surprise him with that comment, that kind of a comment, a descriptive, declarative comment about how this cause staying with math makes you a good learner. That's descriptive. But if it surprised him, a surprise is essentially a neurological error signal that says it's a big burst of dopamine that says, pay attention.

Dr. Michael Rousell: Something really important is happening. That's what that's what our surprise is. It's an error signal. Saying something really important is happening. And surprise is essentially a two burst dopamine. The first burst only last millisecond says pay attention. Something really important is happening, and the second is a slow burst says learn something instantly.

Vicki Davis: Today we're talking with Liesl McConchie. She's an international expert on how the brain learns and coauthor of the bestselling book A Brain Based Learning with Doctor Erik Jensen.

Liesl McConchie: Before we even get. Into how do we get ready to learn, we first need to acknowledge that the brain doesn't walk into classrooms ready to learn. Most students don't walk into our classrooms ready to learn math. And that's the first step is just acknowledge that reality. So what can we do to get the brain ready to learn? And that's where we can dive into the research of how the brain naturally learns and what it likes to learn, and use that to help us in a math classroom.

Liesl McConchie: So first of all, it's important to understand that all learning is dependent on the state that a student is in. I'm not talking about the state of California where I'm from or the state of Georgia, but I'm talking about the brain state. So if a student is walking into a classroom feeling anxious or nervous or fearful or hungry, all of these things impact their ability to learn math.

Liesl McConchie: So many students walk into a math classroom not only carrying their present state of whatever they're in that moment, but also carrying with them so much from their past mathematical experience. So I spent most of my career working in middle school, high school, teaching math there, and so many of them come with five, ten, 15 years of poor experiences of math.

Liesl McConchie: And so they bring this identity with them that I'm not a math person. And so working with that is also important. Another strategy is important to understand who is walking into your class with those walls up. It doesn't have to be a guessing game. There are so many ways that we can engage with our students to understand what their past math experience is, so have them do a quick writing assignment at the beginning of the year.

Liesl McConchie: What is your experience and math been like so far? Have them do a quick Flipgrid activity where they communicate with you a short video. What's your experience been like in math? Have some one on one student conferencing where you can learn about their previous experience so you know what you're working with. And then from there, then we can know what we're working with, and we can try to reprogram those neural connections around the topic of math.

Liesl McConchie: So it's all about recognizing so many teachers. We try to like push, push, push. Let's get excited about math. And we forget that sometimes these parking breaks are on. Vickie, have you ever tried to drive your car with the parking brake on?

Vicki Davis: Yes.

Liesl McConchie: Okay, good. I'm glad I'm not the only one here. I have to, and I don't know what your experience has been like, but for me, my first initial reaction is I get really frustrated and I press on the gas pedal really hard. Like, I just, I press harder. I don't know if you do something similar to that. And so many times as teachers, we do the same thing like, hey, the student isn't learning, they're not ready to learn.

Liesl McConchie: So we try to push harder on the accelerator and we go and we spend money on prizes and candy and rewards and pizza parties trying to get them more excited with some kind of external reward. And we forget to pause and to look to see if there's any parking brake going on.

Announcer: Okay. Teacher talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: Throughout history.

Vicki Davis: The most brilliant minds weren't just born curious, but someone taught them to be. Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna co-invented the CRISPR gene editing technology that can edit DNA itself. She grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, and it didn't feel like she fit in and she didn't see herself as a scientist. Her 10th grade chemistry class teacher was Jeanette Wong.

Vicki Davis: Jeanette Wong didn't just teach the periodic table. She showed Jennifer that science was about solving puzzles, quote, asking questions and figuring out how to answer them. One teacher, one class. One moment that told her that she belonged in science. Temple Grandin and Mr. Carlock. Diagnosed with autism as a child, many people wrote her off. Her science teacher was Mr. Carlock, a former NASA employee, and he saw past her diagnosis.

Vicki Davis: He saw her talent. Temple built a squeeze machine to help with her anxiety. Other adults dismissed it, but Mr. Carlock noticed. He said, if you want to understand why it works, you need to study science. He connected her deepest personal need to scientific inquiry, and it changed her life. And she became one of the most influential animal scientists in the world.

