By shifting key moments of instruction into a small group setting, the teacher-led station ensures that every learner is seen and supported. This is why I often say it’s where the magic happens in a station rotation. Unlike whole-group instruction, the teacher-led station ensures that every student receives dedicated time in a small group, where instruction can be adapted to meet their unique needs. Teachers can adjust content, process, and support to ensure learning falls within each student’s zone of proximal development.

Strategies for Differentiation at the Teacher-led Station

The teacher-led station is incredibly versatile. It is a space where teachers can adapt instruction to meet students where they are in their individual learning journeys. Teachers can adjust this station based on pre-assessment or formative assessment data, the demands of the curriculum, or their students’ needs. This adaptability is what makes the teacher-led station so powerful.

Let’s explore some of the different ways that teachers can use this station to actively engage students and differentiate the experience.

#1 Differentiated Direct Instruction

When teachers differentiate direct instruction, they present the same material to all students but adjust the level of rigor and the way it is delivered so it meets learners where they are. In a whole-group lesson, it’s nearly impossible to make these adjustments in real time because of the sheer range of needs and abilities in the room.

At the teacher-led station, by contrast, the small group format makes differentiation practical. Teachers can adjust the pace, layer in scaffolds such as visuals or manipulatives, or extend the challenge for students who are ready to delve deeper. This ensures that instructional time is meaningful for every learner, whether they require additional support to grasp the concept or more complexity to stay interested and engaged.

The value of differentiated direct instruction at the teacher-led station is that it ensures every student gets access to grade-level concepts and skills in a way that matches their current skill level and learning needs. By adjusting rigor, pacing, and supports, teachers can keep learning within each student’s zone of proximal development, preventing frustration while still promoting growth.

Let’s imagine a fourth-grade math class is working on adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators. At the teacher-led station, the teacher will have three different groups rotating through. Each group works with the teacher for about 20 minutes, focusing on the same goal: adding and subtracting fractions. However, the way it is taught and the materials used will be different for each group.

Group 1: Students Needing Support

This group needs to build a strong conceptual understanding before they can move to abstract symbols. The teacher provides fraction tiles or fraction circles as hands-on tools, making the instruction more concrete. For example, the teacher will model solving a problem like 1/5 + 2/5 by physically placing the 1/5 tile and the 2/5 tile on the table and adding them.

While doing this, they will ask, “We have one fifth and are adding two more fifths. How many fifths do we have now?” The teacher will emphasize that the denominator doesn’t change, only the numerator. Students will use their own set of tiles or fraction circles to practice combining and separating fractions with the teacher’s guidance.

Group 2: Students at Grade Level

This group is ready to connect the concrete concepts to the abstract equations. The teacher uses visual models, such as number lines or shaded rectangular models, on whiteboards to illustrate concepts. They present a problem like 3/8 +4/8 and have students draw a model to represent the problem, showing how they combine the shaded parts. Then, the teacher guides them in connecting their drawings to their written equations. The goal of this group is to bridge the gap between visual representation and mathematical equations.

Group 3: Students Needing a Challenge

This group has a solid grasp of the core concept and is ready to apply it in more complex ways. During this rotation, the teacher introduces word problems and multi-step tasks. For example, the teacher may present a problem like “Sara drank 3/10 of her water bottle. Then her brother drank 5/10 of it. How much water did they drink in total? What fraction of water is left?” The goal is to help students apply their understanding to solve problems that require more than one step, reinforcing their fluency while pushing their critical thinking skills.

#2 Needs-Based Instruction

Needs-based instruction involves designing the teacher-led station to target specific gaps, misconceptions, or readiness levels revealed by pre-assessment or formative assessment data. Whole-group lessons make it difficult to address varied instructional needs.

At the teacher-led station, teachers can group students by instructional need and target the skills or concepts to ensure all students are making progress toward firm standards-aligned goals. This ensures no one is sitting through instruction they do not need, and everyone is getting instruction and support that feels purposeful.

The value of need-based instruction at the teacher-led station lies in its ability to make learning efficient and personalized. Students spend time on what matters most for their growth, and teachers can make better use of limited instructional minutes.

Whole-group lessons make it difficult to address varied instructional needs. The teacher-led station allows teachers to respond directly to those differences, designing instruction that targets what each group needs. This responsiveness prevents students from sitting through lessons that do not apply to them, instead providing instruction that feels purposeful and personalized.

In a 9th-grade ELA class, a series of diagnostics on grammar and sentence structure reveals three distinct student groups with varying instructional needs. This data allows the teacher to design a teacher-led station that provides targeted and distinct instruction to each group.

Group 1: Foundational Skills

This group of students needs a review of the basic parts of speech and their function in a sentence. The teacher will lead a hands-on activity where students work with short sentences on sentence strips. Using different colored highlighters or markers, students will identify and label each part of speech. The focus is on solidifying the foundational understanding of each word’s role in each sentence.

Group 2: Sentence Structure and Combining

This group has a solid understanding of the parts of speech and is ready to work on sentence combining and creating more complex sentences. The teacher will provide several simple sentences on index cards or sentence strips. The group will work together to find ways to combine the sentences into a single, more sophisticated sentence. The teacher will introduce and practice various combining strategies, including the use of conjunctions and dependent clauses.

Group 3: Sophisticated Grammar Concepts

These students have demonstrated mastery of both basic and complex sentence structures and are now ready to explore the nuances of the author’s voice and style. The teacher will provide short passages of text that feature both passive and active voice. The students will work in pairs to identify examples of each and discuss the impact. The teacher will explain the difference between passive and active voice and guide a discussion about when and why an author might choose to use one over the other. The goal is to move beyond simple identification to analytical application.

#3 Differentiated Modeling Sessions

When teachers use modeling, they make their thinking visible by demonstrating how to approach a task, process information, or apply a strategy or skill. In a whole-group setting, this is a one-size-fits-all experience that moves too quickly for some and too slowly for others. The complexity of the text, task, problem, or prompt may also be too easy for some students or too challenging for others.

At the teacher-led station, teachers can tailor modeling to the needs of a small group. They can choose texts or tasks at the right level of complexity, decide how much of the process to model, and adjust the scaffolds they provide. For some students, heavy modeling and sentence starters may be essential. For others, more opportunities for pair practice may be more appropriate.

The value of differentiated modeling at the teacher-led station is that every student gets to see strategies in action in a way that matches their level of readiness and understanding. When working with a small group, teachers also gain a more accurate understanding of who can understand and apply what they are learning before being asked to work independently.

A fourth-grade English language arts teacher could use differentiated modeling sessions to help students identify explicit information in a text and draw inferences from details in the text. This is a critical skill for reading comprehension. When pulled into small group modeling sessions, the teacher can be strategic about their approach, the texts they use, and the level of support and scaffolds they provide.

Group 1: Below-Grade-Level Readers

The teacher uses a simplified text with a clear, linear structure. The think-aloud focuses exclusively on identifying information that is stated directly in the words on the page. As the teacher reads the text aloud, they pause regularly to use a highlighter to physically mark important explicit information that appears in the text. The goal is to develop the foundational skill of reading for specific details before progressing to inferential thinking.

Group 2: At-Grade-Level Readers

The teacher uses a grade-level text and employs a think-aloud strategy to demonstrate to students how to identify explicit details and make a simple, logical inference. The teacher has students complete a simple graphic organizer with two columns. Column one is labeled “Explicit: What the Text Says,” and column two is labeled “Inference: What I Can Figure Out.” As they work through the first part of the text, the teacher guides the group in filling out a chart to capture what they are learning. Then the teacher pairs students strategically in the small group to continue reading the text and filling out the chart with their partners. The teacher watches, collecting valuable formative assessment data, and provides additional support as needed.

Above-Grade-Level Readers

The teacher uses a more challenging text with more nuanced language and sophisticated structure. They use a think-aloud to demonstrate how to connect specific textual evidence with the broader background knowledge to draw conclusions. The teacher starts by conducting a think-aloud with a small portion of the text, then challenges the students to actively engage with the text, finding subtle clues and making inferences supported by multiple pieces of evidence. The small group then shifts from teacher-led modeling to student engagement, with pairs of students working together to apply what they have learned while the teacher listens and supports as needed, asking follow-up questions to drive deeper thinking.

#4 Small Group Discussions with Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Questions

Discussion helps students process, question, and deepen their understanding. However, in whole-group discussions, the same confident students often dominate while quieter students silently fade into the background.