Vicki Davis: Number three, Grace Hopper and her parents, and yes, parents are teachers. To Grace Hopper was a pioneer of computer programing. She helped invent the compiler. She coined the term debugging. Her mother, Mary Murray Van Horne, loved math at a time when women didn't study mathematics. Her mother arranged special instruction in geometry for her daughters. Her father, Walter Fletcher Murray, had both legs amputated due to vascular disease, but despite that, he modeled courage every single day.

Vicki Davis: He never complained, and he never quit. Both parents insisted that their daughters deserved the same education as their son. Grace went on to change the world of computing. She retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at age 79. Number four Katherine Johnson in WW Shefflin Claytor, the mathematician from Hidden Figures, calculated orbital trajectories for NASA. Her professor at West Virginia State was WW Shefflin Claytor, only the third African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics in the entire country at that time.

Vicki Davis: He saw something extraordinary in Katherine. He created entirely new math courses just for her courses that did not exist before. She walked into his classroom and he told her, if you don't show up for my class, I will come and find you. Number five George Washington Carver and Mariah Watkins, born into slavery, orphaned as an infant, walked Miles to attend school.

Vicki Davis: No school in his town would accept him. His first real teacher was Mariah Watkins in Neosho, Missouri. She told the 11 year old boy, you must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people. Carver spent his whole life doing exactly that. He revolutionized agriculture. He developed hundreds of uses for peanuts.

Vicki Davis: And as the Georgia Peanut Princess, 1987. That's pretty special to me. Number six, I'll tell you my story about Phil Adler from Georgia Tech. So I'm a farm girl from small town Camilla, Georgia. I went to Georgia Tech, even though back then not many girls went there, and certainly they didn't like computers. And I heard of an amazing professor, doctor Phil Adler.

Vicki Davis: In fact, the well-known Bobby Cremins at basketball at the time had all of his basketball players take his class. Doctor Adler was different. He never gave tests. His class was 100% Socratic seminar. I remember my first semester with him at midterm. I had a B and I didn't usually make B's, but he'd never given us a test. And I went to see Doctor Adler and I said, Doctor Adler, I have a B.

Vicki Davis: What am I going to do? You don't give a test. And he says, I know I don't. Then he looked at me and he said, Vicki, can you look me in the eye? I said, I don't care how you compare to anybody else. You've spent your whole career trying to be better than everybody else so that you can make a higher grade.

Vicki Davis: But here's my question are you doing the best compared to what you can do? So in some ways, he called my bluff. It wasn't that I wasn't trying. It wasn't that I wasn't learning, he said. A standard of excellence of was I doing my best? Was I constantly exceeding what I had done before? I've carried that with me as I create, podcast and create shows.

Vicki Davis: This is not about competition. This is about being my best. I remember more from those classes principles of R&D, management and high tech management and all the things he taught that I apply all the time as I talk about technology. He never gave a test. He forever shaped my thinking on teaching. My last semester before I graduated, Adler asked me to be his teaching assistant.

Vicki Davis: I was in awe of Doctor Adler and I didn't want to let him down. And he told me before I graduated, and he told lots of this because I know that a lot of people thought Doctor Adler was amazing. He told me I was super special and I was going to do remarkable things, and it really meant a lot to me.

Vicki Davis: I kept up with Doctor Adler until he died in July 2023. He always told me I was remarkable, and now I want to tell you and tell my students that you're remarkable to so we can see that we have to have a mindset and encouragement to be curious, but also to inspire excellence with these conversations. None of these things happen in isolation.

Vicki Davis: Excellence in teaching and learning happens in a culture. Next, we're going to hear from Doctor Sam Nix. He's a chief academic officer at a major district in Texas, and he studies what makes some classrooms electric. And while others may not measure up.

Announcer: Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: What do you look for in an excellent classroom.

Dr. Sam Nix: And an excellent classroom? I look for for why? Structure is there a structure and a culture that is conducive? Is there a relationship where the learning is relevant for the students? Where the student was showing their learning, where the student is passionate about what they're learning? Is there what I'm going to call aligned? Is there an aligned lesson between what the teacher is trying to convey and what she's acting, assessing, or he is assessing with students?

Dr. Sam Nix: Ultimately is a place where students and Jordan and how do I know and how can I tell that? And when I talk to the students, are they they're trying to get through it or are they enjoyed?

Vicki Davis: So your expertise is transforming school culture. There's classroom culture and then there's school culture. And when you have an amazing school culture, it does make it easier to build a great classroom culture. So how do you go about shaping a school culture?

Dr. Sam Nix: One of the things that you just mentioned is so appropriate, because we have all seen the student that goes to Teacher A's classroom and is assigned, right. It goes to teach a classroom. Oh my goodness. Right. So the goal is how do we create a functional just students but also staff, parents, everyone that's in the culture. Preciate quality relationships, appreciates quality instruction, focused on learning and enjoys being there.

Dr. Sam Nix: And it starts with it starts with leadership. It starts with the example, the mindset, the language of the leader. And so when I am talking about shifting school cultures and when I work with principals and I work with schools, and I went to school districts and I work confidence with shifting IT culture, I hear so many times you say, well, start to bottom up.

Dr. Sam Nix: And I don't disagree with that, but the leadership tone and what the leader allows or doesn't, what the leader sets the tone for or doesn't set the tone for, what the leader warns or how to before really makes a sustainable difference.

Vicki Davis: Fascinated with what you said about the language of leadership, could you contrast perhaps successful language? And we all know that language has to be backed up by action, so that's just assumed. But let's talk about successful language versus language that may not have the impact that a leader thinks it will have.

Dr. Sam Nix: I love it. I'm going to use a story. I have a sister. I have a younger sister. Her name is Sharice. So my sister and I were born in Arlington, Texas. Okay, so we speak like Texans. We say things like ball, Texas. So my sister, she graduated high school. She went to college in Louisiana. She went to college at Dillard University in New Orleans.

Dr. Sam Nix: After a semester, she came back home and she was speaking with a dialect that was formed to the family with almost like a Cajun dialect. I was like, Sharice, you don't talk like that. Like, why are you talking like that? What I realized was she was talking like the environment that she was. Then. I'm using that as an example because leadership is about solving problems.

Dr. Sam Nix: Leadership is about not complaining about the problem, not pointing out the problem, not complaining about how someone else didn't solve the problem. Leadership is about identifying issues and problems and working to solve it. That's why leadership is there. So when you have people who have about why they can't, when you have people who talk about all of the barriers and all of the challenges and all of the issues, it amazes me how many leaders talk and complain about the thing that they're hired to solve.

Dr. Sam Nix: When I say leadership talking, I talk about I can hear a leader because when I when I'm in the presence of a leader, I hear possibility, I hear solution. I hear problem solving. I hear strategy. It's not that they don't focus on the problem, but they don't prioritize the problem. So to me, the leadership language is a language that helps people and the organization reach the vision, not language that talks about all of the reasons that it's them from reaching the business.

Dr. Sam Nix: So much like my sister, when I'm around really great high performing leaders, I can hear it. And I asked leaders all of the time if I were to talk to your staff, if I were to talk to your team. What do they sound? What's their dialect? What are they focusing on? Because they have learned, and now they're in an environment where they're complaining, where they are talking about people, talking about the problem being negative.

Dr. Sam Nix: That is not conducive to transformation. That's not conducive to improvement, that's conducive to stagnation or regression.

Vicki Davis: But interestingly, sometimes.

Vicki Davis: Culture starts with a single word. Here's math teacher Dr. Lidia Gonzalez.

Vicki Davis: Stated, sitting with a challenging problem.

Vicki Davis: Brow furrowed.

Vicki Davis: Trying.

Vicki Davis: Different approaches. Many well-meaning teachers or parents might rush into rescue them from this discomfort. But what if that struggle, when properly supported, is actually where the most powerful learning happens? This is the concept of productive struggle, and it's transforming how we think about difficulty in mathematics. The seventh teaching practice supporting productive struggle and learning mathematics recognizes that this sweet spot between challenge and support is where mathematical resilience is born.

Vicki Davis: It's not about making math needlessly difficult. It's about creating the optimal zone for growth. One of the most powerful insights came from Doctor Dr. Lidia Gonzalez in Part one of this math series, and it's the transformational power of the word.

Vicki Davis: Yet it.

Dr. Lidia Gonzalez: Really troubled me that a lot of people are so comfortable saying that they're bad at math. And we're talking people across all different fields, people with all different levels of education. I'll just openly admit that they're not good at math, but you would be ashamed to say you don't know how to read. And so it doesn't sit well with me that so many people are so comfortable saying this.

Dr. Lidia Gonzalez: And I think that the fact that our society accepts this is one of the reasons why it's sort of difficult to get everyone on board and to make it so that the majority of students excel at it because there's like this way out, right? It's okay not be good at it.