At the teacher-led station, discussions are more intimate and inclusive. Teachers can ensure that every student has space to contribute. They can also use Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) framework to differentiate the level of questioning. Some groups may need recall-level questions to build confidence, while others are ready for strategic or extended thinking. Teachers can also add scaffolds, like sentence frames, graphic organizers, or talking chips, to help students engage successfully.

The value of small group discussions at the teacher-led station lies in providing all students with the opportunity and support to think critically, share ideas, ask questions, and practice academic discourse at a level that feels both appropriate and challenging.

Think about a high school history class discussing the French Revolution. The teacher comes prepared with questions at various depths of knowledge to challenge different groups, depending on what they seem ready for. For example, they might use DOK 1 questions, such as “What were the main causes of the French Revolution?” with one group, while another group tackles a DOK 3 prompt like “Why did the revolution shift from reform to radical change?” The goal for the teacher is to avoid pigeonholing a group of students at a particular level of rigor, but instead to have a collection of questions at different levels of complexity and use the conversations as they unfold to make informed decisions about which questions to ask a particular group. The preparation before the discussion is key!

#5 Formative Feedback on Work in Progress

Feedback is most effective when it is timely, specific, and actionable. When the focus in classrooms is on whole-group instruction, feedback usually happens after the work is collected. At that point, it’s too late for students to use the feedback to improve their work. It also means teachers spend significant time giving students feedback outside of class during their evenings and weekends.

At the teacher-led station, teachers can embed feedback into the learning process. They can read drafts of student writing, examine problem-solving steps, or review projects in progress as students work, offering suggestions students can immediately apply. By moving feedback loops into the classroom and narrowing the focus of feedback (e.g., clarity of ideas, word choice, structure), teachers can make feedback personal and meaningful.

The value of formative feedback at the teacher-led station is that it saves teachers hours of work outside of class and provides students with the support they need when it matters most – as they work. Students feel supported rather than judged when feedback is provided before they submit their work for assessment. They are also more likely to understand their strengths and the areas where they need to invest time and energy to improve, which helps them to better understand themselves as learners.

Let’s consider a group of high school students who are writing an argumentative essay on the topic “Should social media companies be held responsible for the spread of misinformation?” Students have written a draft of their introduction paragraph with a thesis statement and the first body paragraph. At their first small-group feedback session for this essay, the teacher explains to the group that they will focus exclusively on reviewing the thesis statement and the first topic sentence. As the teacher jumps in and out of digital documents leaving feedback, students begin working on their second body paragraph. The goal is for the teacher to have dedicated time to give feedback while students have time to make progress on the assignment.

Teachers can provide all students with feedback on the same element of their work, or they can personalize feedback to specific elements based on a student’s writing ability. Some students may benefit from feedback on foundational aspects of writing, while others may be ready for feedback on more complex elements.

Wrap Up

Differentiation doesn’t have to feel overwhelming and unrealistic. The teacher-led station makes it possible to differentiate consistently and effectively. It gives teachers the time and space to tailor instruction and support in ways that whole-group lessons simply can’t. It creates the opportunity to adjust the rigor and complexity and provide the necessary support, guidance, and feedback.

The teacher-led station is not about doing more; it’s about doing what matters most, better. By shifting key moments of instruction, modeling, discussion, and feedback into small groups, we ensure that every student has access to the challenge and support they need to make progress toward standards-aligned learning goals. When used intentionally, the teacher-led station makes differentiation sustainable for teachers and creates more inclusive, responsive, and student-centered classrooms.

Want to Make Time for Small-Group Instruction?

If you’re looking for a better way to meet the needs of all your students, reclaim your time for small-group instruction, and design more intentional learning experiences, I wrote The Station Rotation Model and UDL: Elevate Tier 1 Instruction and Cultivate Learner Agency for you!

School leaders interested in using the book for a staff-wide study can place a discounted bulk order for 10 or more copies. If you and your teachers need additional support, I offer customized professional learning that is hands-on, practice-based, and tailored to your team’s needs. Together, we can support your teachers in developing their UDL practice, differentiating instruction more effectively, and elevating Tier 1 instruction. We can even utilize the Station Rotation Model to create space for Tier 2 support and Tier 3 intervention within general education classrooms.

The post Differentiation Made Doable: The Teacher-led Station in the Station Rotation Model appeared first on Dr. Catlin Tucker.

Episode Description

In this episode of The Balance, I talk with Shira Woolf Cohen, co-founder of Innovageous and author of Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success.

With nearly three decades in education and workforce development, Shira shares why the gap between what students learn in school and the skills needed in today’s workplace demands urgent attention. We explore what it means to cultivate a future-focused mindset, why every teacher is a “career teacher,” and how schools can embed career-connected learning across grade levels and subject areas.

Shira offers strategies for building on student strengths, examples of what this work looks like in practice, and actionable steps leaders can take to begin designing future-focused schools.

Connect with Shira Woolf Cohen and learn more about her work.

Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success

• http://innovageous.com
• https://www.instagram.com/innovageous/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/innovageous
• https://www.facebook.com/InnovageousSolutions/

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.

Catlin Tucker

Welcome to the balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker, and today my guest is Shira Wolfe Cohen, an educator, leader and advocate for innovative learning experiences that prepare students for their futures. She has nearly three decades of experience in education and workforce development. She has been a teacher, a program director, a dean, vice principal principal, and she is the co-founder of innovators. She is also the author of the book Leading Future Focused Schools Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success. So very excited to have the opportunity to chat with her about her work and her book. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I am super excited to have this conversation. But before we dive in and we start talking about your book, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about your journey in education. Where did you begin? How did you find your way to the work you’re doing now around kind of career connected learning and future focused schools?

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah, well, I started my career when I was actually I like to tell people I started when I was 13, and I had my first job as a junior counselor in a pre camp camp, spelled with a K, because it was, pre-K kids. And in that space, I realized that I always wanted to do something with young people. I just didn’t know what it was. When I got into high school, and I know we’re going to talk more about this, I didn’t have the best experience, but it actually stamped that experience stamped my I need to go into education. And I decided to be a math teacher and go to school at Lesley College. It was Lesley College back then, and now it’s Lesley University and I became really involved in the school community and also started to think about all the jobs I had as a young person, whether that was babysitting, being a camp counselor, working in the weathervane, taking us back to that, the weathervane and.

Catlin Tucker

Oh.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. Remember, that’s where I work there in high school. Yeah. For the rain. And I started to think about, like, all the skills I had built and how I would bring that into my classroom. And so I did a lot of things like work in the Human Services department of the City of Cambridge to run an internship program. I came to the city of Philadelphia and worked in the city’s, Youth Work program over the summer, and really recognized that that was something that was interesting to me to help young people develop their futures and their careers. But I also really wanted to be a math teacher and so stepped into that classroom, spent five years in there sharpening my craft, as you know, middle school math. I then took a step out, started doing some more teaching, teaching some elective classes. And then I started running after school programs and decided that it was time for our school to have a youth internship and work program. So partnering with the city to get those foundational money to do that. And so in all that space, I really, really believed that every teacher needed to foster the strengths and passions of young people. And so as I became a principal and I worked with the CEO of the charter school I spent 19 years at to build out what the new programing and curriculum and expanded grades for high school could look like. We really focused on what it meant to make sure that every young person had a path. And so after I spent about ten years, serving as assistant principal and principal of the school, I decided that, you know, it was time to step out and do something new. I thought that something new was going to a new school. But what if it was in? It was 2020 March 2020, and so we could all imagine. Yep, that was 19 years of the school and March 2020 decided, you know, opportunity to go somewhere else and shortly realize that there’s a different education space. And so started in a business which is a combination of innovative and courageous. As one word, with my two partners, Joanna and Alicia. And in that work, we work to ensure that there is continuity and learning and inclusive opportunities for every young person, and that as part of that means helping to prepare them for their future. And so that journey from 13 to now helps me bring all the knowledge and interest in supporting young people and figuring out who they are, what they want to be, their passions and really at of just making sure that schools are embodying that and really fostering that for every student, not just for the students who are in a CTE program or the students who they know. We’re headed to college. But for everyone.