Vicki Davis: Right? I know I teach technology and and if I ever have a student who says technology doesn't like me, I have to deal with that belief before I can teach that student, because they're excusing and they don't have a growth mindset. They have a fixed mindset.

Dr. Lidia Gonzalez: You were saying about having a growth mindset. I think that the word that really helps us get. So just to to look at it as, you know what, you might not be very good at math yet, but that doesn't mean that you can't be successful going forward and then find tasks and activities where that student is successful and and keep reminding them that what you just did, you're just in some math there, and you were really good at it, because most students are certainly capable of doing the work.

Dr. Lidia Gonzalez: It's just that the the mindset sometimes gets in the way. And with parents who I would get that all the time as a high school math teacher, well, I wasn't very good at it either. And then.

Vicki Davis: You know.

Dr. Lidia Gonzalez: But but to say, well, but I think your student could be great at it. It's just a matter of working at it and finding ways we can, you know, support the student and things of that nature. But that little word yet, I think is goes a long way.

Vicki Davis: Yet that is three letters y e t and everything changes. Justin Reich from MIT says some empowering things to help us teachers know how. We might not be there yet, but we make a huge difference.

Dr. Justin Reich: Just aren't enough principals in the building to make teaching better in Mandarin and sixth grade Earth science and third grade and everything else that you have going on. So iterate is really a book about teacher leadership, about the incredibly important roles that teachers play in experimental and bringing new ideas to life. If improving schools, and the way that coaches and consultants and principals can help and support teachers in doing that incredibly important work.

Dr. Justin Reich: Part of what I want people to think about is how can we start with smaller bets? How can we validate ideas with smaller, lightweight experiments? Maybe we're not doing them with the whole class. Maybe we're doing them with a few students. Maybe we're doing them as part of an after school activity. Maybe we give students a little bit of extra credit to try something new.

Dr. Justin Reich: And then once we identify some ideas that seem more promising than we build up to larger and bigger experiments. So schools have this oftentimes have this sort of real linear mindset towards change. A lot of schools that have five year plans that have sort of big long term thinking about change, and part of the book is trying to shift from thinking about lines and climbing mountains to to circles and spirals.

Dr. Justin Reich: What are small, lightweight experiments that we can conduct them that will make our schools better? And how can we build on all those things?

Vicki Davis: What we learn has to work on Monday. And you know, that's a goal for this show. Cool Cat teacher talk. And for my podcast, A ten Minute Teacher, I want you to be able to use what you learn tomorrow in part two of this STEAM.

Vicki Davis: Super series is going to be about action. But as we wrap up, let's remember that we do have to align to standards. Patti Duncan said.

Dr. Michael Rousell: Stem.

Patti Duncan: Is more about.

Vicki Davis: How.

Patti Duncan: We teach than it is what we teach, and it shouldn't be about necessarily. I'm making these check marks and hitting these levels of meeting certain DCIs or science and engineering practices or crosscutting concepts as much as it is. What experiences. Am I bringing to the students through my planning? What am I being intentional about bringing into my classroom so that the students experience these things, to develop these skills, to see these connections, to understand this content in the context of solving a real world problem and where they answer questions about real scientific phenomena.

Vicki Davis: And now let's hear from teacher Stephanie Zeiger.

Stephanie Zeiger: So one of my favorite projects we do has to do with an electricity unit in our seventh grade. And so we ask students to develop an interactive toy. The students work as mechanical and electrical engineers to learn about circuits like series and parallel current and voltage, and then they design a toy that's going to incorporate a push button and LED or a motor.

Stephanie Zeiger: And what we found was our students like, oh yay, my button works and the LED works, but they really want a more interactive toy that does a little bit more than light up or spin. And so we took the project to the next level and added in what's called physical computing. And so now our students are using Arduino to actually light LEDs and patterns spin a motor to a certain degree that they want, so they get more control over the toy or just even play a song by changing the frequency of sound waves using a buzzer.

Stephanie Zeiger: The excitement of this project grew exponentially, and our students are even more excited when they finally get through that, trying things out and really get a working toy that incorporates that Arduino. This was in a seventh grade class.

Vicki Davis: So remarkable educators. Here's a takeaway about the stay mindset. First, let's start with inquiry. Let's work to spark wonder and curiosity. That's our foundation for the STEAM mindset. Then we pull in creativity as we work to solve problems. And as we've learned, if you can surprise your students in interesting ways that can help this whole process, we can also create a culture of high.