Catlin Tucker

I love that. And so when you were a middle school math teacher, were you already thinking about how do I make clear connections between what my middle school students are learning in math and the world outside the classroom? Because I think for me, somebody who did not thrive in math classrooms, I don’t I’m not particularly mathematically minded. That was the disconnect for me for so long as just like I’m learning something in this room that I literally have no idea how I would ever use in my life outside of this room. I mean, once we got past basic like arithmetic, I was just like, I don’t see the application or the relevance of this at all.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So when I stepped into the classroom, I knew I had to bring it into the classroom. I just didn’t know how and when. I started teaching in 2001, when I graduated college, I actually didn’t go right into the classroom. I spent time running a boys and girls club programs, afterschool programs, being in an AmeriCorps program at a high school here in Philadelphia to sharpen my skills in relationship building and management of young people before I got to the content. Right. But when I stepped into the classroom, I was handed the most traditional textbook that basically was like, you know, practice questions that whole like, there’s 50 questions, do the odds, do the evens, let’s practice together. And there were some kids that got it, but there were more that didn’t. And so I started to bring in games and small projects and opportunities for young people to start teaching other people, because in my time as an AmeriCorps member, as a leader in AmeriCorps, I really learned about service and the impact of service. Yeah. And I gave students an opportunity to serve others. And for me, that was the entry point to serve others by helping them in class, to serve others, by creating board games for younger grades on topics that students had to reinforce. So for me, if I recognize that you had a topic you need to reinforce, and I was teaching seventh grade math, but you were still working on some third or fourth grade skills, and you just have you sit and practice over and over. We did some sort of project. We maybe created a board game. We created a set of posters, right, that were there to educate other people. And so I started to empower students to think about how their skills, whether are strengths or areas of growth, could be used to support others as well. And so it started to get some of my students who didn’t want to do 25 practice problems. I don’t blame them, know, to be like, but I would like to create a game for the third graders on long division, right? Or I want to be able to write. You know, one of my students said, like, I’m so bad at math, but I love writing. And I was like, well, let’s write a math, a book about this math topic, write a story that tells the story of this math problem. Right. And so I started to tap into that way, and it really what I saw was it just opened up young people to be more interested in taking risks, interested in bringing into their strengths, into areas that maybe they considered, like, I’m not good at this. And it just opened up a few opportunities for young people that they had not expected, and I had not expected. And for me, that was a starting point.

Catlin Tucker

I love that. So that that speaks to so many of the things that I definitely spend my time advocating for, which is just like kids are so capable, but they learn differently and they have different strengths and preferences. And if we can figure out how to remove those barriers and let them shine in a way that works for them, it can be so powerful for kids who haven’t classically felt maybe successful in a particular subject area. And I was coaching a math teacher last year, and we were talking about self pacing, and there was this real fear around, like, you know, have some kids who are so strong and they finish so quickly or they’re, they’re ready for a next level challenge. But I don’t just want to give them more work. And I was like, okay, well, what if we develop these like next level opportunities or these kind of like tasks for them that are creative in nature or we say the alternative depending on how you’re feeling today, is you can pick up a student math tutor lanyard and go work with one of your classmates and support them and be this kind of peer tutor for people who might be struggling a little bit more. Because sometimes just the way they explain things to each other, they get it. And we’ve explained it three times and they don’t get it, you know? And so I just love the idea of service and creativity and multiple pathways.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t, you know. Yeah. We all know that some people are not banks. We can’t just deposit information. And the more they can process the information, the more they can tie it to things that are their strengths. The more they can interact with others and see the impact of their work and the connection and relevancy. The more effort and agency they’re going to have in their learning. And it doesn’t have to be. What I ended up finding was I would come into my classroom and kids would be like waiting at the door to come in, right? Versus and they would be waiting at the door because they knew they had to get their folder, because I was going to give them time to continue working on their game or continue writing their story. Or in some cases, they were the person who was teaching the practice mini lesson at the beginning of my class.

Catlin Tucker

Oh my goodness, I love that so much. Okay, so you were kind enough to send me a copy of your book. It’s titled Leading Future Focused Schools Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success. And I have been making my way through it and loving it. I was sharing before we started recording that I actually have my CTE credential. And so I’ve definitely and I’ve worked with lots of teachers with their CCT credentials and the idea of career pathways. But what you’re talking about in this book is so much more like this interweaving of this career focus into almost everything that we do, which I think is so fascinating. But you really start the book, you open it, describing this like growing gap between the skills that students are learning and developing in school and then the skills that they really need to thrive in a rapidly changing workplace. So can you kind of paint a picture of this gap for our listeners, and why this shift in our educational approach and instructional models and what we’re focusing on in classrooms is so urgent?

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So you walk into a lot of classrooms in schools and what you first want to see, and most people are looking for is at our students doing what the teacher asks. And I’m not gonna lie, I look for that to when I am an outsider coming in for me. I look at a baseline of who’s engaged and who’s on task. But when we look further and we wonder why students are on or off task, a lot of times what we see is teachers as a stage, on a stage, right? And giving a long lecture. We might see very clear, structured opportunities for students to turn to the person next to them and talk about something, or to go to Four Corners, and we see students on computers, or maybe having a small activity or an independent worksheet or working, you know, in small groups with a teacher. What we don’t see on a consistent basis is young people grappling with content to persevere through something that they might not know with the appropriate scaffolds and supports from their teacher. We don’t necessarily see students being able to choose the way they want to approach an assignment, right? We don’t always see teachers who are creating a flexible work environment, classroom environment that encourage students to be adaptable and use creativity. And there are schools and classrooms where that is happening, but it’s definitely not the majority, right. And at the same time, we’re seeing data on student outcomes, whether that is literacy and math rates, whether that is attendance, whether there’s Gallup, has just put out some updated research on relevancy and of students see pathways and relationships with adults and it’s sort of a dismal. And so you think about that as the schooling, both the process that’s happening in classrooms and the outcomes that we’re seeing both in outcomes for students, but also their perspective. Right. A lot of the, you know, there are lots of surveys around engagement and relevancy that we’re asking young people for their thoughts, and they’re not answering in a way where they want to be in school, and they see the connections and they understand how this impacts their pathway in the future. And so that school. Right. In the workforce, what we’re seeing is this consistently changing needs. There’s technology that is out there that was not here 5 or 10 years ago or even last year. There is jobs that we would have never thought of many years ago. There are things that young people want to be that we can’t even imagine or stamp as something that could happen because we don’t know what’s to come. And so when you ask employers about what they think is important in their, you know, in the, in the future workforce, they’re not saying they need to have the technical skills for my job. What they’re saying is we need them to be able to approach a problem with creativity and flexibility. We need them to be able to when things don’t go right, to be able to manage their emotions and manage their approach, to be able to problem solve. For that, they are thinking about how young people are communicating and their communication skills, their ability to work with other people, their ability to manage their own time. And I don’t believe that our schools and again, not every school out there, but most schools are not preparing students for that type of world. Yeah, we give them clear directions. We expect them to follow it. We give them a clear outline of what their assignments should be, and we give them a rubric that shows exactly how we’re going to assess that one thing. We provide them content, we test them on it. We don’t. Certainly there are many schools not grading or assessing those what we call cross-sector skills, durable skills, 21st century skills, all the same thing. Right. And so there is this divide in what we are teaching and allowing students to experience in school and what our employers are looking for in the future workforce. So somehow we have to bridge that gap so that both educators and schools are helping to prepare young people for their future, whatever that may be, and that the ecosystem of professionals and industry partners are supporting educators and understanding what those needs are. Because there is no class in college that teaches teachers how to teach these types of skills. Maybe in the past five years, there’s been a resurgence of, like ACL courses, right? I’m teaching intro to ACL or things like that, but it’s not in the core content of what new teachers are teaching and learning, you know?

Catlin Tucker

And so often ACL like social emotional learning skills are taught almost like a there’s separate they’re an add on. They are not integrated into the fabric of a class where you have students consistently checking in with themselves, like practicing ways in which to self-regulate and understand how they’re feeling. Make responsible decisions like there are kids who sit in classrooms all day long. To your point, who the focus is compliance. They don’t actually get to make any meaningful choices about what they learn, or how they learn, or what they create to demonstrate their learning. And so, yeah, I one of the quotes and it was a little longer in the one of the first chapters was, I think from somebody’s interests industry talking about like, we need people who can wrestle with complex challenges and think creatively and like that is so important. And like, how often are kids actually mentally given the space, the time, the opportunity to wrestle with things? And I think a lot of teachers will say things like, oh, well, you know, learned helplessness or they’re not motivated or engaged. I’m like, they just don’t have any practice.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Oh my gosh, you’re so right. And it’s you’re I would say, and I think I mentioned this in the book, that middle school teachers the most will say they don’t know how to manage their emotions. They don’t know how to get things done. They don’t know how to follow directions. They don’t know how to work with other people. Almost with this like look around of like, who’s supposed to do this? Well, we’re supposed to do this. We have to do this as part of what we’re doing with our young people every day. And you make a really good point. I think that that’s the framework of how we integrate school successfully of both this combination of, yes, intentional research based curriculum and these every day to day actions is the same thing that we talk about and how we integrate careers. It can’t just be, I have an internship or you’re doing a job shadow, or I’m part of an after school school enterprise. It has to be that I’m doing this, and I see these connections in my classroom because my teachers are doing certain things to make sure that I know my strengths, and I need message, and I’m using academic language and all those things for sure.

Catlin Tucker

And you make the point in the book that, like, every teacher is a career teacher. So I would love for you to just unpack, explain that idea for listeners. And also obviously, like maybe we have a third grade teacher listening or we have like a sixth grade science teacher and they’re like, wait, but what does this look like? So any like little examples because I know you. The one thing I will tell everybody listening that’s so fabulous about the book is just the amount of specific strategies and examples that are so incredibly helpful and sometimes missing some from some books. So I would love for you to unpack that at your as career teacher. And then what could that look like in practice in subjects or, grade levels where teachers might be like, I don’t know how I would do this.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So I think there’s, you know, there’s a few things, we what it means is that every what I mean by every career, every what I mean by every teacher is a career teacher is that it’s not one person’s responsibility to make sure that students know their strengths and their pathway and have a really good future. It is everyone’s responsibility. But in many schools, it’s the counselor or a career counselor, or an afterschool program specialist or an advisor in a future focused school, every educator sees their role in helping young people prepare for their future. And so when we think about teachers, because you’re right, I think, again, there’s no course on this. But when we think about teachers, I think, you know, there’s two things. One or these actions that you might show on the day to day basis, right? Everything from naming social, emotional and cross-sector or 21st century skills in the moment when you see young people doing something that will support their future, name it and say it right. We also want to make sure that there is just this every opportunity for young people to have leadership that can happen through a holding a job in a classroom, everything from I’m the timekeeper, you know, the traditional ones, to I’m the warm up, I’m the brain break person, I’m the Yogi, right? We’ve seen so many opportunities for young people to take leadership, and it doesn’t have to be. I’m showing leadership in math because it’s my math classroom, right? We can show leadership in other ways. In that math classroom, we can also have as a teachers, we can have visuals we have seen right when we put up, letters that young people are writing or newspaper articles, we can refer to them as reporters. Right. And we can have visuals in our classroom that remind young people of how they can make connections to their future. Some of the other things teachers might do is use that academic and professional language and behaviors in their classroom. And so I always use this example. But, you know, sometimes students come into your classroom not saying they have an excuse or it’s a valid excuse, but we the way we respond to them when they come in, will allow us to have a conversation that is more of a professional conversation. Then I’m like, why are you late? Right? And so these are some of the things that teachers can do on an everyday basis. The other thing teachers can do is teachers can make connections to careers in a way that is appropriate for their grade level. Right. And so in a younger grade, you might consider how do we role playing different jobs in a town? How do we not just listen to careers and have understand, you know, watch a video. But how do we then maybe think about what skills we have that could be connected to that career? How do we set up a mini marketplace or act out different careers and, like in a, you know, scenarios or drama or write out, you know, different captions to the pictures of careers saying what this person is and why they’re important to the community. So there are lots of smaller things that we can do. We can also as we get into the older grades, we can think about, them starting their own business. We can call them by their career names. One of the best things I heard was, a teacher calling her students analyst’s for the day.

Catlin Tucker

Ooh, I love that.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah, and I love it. Literally, like, blew me away. I was, like, just calling them these names and finding these small spaces. Nobody’s saying you have to stop what you’re doing and teach a specific curriculum. I do think there’s a space for that. Maybe that’s a space where the counselor teaches that or a career specialist. But these are the every day to day things that we do to make those connections. We don’t just teach about how, you know, how we design a garden. We also talk about who are the people that are helping us to diagnose gardens and doing the work. And so just on an everyday basis, making those connections helps students to see the relevancy in the future of, like, what’s possible and what they really liked working with area and perimeter. Maybe they also might really like being a landscape architect or like doing other things. And so if we don’t name them and expose young people to them and help them make those connections, they won’t ever see, so again, it’s not about stopping what we’re doing. It is about integrating the day to day actions that create this future focused classroom, and finding the times to make those connections to specific careers or young people as leaders, or as analysts or as researchers, whatever they are that day.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And there’s so much I love about that because I so my oldest child like loves science and she is just has this like weird sixth sense with animals. She’s like amazing with them. But I think one of the big challenges, as she’s kind of gotten to the place where she was applying to college and she used to give out majors. And I mean, I invited or I had a friend invite her to Chateau in, like a vet’s office, but that was the only thing that in her scope of experience was like science and animals and then she spent three days shadowing in a vet’s office and was like, I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this, but what else can I even do? If I love science and I care about animals and their ecosystems and their habitats and all the things. And I remember that experience, too, like graduating from high school, going to college, and being like, I only know the handful of careers for people I’ve interacted with, or that my parents were right. And so I can imagine. And now we’re in this world of AI where if I’m a teacher and I’m teaching something and I’m like, I don’t even know what careers this speaks to. Now I go to AI and I’m like, hey, I’m teaching this skill. Like, how do I frame this in a career context? Now I have language and insight that I might not have had before. AI to make those connections visible for students.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah, I love how you just said that, because when you said my daughter’s interested in, you know, animals in science, what do you think I did? I went to ChatGPT and I wrote provide me with a list of careers in animals in science. Right. Because as teachers don’t have the knowledge of all the careers that are out there, I mean, I, I don’t know that, but no.

Catlin Tucker

Me neither.

Shira Woolf Cohen

This two seconds. Right. In two seconds. I wrote that one question and I got categories things with animal care and health. Yes. Around vets and being a vet technician and working in animal shelter, wildlife rehab. But there’s also research around being an animal scientist or a zoologist or a behavior scientist for animals, right? Or being a animal trainer or even a science teacher focused on animals. Right. There’s so much that you can do and we as educators don’t know. And so there is a really interesting space for us to say, how do we use AI tools to help us deepen our knowledge of the workforce development system, and what programs and majors and careers are out there? But also then, like you said, help to brainstorm some creative ways to expose students to those careers.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, and even some of the examples, like I remember in and I don’t remember why I decided to do this, I was just like, writing a business letter is a skill. I want my students to have it. It’s not in my standards. And we ended up writing business letters to, I want to say, like a government person about an issue we had been researching and I did this, video just for my students of, like, how to write a business letter and I want to say on YouTube, that video has like 150,000 views, more like more than any other writing video I’ve ever done. And I think it really speaks to this like craving for some of that, you know, even just support with what are some of the skills that I’ll need to apply for a job or be in a job. And like as an English teacher, I can see really clear overlaps of ways to pull in some of that. And what I loved were some of the other examples you gave to where I was just like, oh, we’re working on this in the subject area. And we could do it through this lens. And that’s actually a really great skill to cultivate for students when we think about a future career, you know, setting and skill set that they need. And so I think that, that, that teacher level, it’s so exciting to kind of think about how to do that, just to create more interest and relevance for students. But you also talk about, you know, the importance of kind of cultivating a future focused mindset and like the role that leadership really can play or should play in that. And so what does it look like in practice for leaders who are like, I see the value. I really want to move my campus in this direction. How do they kind of build and develop and cultivate this mindset?