Vicki Davis: Expectations, individual conversations, and we can connect with our standards. It's just part of what we do. All of our guests today have said the same thing in their own way. Start with sparking wonder. I love seeing the light go on in students eyes when they realize they can do something they didn't know how to do. I love it when remarkable teachers spark that sense of wonder.

Vicki Davis: Are you sparking a sense of wonder? And do we have a sense of wonder as individuals, whether we have students or children or grandchildren or kids in a club or sports team, we can all spark wondering, curiosity and learning and create a culture of learning and excitement. This has been part one of our STEAM Super Series, sponsored by the Van Andel Institute of Education and their New Educators studio that helps bring inquiry based learning into every classroom.

Vicki Davis: Next week in part two, you'll learn what happens when this STEAM mindset meets the real world. You'll hear from more than a dozen educators with ideas you can try out your next day in class. That's a STEAM in action. Next week, I'll call Kat teacher talk the show notes and links to every resource we mentioned today. Is it cool cat teacher for.

Vicki Davis: Mindset. I'll see you next week. See you later. Educator.

Announcer: Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Stay in the loop. Visit coolcatteacher.com. Follow at Cool Cat Teacher everywhere you connect.

Vicki Davis: Today we're talking with Dr. Brad Marshall. He's an Australian psychologist, researcher, and author who has worked for more than two decades with young people and families affected by screen overuse and technology dependence. He is known internationally as the Unplugged Psychologist, Director for the Screens and Gaming Disorder Clinic in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Marshall is the co-author of Do Not Disturb. Now, for my international listeners, the name of this book outside the US is How to Say No to Your Phone.

How does your advice differ from all the detox advice that seems to be rolling around the internet right now?

Dr. Brad Marshall: Yeah, thanks very much, Vicki, for having me. It's great to be here. I think the way that my advice differs is just given my background. I've been working with kids and families in screen addiction and gaming addiction, phone addiction. That term “addiction” — 10 or 15 years ago, people would get very angry at me for using that. But now we all accept that it can get to that level in some kids.

Because of my clinical background, I've seen over two and a half thousand families in my clinic from around the world. And so this comes from a practical sense. Many people can think in an academic way or in theoretical ways of, “Just take that device from your teenager.” But I've been there and I've done that with all of these families and I've trialed all of these techniques as to what works.

And then on top of that, in the last five years in my research lab at Macquarie University in Sydney, we've evidence-based all of the techniques that are in this book. So that's a short answer as to how this is different — because in a practical sense, these are things that we know actually work.

Vicki Davis: You know, there are some interesting statistics that I was digging into to prepare for today. There's a significant association between four plus hours of daily screen time and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Common Sense Media says that kids in the US pick up their phones 72 times a day. They use their phones 43 minutes during school on the average. Now, some of us — like my school — have banned phones, which has been great.

But they receive a median of 237 notifications a day. Teens say they're afraid of missing out, but they also want boundaries. And educators and parents want to empower kids, not restrict them. You really talk about a no-judgment approach. How do we start from a no-judgment approach? Because when I hear these numbers, this is not what being a teenager or tween-ager should be.

Dr. Brad Marshall: I want to be really clear. I am all for boundaries. And in fact, all of my research papers and books are around the effective way to put in place boundaries and safeguards in this. But what comes with that is that we have to have that non-judgmental approach with our teens and tweens. And what it ultimately boils down to, Vicki, is we failed our kids. Everyone in this field and everyone who didn't act, we failed them.

One of my biggest regrets in my career — I gave testimony to the Australian Parliament inquiries into the social media bans, which we are rolling out in Australia for under 16s in December. I gave testimony to that Senate inquiry in Australia, and I said exactly that. We are at fault here. We all complain kids are on their phones too much and the impact that is on mental health. But number one, we allowed that to happen. That was on our watch. Number two, we have systematically gone about reducing their options outside of screens. We shut down their sporting fields, we stop them from being in communities, we stop them from going outside, and then we wonder why they're inside so much on screens. So it has to be a non-judgmental approach from my perspective, because we're at fault.

Vicki Davis: I have to admit, I was in the cell phone business. My first job out of college, '91 to '94, I was the general manager. And people kept saying, “I want to get my kids phones for safety.” Those days, you couldn't text, you couldn't do anything. Yeah, it made some sense. In a rural area, a flat tire, getting stuck in a ditch is a real issue.