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So there are four components that for leaders, I want to name. The first one is going to be around establishing a future focused identity, because future focus leaders are going to create the space where there is a shared vision. There’s alignment, right, that every, person knows about because it is really clear. And and that is something that is a first part. It’s like we have to establish as the leaders the future focused identity. I’m not saying do it in a behind your desk by yourself. Right. But we have to establish it and we have to name it. We also have to make sure that there are some supportive structures in place. I think this is one of the like gaps that I see a lot of times in my work with leaders is we say like we’re going to do this thing, but what we’re not doing is providing the systems, the supports, the accountability, the structures for our teachers to do it. So the second part is that that future focus leaders create the systems, the time, the resources that teachers need to create and embody that future focus mindset from that like aspiration into their daily practice of what’s happening every day. We can’t just expect that we’re going to name, hey, we want you to have a future focused mindset. Here’s what I mean by that and that teachers are going to go do it. We have to make sure we’re giving them the resources, the support, but also the accountability when we say it’s going to happen. And we’ve given the support and the resources to make sure it’s happening. The third one is educators, as leaders. I don’t know another way to say that it’s that like future focus leaders, like they engage and they equip educators to be part of their team to serve as teacher leaders, to service grade level, rep level representatives, to lead PD, to share what’s happening, to open up their classroom, to build that momentum. Back to the third part. And then the fourth part is engaging that family and community because future focused leaders, they’re always building powerful partnerships. They’re making sure their ecosystem is really strong so that families and community members can be part of their school. And so when leaders are really doing those four things, then they can create the system of a future focused school. That is not just them saying they want to do something, but is really embodying that with the, communication, the systems, the support, the accountability, the inspiration and empowerment and the engagement of families and communities.

Catlin Tucker

I love that, so that’s what we want.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah.

Catlin Tucker

You feel like are the the mindsets or just the barriers that.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Schools.

Catlin Tucker

Back or leadership back from making this kind of a shift? Heavy question.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah, that is every question. So, I mean, I think the purpose of education in our country has not necessarily been the right way. And so I think when we look as like a very macro level, right before we get into the individual thing on a macro level, the purpose of education has really felt more like childcare and ensuring students have reading, math and math skills. Right? Like these to bake big things. The purpose of education has not necessarily been to prepare every student for being productive, contributing citizens in our society. And that’s the gap. And what we’re seeing as a result of that is economic mobility from generation to generation is actually not getting stronger, as we would hope for our young people. And so I think on a macro level, this mindset of like the purpose of school, I also think there is this mindset that young people should do as we said. And if I tell you to do the ad practice numbers, you should do them. And even if you did the event and you did the 25 even ones, if you didn’t do the ad one, you still get a zero, right? I also think that teachers I hear this all the time on a teacher level, which is I teach math, I teach science, not, I teach young people and I teach students. And my content is math, right? Because when we teach math, our priority is teaching math, whether the young people get it or not. When we teach students, our priority is that our students are growing and learning, hopefully in the content and everything else that they’re responsible.

Catlin Tucker

And so I love that.

Shira Woolf Cohen

I’m going to say the other mindset, which you alluded to a little bit, which is this, well, we teachers can are not holding and schools are not holding students to high expectations for everyone. When we see they can’t meet the expectations, we don’t allow them to grapple or should demonstrate, grant and persevere. We lower the expectation or we find another pathway to graduation, or we give them an opportunity to make it up in a totally different way. And so lowering those expectations is a mindset that our schools and our teachers and our leaders embody that allows them to just lower the bar, which is not preparing them for those things that we talked about around adaptability and flexibility and managing time and emotions, communication, that our our workforce, the saying we need to have and we need to see in our future generations of, you know, employees.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, I know, I think I really do think larger conversations and grappling with what is the purpose of us all being in this space together is something that definitely needs to happen. And I really you one of the things as I was reading the book that I loved as well, was your emphasis on kind of the role of a strengths based approach to instruction, right? Where, you know, we’re really building on the the assets and the qualities and the strengths students are bringing into the classroom, because none of us is good at everything, period. And so how are we celebrating and supporting students where they’re where they are in our classes? And, and really approaching instruction from that more strength based approach?

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. You’re right. We’re not all go to everything. So I was a middle school math teacher, and you can only imagine how many students and families would come in and say, like, they’re not good at math and everyone is good at math, right? We just have to get to a point where you find systems that so that you understand and processes you can understand, you understand the relevance. Maybe you even have the tools, right? Like I work with some teachers who will be like, we’re working on word problems, but this this young person doesn’t have their math. That’s right. They’re great at the Ela, but they don’t have their math backs. And this is a great example of strength based and sounds like okay, but you just said they’re great at literacy. So where can we start. Pull out some of their strengths in support of them getting to the numbers skills. What do they know about this word problem. What can they tell us. Right. And and maybe we even give them a calculator to do some of the number facts because they’re in ninth grade. And like if we go back to number facts, they’re never going to move on. But we give them the tools because there are calculators all over the place to be able to persevere through so that they feel a little bit of a win to feel like they can go back and tackle this. Right. And so when we look at young people’s strengths, we can help them build their self-awareness. And so some of the things I think about is, I used to have students, like, share what they thought some of their biggest strengths in math were. And if they were like, I’m not a math person, let them tell me why. And then we would go back to that was a journal entry, and we go back to it and we’d sit down and talk about their growth and was there like any times where they thought maybe they got a little bit better at this, or would they change their opinion? Right. So building their self-awareness. Also, as a new teacher, I did interest inventories for my students so that I could know what their interests were so that we could make those connections. Right. So, I was definitely that teacher that, like, took my student who I needed to see during lunch and was not, you know, following my rules and all the things, but being interrupted, like interrupting. I took him because I knew he was a basketball player to the gym. And we I’m a terrible basketball player, but we shot hoops while we did some of the math work. Right. And so that’s because I knew he really loved basketball. Right. Same thing with streaming video games. Right. So how do we tap into those interests? And so allowing students to tell us their interests and then us making those small connections, even as we’re writing, word problems or questions for a test, how do we just add in some of their interest to, like, pique that just a tiny bit?

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. Yeah. And I’m even thinking about too, because I have had this conversation with teachers around another use of AI, which is what’s great is if you’re in a school where kids are allowed to utilize, you know, school AI or some other like online space where they can interact with an AI, then they can also like kind of use lenses of interest to try to practice things and understand things that are hard for them. So if there’s like, here’s a mathematical process, can you explain it to me through the lens of this other thing that I like, that I enjoy, that I’m interested in now? We also, like, don’t have to be the educator that, like, thinks up all the things that are going to appeal to the different interest in our class. It’s like we can actually position students to be able to do them that for themselves at times.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yes. We do not have to. We’re never going to have all the answers. And I think if teachers are, this mindset that I should know everything about what I’m teaching in my classroom, that might be a mindset we need to shift because we don’t know everything and we certainly can’t. I don’t know enough about baseball or basketball to help explain the math. You know, content skill through that lens. But you’re right. I might be able to help me do that. But I think also as teachers, we can do some things that are simple. Once we know students interest and what they think they’re good at, we can give them some choices, right? It’s not hard to say. Here are the three ways that you can respond to this assignment. We can have them recognize each other. We can have them, do some things that are like student led discussions. Going back to that leadership, if I have a young person who I know loves to talk, and let’s plan out how you’re going to talk in our class because you’re going to lead the discussion. Right? I love, and so I think some of these things are strategies that teachers can use to just find out what strikes or students have from their own opinion, foster those strengths and celebrate those strengths. As we’re going through our content. And it doesn’t have to be the strength, doesn’t have to be directly related to your content. It can be, you know, kind of adjacent to it that impacts your.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And our content, it is we teach in silos, but that’s not how life is. So there are all these wonderful opportunities to blend skills from the humanities into the math and sciences and into the arts and the languages. Like, there’s so much cool stuff we can do if we to your point, stop thinking like, hey, I’m just an English teacher, or I’m just a science teacher or a math teacher. It’s like, yeah, but there’s a whole kaleidoscope of skills and ways in which other subject areas and focus is, focus areas kind of bleed into what we do and like, merge with it. And I think in really exciting ways. And the more I hear you talk, so I am reflected, you share a really powerful reflection of your own experience with a student. And the more I was reading the book and even this conversation, I’m like, I can see how much this is showing up in your own kind of mission and your values and like, what’s driving your work. And you ask this question of like, why are my skills and my talents and strengths not recognized in school when they were being recognized in other areas of your life? So I would love for you to just share a little bit of that story with listeners and kind of how it shaped the way you think about education and this work that you’re doing.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So I people don’t believe me. I literally slept through high school classes. I was this student that flew right under the radar. I wasn’t failing, I didn’t call disruption. But there were classes every day that I went in and they were, you know, hour long classes. And I would walk into the class and I would put my head down like I was looking at my book, and I would go to sleep. And 45 minutes later, the bell would ring. I’d get up and I’d leave. Nobody ask me questions. Nobody asked me to do anything. I was not asked to do anything. I wasn’t even asked to do anything. And so, that was my experience in high school, and I literally I was a straight C student. I applied to one college and I applied to that college after a lot of debate with my mom, with my guidance counselor, around whether or not I was going to go to college and I knew I was going to college. And that was my school experience. But I was a really active member of my synagogue’s youth group with my community center, with my summer camp. And in those places I was seen as a leader. My voice was heard. Great relationships with adults had opportunities to take on roles and try new things. I was able to give back to the community and I was just these two totally different people. I’m sure that what got me into college was the fact that I was this other person. Right? Because I had all these things on my resumé and on my application that had nothing to do with school because I really I hated school. I was never part in an afterschool program. I played sports for one season my freshman year and hated it. And so I was based very to like, I literally was part of zero afterschool programs at my high school, which is crazy to me, or any leadership opportunities or extracurricular. Zero. Right. But in this other space, I was very active. And so there was this gap there that I somehow had to bring together. And so when I asked myself that question around, like, why are my talents and skills and, you know, strengths seen in one space but not the other? I really think it was about what the adults valued. And adults valued students who didn’t disrupt. And they valued students who got A’s right. And I was yeah, I didn’t disrupt anything. But I also certainly didn’t contribute. And I certainly wasn’t getting good grades. And so in the other space they weren’t worried about my grades. They were worried about who I was as a person. And were they fostering someone who’s going to be an active citizen? And did I know what my future was going to be like and who I wasn’t as a person? Right. And those two things were very separate. And so there is a space of bringing both those spaces together and maybe, just maybe, if there were teachers in my high school who would have asked me questions, asked me why I slept through class, even acknowledge I don’t remember a teacher saying to me, I see you sleeping for class and RA that’s. And so yeah, I mean, it’s literally crazy. And I just wonder what would have happened if those teachers would have seen me as a person and as a leader and as a contributor to the community, not just as someone who should be learning math or science or English.

Catlin Tucker

Well, and what I love about this is you think about how many students we lose because the way school is structured doesn’t it doesn’t work for them. My son is like that. Like he’s smart, he gets A’s and B’s because that’s like, that’s how he has social life, you know? But like he does not enjoy the experience. And I think because he’s very charismatic and he’s very extroverted and you know, he would love to do projects with people and have those conversations and a lot of that isn’t fostered. And many of his classes, and I wonder if we had more of a, you know, future focused career focus where we’re really starting to celebrate and invite, a lot of different skills, not just the content specific skills, but leadership, communication, problem solving, like how many more students would feel seen and feel like, yeah, you know, math is it’s it’s tough for me. But in my math class, I get to do all these other things that, you know what I actually feel like I’m really good at? I just wonder how many more students we would be kind of keeping in that net of engagement and motivated to come to school in an era where, like so many kids are just staying home.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Totally. Every opportunity to make connections, to allow students to be seen for us to not just recognize and celebrate the content, but recognize who these young people are and learners. And as you know, people who are growing into what we hope will be this future generation of amazing citizens who meant great things. But if we continue to do this, come to class, pay attention, do this thing, stay on task, and we don’t do a little bit of the messy work, which is, I think, what a lot of times like makes teachers feel like they don’t want to do this. It’s because it doesn’t feel like a straight line. It doesn’t feel like there’s a clear outcome. It doesn’t feel like I say this and students do this, but it could be a little bit more roundabout and it could feel a little bit more like I’m a facilitator and it could be a little bit more like, I don’t know, all the answers and that would be okay. And how do we get teachers to that space is there’s going to be some hard work of, the level of, you know, post-secondary and training teachers, but also, schools and leaders to do the work to make it, to give permission to do that. Because that is a huge like barrier for teachers, is they think that I’m supposed to operate in this box and I can’t go out of it. And sometimes as leaders, we need to give them the permission to step outside that box in an effort of developing really strong, young people who know what they want to do and be as they grow up.

Catlin Tucker

Well, and I would say get comfortable with the messy because actually learning is super messy. It’s not this tidy little like, we do this and you practice this and we move on to the next thing. The way we present it is actually not how learning works at all. And so yeah, let’s get them comfortable with all the messy and and yeah, give them permission to like not have all the answers and not have to be like, you know, moving at this like this rapid clip where nobody feels like they can even take a second to like, do anything other than teach the lesson that’s in front of them, in the way it’s been written. It’s, it’s such a challenging moment in education.

Shira Woolf Cohen

If we did all these other things, it also we would if we focus on all these other things, then it would be more natural that students will be able to understand and comprehend, do better with the content because we focus on all the things that will allow them to approach it.

Catlin Tucker

Yes, yes. Oh my gosh, I feel like we could talk for another hour.

Shira Woolf Cohen

We could.

Catlin Tucker

But I want to respect your time. I always end the podcast by inviting my guests to share a tip, a strategy. It could be a mindset, a routine, something that just like, helps you strive for some semblance of balance in your life. Since we’re all juggling so much, whether it’s families and careers and whatever, so is there something that works for you?

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. So during Covid, I started, walking and listening to podcasts. So I’ve just I’ve had the pleasure of listening to many of your podcasts, especially, as I was trying to figure out how to transfer my own school to a virtual space. And so I think one of the things I do for balance is I find things that I like to watch or listen to, and I try to do something active while I’m doing that. And so am I doing two things at once. My husband always laughs because I in the background of my work on a daily basis, there are medical dramas and EMT dramas, and maybe that’s from my many years in a school always having so much happening. But for me, doing both of those things of moving and watching or listening allows me to occupy my whole brain. If I’m just walking, I’m still thinking about work. If I’m just watching, I get, you know, I get distracted. So those two things help to bring me balance and really just occupy my whole body, mind and body.

Catlin Tucker

My gosh, I am very much, active paired with the podcast kind of person to whether I’m walking my dog or I’m on the stair climber at the gym. Yeah. So that’s a great, great tip. Well, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. For the book, I will link to the book in the show notes for anybody who’s excited to check it out. But just really appreciate the perspective.

Shira Woolf Cohen

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I, listen to so many of your podcasts, and it’s exciting to be on and just share more about the strategies and the book. And so thank you. Absolutely.

Catlin Tucker

I love this idea of focusing on future ready, career ready skills, future ready kind of learning, getting kids excited about the connections between what they’re doing in the classroom, what they’re learning, and potential careers beyond the classroom.

I think about how many students don’t really see the relevance of what they’re learning in a classroom. And if we as educators can start to make the connections between the skills they’re developing, the roles they’re taking on, the content they’re learning, and specific career pathways beyond school, how many more students might we be able to kind of keep interested, help them see why this is important, what they’re learning, and, kind of the skills that they’re honing. And I like also that we teach in this time where we don’t have to be the expert on every career, we can lean on AI to say, hey, this is what I’m teaching, and how do I make a career connection for my students? Or how what roles might my students take to kind of explore something or hone specific skills? Right. I loved the comment of we’re not just teachers of a particular content. We are teachers of the whole person, the whole child. And how are we thinking about setting them up for success long after they leave our classrooms with skills that are going to allow them to be resilient and flexible as they approach really complex kind of nuanced problems, unfamiliar challenges that they will inevitably face once they are out in the world. So such a great conversation.

I highly recommend the book if you have any questions, any comments, any feedback, I will link to kind of shear as contact information in the show notes, as well as to the book you can always find me online. I’m at Catlin Underscore Tucker on X, I am at Catlin Tucker on Instagram. Or you can always find me on my website catlintucker.com where you can read blogs, post questions and comments there. And as always, I want to thank you guys so much for joining me for this conversation. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.

The post Future-Focused Schools: Career-Connected Learning with Shira Woolf Cohen appeared first on Dr. Catlin Tucker.

The answer, in part, lies in rethinking how we design and facilitate lessons and learning experiences. Too often, whole-group instruction is expected to meet the needs of every student. However, learners bring a diverse mix of strengths, skill levels, learning preferences, and language proficiencies to class. When we rely too heavily on teacher-led, one-size-fits-all lessons, we risk leaving students behind or inadvertently holding others back. That’s where the Station Rotation Model can be a game-changer.

By strategically designing for small-group, differentiated instruction and embracing blended learning structures that support flexibility and choice, we can create more inclusive learning environments. We can shift control over the pace and path of learning to students without sacrificing rigor or engagement.

Why A Study Guide?