But now it almost feels like the safest kids are the ones who don't have phones. That should bother us. Like, what do we do if we've already bought our child phones and we're like, okay, this is not going the right direction? How do you advise parents? What do they do that fits with your evidence-based approach?

Dr. Brad Marshall: In Australia, we are leading the world on this in many different facets. We banned phones two years ago in schools, every school. And we saw at the time that the lobbyists from the tech industries were very up in arms about that. All these terrible outcomes are going to happen. Well, hey, guess what? All of the evidence says that was beneficial. Teachers tell us that kids are actually listening.

Kids say, “I enjoy lunch. The older kids talk to me. I have more friends. I do more outside of school now. I'm using my phone less because I'm actually making human connections instead of walking down the hall with my nose in my phone.” So absolutely, I am a big fan of the ban.

And look, there are many, many steps that we've proven in lab and in my books. But if I give one specific to phones, because we're talking about Do Not Disturb, ultimately what it boils down to is one of the things you can do to protect your kids is limit their amount of cell phone data. What I mean by this is most families will have tried to use software parental controls on their child's phone.

And most of them will have figured out they don't work. The reason they don't work is quite simply because that is the tech company self-regulating. It is not in their best interests for that to work. Unfortunately, what we had to do for parents is really apply the handbrake rule here. So the handbrake rule is: if you only have five to ten gigabytes of data, you're going to use that very sparingly. And you can still talk and text, of course. But the cell phone companies make this very difficult around the world because they continue to increase the data plans.

Vicki Davis: What is a practical first step for a teen or a tween who feels like they're too far gone in their cell phone use?

Dr. Brad Marshall: As a first point, it's fantastic when you hear a teen or tween actually recognize that. But what we should warn the educators and the parents out there is that sometimes that insight comes and goes. You might have them acknowledge that, but then a day later they back away from it. And that's a classic sort of addiction model anyway. But what I would say is that any teen or tween in my clinic that has acknowledged that, what I'm trying to do is build on that motivation and talk about the areas of life that it's impacting. Is it impacting friendships, relationships with mom and dad or family? Is it impacting sleep? Is it impacting sport? There is a whole range of areas that excessive phone use and screen use impacts. And what we do from there is we talk about the psychological science behind it.

We talk about the areas that it impacts, also about the persuasive design that tech companies use to hook you in, to spend more time on that phone. Because it moves the child or the teen and tween away from feeling like “I'm the problem” into actually “you're the victim of this.” And we all are as adults as well, by the way, because this is predatory behavior from the algorithms and the persuasive design. It is meant to do this.

So don't feel like a failure if you're spending too much time on your phone because ultimately it is doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Vicki Davis: What roles do schools and families play in shaping better tech habits with our teens? I mean, I'm getting ready to help a session with parents next week on this very topic. So I'm saying, what message can I give parents and what do we say?

Dr. Brad Marshall: There are so many messages. If I just have to pick a few here, the number one issue that I've seen in my clinic is sleep. When screens and phones impact sleep, everything will go downhill very quickly. All of the developmental and psychological impacts snowball. I talk about this in my 2019 book, The Tech Diet for Your Child and Teen, which is a parenting book.

As parents and as educators, we do have a role to put healthy boundaries around this. Why? Not because I'm treating children and teens like they don't have any agency and they shouldn't have any say, but quite simply, the brain is developing at that age, as we know. The areas of the brain — the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala — they don't fully develop for females in their early 20s, males late 20s. So this idea that they should be able to self-regulate their phone use by age 12, 14, 16 is neurologically ridiculous. And that is akin to me giving a 12- or 14-year-old a six-pack of beer and a set of car keys and hoping they don't crash. They're going to make some poor decisions.

Self-regulation of tech use — you know, “it's a technological world, we all need to help our kids self-regulate their tech use” — I would put it to you that that is probably a marketing ploy by a technology lobbyist because there's no science in that. So we have to really help educators and parents understand that self-regulation is something that most kids are not going to be able to achieve.

Vicki Davis: This is just so spot on. Thank you for bringing both of these issues to the forefront. It's encouraging to know that there are people studying it and that parents can have hope. So Dr. Brad Marshall, thanks for coming on the show.

Dr. Brad Marshall: Thanks, Vicki.