I created this free, interactive study guide to help educators, instructional coaches, PLCs, and school leaders encourage thoughtful application of the ideas in the text. Whether you are reading the book on your own, diving into it with a team, or leading a campus-wide book study, this guide is designed to support deeper reflection, collaboration, and implementation.

It is packed with:

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Who Is It For?

This study guide is for any educator, school, or district that is ready to:

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Whether you are new to the Station Rotation Model or looking to refine and elevate your existing practice, this guide is designed to be your companion in that journey.

Let’s Reimagine What’s Possible

The Station Rotation Model is a blended learning model that can help educators reimagine what teaching and learning can look like to better meet the diversity of needs in today’s classrooms.

I hope this guide helps you and your team get the most out of the book and pushes your thinking about what is possible in your own practice.

You can download the free study guide here:

If the book and study guide spark questions or ideas, I’d love to hear from you! You can post a question or comment here or connect with me on social media (X, Instagram, LinkedIn). I’d love for you to share your reflections using the hashtag #StationRotationModel.

If you are looking to support your staff with hands-on, practice-based professional learning to support the shift from whole group lessons to differentiated small group instruction using the Station Rotation Model, feel free to reach out directly to explore professional learning opportunities!

School leaders interested in using the book for a staff-wide study can place a discounted bulk order for 10 or more copies. If you and your teachers need additional support, I offer customized professional learning that is hands-on, practice-based, and tailored to your team’s needs. Together, we can support your teachers in developing their UDL practice, differentiating instruction more effectively, and elevating Tier 1 instruction. We can even utilize the Station Rotation Model to create space for Tier 2 support and Tier 3 intervention within general education classrooms. And, we can explore how this model can help us position students as active agents leading their own learning!

The post Get Your Free Study Guide for The Station Rotation Model and UDL appeared first on Dr. Catlin Tucker.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here and in many of the digital tools teachers already use for lesson planning, grading, and assessment. These platforms are doing much of the heavy lifting in designing instructional materials and assessments. If you already have a favorite tool that works for your context, you may not feel the need to build AI-prompts from scratch. However, for educators who want more control over the design process, AI chatbots can be a game-changer, as Dr. Katie Novak and I explored in our book, Elevating Educational Design with AI.

Unlike fixed tools that generate a single output, chatbots allow us to shape the process. We can clarify our goals, provide detailed information about our teaching context and unique population of students, and provide feedback needed to improve any output provided. This back-and-forth exchange enables us to improve the AI-generated materials until they align perfectly with our instructional goals, standards, and student needs. That level of control requires careful prompting.

Why REFINE Matters

AI has incredible potential to elevate educational design, reducing the cognitive load on teachers. However, AI should not replace the teacher’s professional judgement. The teacher’s role at the start, in engineering strong prompts, sets the foundation for a meaningful and relevant output. And, the teacher’s role at the end, evaluating the AI’s response, ensures the content created by AI is accurate, bias-free, and responsive to students’ needs.

Think of AI as a design thought partner. It can generate ideas, draft assessments, provide construct-specific options, and suggest scaffolds, but it cannot understand your students the way you do. Your expertise, empathy, and contextual knowledge are irreplaceable.

I developed the REFINE acronym for prompt engineering to provide educators with a structured approach to harnessing AI’s creative potential while keeping them firmly in the driver’s seat. Whether you are designing informal checks for understanding, developing performance tasks, crafting lessons and activities, generating rubrics and scaffolds, strong prompts lead to stronger outcomes.

REFINE Acronym

Without detailed instructions, AI may produce generic results. That is why I use the REFINE acronym when coaching teachers on engineering prompts that are more likely to provide valuable and usable outputs. Using an acronym to guide prompting helps teachers write clear, detailed requests that maximize the usefulness of AI in designing lessons, activities, assessments, and other learning experiences.

R – Role: Assign the AI a Specific Role

Assigning a role, like curriculum designer, master teacher, or reading specialist, helps the AI adopt domain-specific knowledge and conventions, resulting in more contextually accurate and specific outputs. Research indicates that role prompts enhance precision and influence tone (Chen et al., 2025). It’s a simple move that yields more detailed and useful results.

Ask AI to: Act as a curriculum designer with expertise in formative assessment for upper elementary students.

E – Expectation: Clearly State The Task or Question

The stronger and more specific the input, the better the output. If we are vague or unclear in our prompting, the AI will respond in kind. Clear, precise instructions reduce ambiguity and misinterpretation, which are common when prompts are too general. Research shows that vague prompts often produce overly broad or generic results.

Ask AI to: Create a short pre-assessment that helps me identify which of my fourth-grade students understand the concept of fractions as part of a whole.

F – Frame: Provide The Relevant Details and Context

Context is critical. Without it, the AI is unlikely to produce a result we can use. We need to provide details such as grade level, subject-specific standards, student needs, language proficiencies, time constraints, and other relevant information to ensure we receive an answer or output that will work for us and our students. When we provide the relevant details and context, AI is more successful at generating tasks, activities, and assessments that will meet our specific needs. This step helps us move from “good idea” to “ready-to-use resource.”

Ask AI to: Align the pre-assessment with the fourth-grade Common Core math standard “4.NF.3 Students understand fractions as a sum of unit fractions, leading to skills in adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators. They can decompose fractions in multiple ways and add/subtract mixed numbers with like denominators using visual models and solving word problems.”

I – Include: Specify What You Want AI to Include in the Response

AI chatbots can create a wide range of items, like bulleted lists, templates, rubrics, visual instructions, and content tailored to specific learning goals. That’s why it’s essential to specify exactly what elements we want in the output to the AI. If we ask for a standards-aligned, mastery-based rubric, we are much more likely to get it. Being explicit also saves time because we don’t have to go back and forth, giving multiple rounds of feedback. The clearer we are upfront, the closer AI gets to what we need the first time.

Ask AI to: Include ten questions of increasing rigor that mix multiple-choice, short answer, and at least one application problem. Provide a simple asset-based rubric aligned to standards 4.NF.3 that I can use to quickly assess student understanding.

N – Nuance: Define the Audience, Tone, and Style

The same content looks very different depending on the audience. Directions for students, for example, need to be clear, simple, and age-appropriate. By contrast, guidance for families or lessons shared with colleagues might use more complex vocabulary or technical language. Nuance helps us match the tone and style of the output to the people who will be engaging with it. Without this step, we risk ending up with content that is accurate, but it may not be accessible or engaging for the intended audience.

Ask AI to: Write the assessment directions in student-friendly language that a fourth-grade student can understand.

E – Evaluate: Analyze the AI Output for Bias, Accuracy, and Relevance; Provide Feedback

This step occurs once we have an output. It prioritizes the teacher’s role at the end of this process, using their subject area expertise and unique understanding of their students to evaluate the output created. Even the strongest prompts don’t guarantee that AI will get it right. Models can make mistakes, oversimplify, or introduce bias. That’s why teachers are essential at the end of the process. We must review the output, verify its accuracy, and ensure it is suitable for our learners. If revisions are needed, we can provide specific feedback to guide the AI in refining or improving the results.

Give AI Feedback: These word problems are great, but the language is too complex for some of my multilingual learners. Can you simplify the vocabulary while retaining the math concepts?

Putting It All Together

Here is what the full request would look like when each step of the REFINE acronym is combined to create a single, comprehensive AI prompt.

Prompt Example: Act as a curriculum designer with expertise in formative assessment for upper elementary students. Create a short pre-assessment that helps me identify which of my fourth-grade students understand the concept of fractions as part of a whole. Align the pre-assessment with the fourth-grade Common Core math standard “4.NF.3 Students understand fractions as a sum of unit fractions, leading to skills in adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators. They can decompose fractions in multiple ways and add/subtract mixed numbers with like denominators using visual models and solving word problems.” Include ten questions of increasing rigor that mix multiple-choice, short answer, and at least one application problem. Provide a simple asset-based rubric aligned to standards 4.NF.3 that I can use to quickly assess student understanding. Write the assessment directions in student-friendly language that a fourth-grade student can understand.

You can check out the output here.

Taking the time to REFINE your prompt may feel like extra work at the start, but it saves time in the long run. A vague prompt often leads to generic outputs that may require multiple rounds of revision and feedback. By investing a bit more time up front, clarifying the AI’s roles, setting clear expectations, and providing the necessary context and nuanced details, you set the AI up to generate stronger drafts the first time. This reduces the need for back-and-forth and gets you to a usable result much faster.

Wrap Up

AI can make designing dynamic, differentiated learning experiences and assessments more manageable, saving time and inspiring educators with new ideas. By assigning AI a role, setting clear expectations, framing the context, specifying inclusions, defining nuances, and critically evaluating the output, teachers can turn an AI chatbot into a powerful instructional design partner.

So, whether you are building your next unit or designing resources for diverse groups of learners, I hope the REFINE acronym provides a roadmap to get the most out of AI while keeping your professional expertise and knowledge of your students at the center of the process.

Want to learn more about designing with AI?

Check out my book, Elevating Educational Design with AI. I also partner with schools to design and facilitate professional learning that empowers educators to use AI thoughtfully to create more inclusive, responsive, and effective learning experiences.

The post REFINE: A Structured Approach to AI Prompting for Educators appeared first on Dr. Catlin Tucker.

Episode Description

In this episode of The Balance, I chat with Sunil Gunderia, Chief Innovation Officer at Age of Learning, the company behind ABCmouse. Sunil is driving efforts to design AI-powered tools that personalize learning for young children while keeping safety and effectiveness at the center.

We discuss how AI can support rather than replace teachers, the importance of guardrails and evidence-based best practices, and the role of personalized learning programs in helping young learners build strong foundations in reading and math. Sunil also shares how programs like My Reading Academy are helping thousands of pre-K students develop confidence, resilience, and a love of learning.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.

Catlin Tucker

Welcome to the balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker, and today my guest is Sunil Gunderia, the Chief Innovation Officer at Age of Learning, the company behind ABCmouse. . At Age of Learning the company behind ABCmouse. And I had the pleasure of meeting Sunil when I was at a leadership symposium and he was facilitating a session on AI and really this kind of potential of AI in education.

Catlin Tucker

And so I thought it’d be really fun to have him on the program and just talk about the work he’s been doing as a chief innovation officer, what he’s learning about AI and best practices for implementation as it relates to learners and specifically younger learners.

Catlin Tucker

Well, I am thrilled we finally got to connect for this conversation. So we met at an Age of Learning kind of symposium for leadership. Coming together, talking about my specific conversation was about AI in education and using it to elevate design. So I’d love for you to start by just sharing a little bit about your journey in the education space.

Catlin Tucker

Like what? A little bit into kind of your role and what it means to be like a Chief Innovation officer? For those of us who might not really understand what that entails.

Sunil Gunderia

Absolutely. Catlin,, thank you for, the opportunity to be on your podcast and, and reach your, your, your amazing audience that I know is super engaged with your work. We met at a forum that we held for leaders at Age of Learning, school leaders at Age of Learning, around our two products. But before I start to talk about that, you know, Age of Learning is best known for ABCmouse, which, we’re proud that, over 600,000 teachers have used ABCmouse in their, their, classroom, and many more have even used it as parents at home with their or their children.

Sunil Gunderia

We’ve had over 15 million kids use age of, ABCmouse wow with their children across the world. And it’s, something that we’ve really focused on from the get go. And I, I was taking a look at your last, podcast with, Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, and they talked about engagement at the teenage years.

Sunil Gunderia

And, and you look at engagement and learning and how important that is. And starting out early. And a big part of, ABCmouse’s success has been that we. Yes, 100%, you know, research based learning is very important and understanding how to do that. But that goes hand in hand with engagement. And I think that is something that we’ve done in spades with ABCmouse.

Sunil Gunderia

And it’s we’re it works for kids. So kids going up to the time they go to school. And ABCmouse is offered to parents directly to use at home. In addition to offering it free to teachers to use in their classroom. That product in particular really has built trust of parents, because it’s not just something that kids do for fun.

Sunil Gunderia

They do it because they learn, but they have fun learning. And it really sets up that mindset of that. Learning is fun. And unfortunately, a lot of times when kids transition from being in home to going to school, learning doesn’t loses that element, of delight. And it’s something that we really try to capture in our products.

Sunil Gunderia

And it’s something that I, you know, we care deeply about. Now, you know, my title is, unique. And I’m sure the title Chief Innovation Officer means a lot of different things, a lot of different companies. I would say that, the core of it and, and really the, the experience that I’ve had at Age of Learning has been to build off of our understanding of what motivates kids to learn what, what empowers the adults around them to support the kids and learning and look at spaces that really need to, that we need, need to address.

Sunil Gunderia

We’ve been really fortunate as a company that we’ve had a lot of success on our consumer product with ABCmouse and I for the last ten years have been able to focus on, all right, how do we solve, the, you know, the next big challenge, which if you look at it from, a overall US perspective, it’s a proficiency in math and reading for young learners with, you know, over 70% of our kids not reaching, proficiency in math and reading.

Sunil Gunderia

And that has been kind of become something that, we felt like as a company that we had a lot of the data, a lot of the research, and honestly, a lot of the, financial wherewithal to start tackling. And that allowed me in a role at the time I was chief strategy officer. But it’s very similar.

Sunil Gunderia

You know, it’s focused on R&D and looking at how do we make systems change and what that involve was like, what, you know, breaking down what goes into learning, to start with. So if you think about the learning sciences, you know, how do we as humans best learn, what should children’s learn? And a lot of the stuff you talk about in terms of how do we personalized learning so that it works for every child, that allowed me to develop out of team of expert, PhDs, teachers, master teachers who really understood learning.

Sunil Gunderia

And then our focus was then how do we create a create products, which we have my math academy in my reading academy that work towards that was the end of improving outcomes for all children. And, that involved creating a personalized mastery learning system, that we have three patents on, and then taking that system because not enough to have patents, it’s not enough to have research, but then showing what can be effective.

Sunil Gunderia

And that’s what we’re really proud about is the evidence that we have that our products, my math and my reading Academy, have 25 studies that show they work in classrooms. And not only do they work in classrooms, they empower the teachers and the parents that use them to use data to better inform their own instruction and support a child’s learning.

Sunil Gunderia

So that’s a lot to say. I would say the last part of it is now, a lot of my work is focused on how do we actually make that system change. So working with policymakers, educators at the district level, at the teacher level, to really understand what evidence is, to understand how we focus on outcomes and, and make sure we’re, we’re we’re looking at the end game being about student results and not just technology and tools.

Sunil Gunderia

It has to be about results.

Catlin Tucker

Know for sure. And so there’s obviously a ton of excitement and fear around AI and education, the role AI is playing in different programs and edge tools that are popping up. How do you kind of see AI being thoughtfully integrated into learning? Because I know there’s from my very first, appearance at a symposium, they’re talking about the role of AI in some of the work you guys are doing.

Catlin Tucker

And you just got back from, an event at Harvard around AI in early, literacy or early education. I’m just curious, like, what is the thinking for you all around that what are the what’s the excitement? What are maybe the fears you have at your level when you think about the expanding role probably of AI?

Sunil Gunderia

Yeah, yeah, I think we have to start with that. AI is not a solution. It’s a tool and a tool that can make our solutions more impactful and more effective. I, in use of AI within whatever we develop must fall, you know, has to follow science and has to be supported with, with evidence of its effectiveness.

Sunil Gunderia

So, you know, we can’t we can’t trade off speed for child well-being. And I think that is something important. And, you know, as a at this, symposium at Harvard, which was it’s really interesting. Also in, in your listeners might be interested in the work of Doctor Michael Rich, whose organization, the Digital Wellness Lab is, who sponsored the, the actual workshop, which included academics, you know, policy folks, ethics folks, and that industry folks.

Sunil Gunderia

On how do we establish guardrails for the effective use of AI, specifically with young kids ages 2 to 6? And, and I think this cross sector collaboration is really essential, because we don’t know all the answers other than we have to, kind of balance between technology that’s moving really fast with AI and, and, and research that tends to move really slow.

Sunil Gunderia

And we can’t be absolutist about. No, we can’t do X, Y, and Z. Otherwise you’re going to lose a lot of the industry participants and, and, or they’ll just do what they want to do and you won’t be able to, but how do we create, you know, guidelines and frameworks that really help understand what a child is capable of, what they where they are developmentally?

Sunil Gunderia

What does the learning science tell us? And, you know, strong, strong belief around how do we enable humans, whether that be a parent, whether that be an educator, whether that be, you know, another caregiver to really support the child in the learning process. And I think those are all things that come came out of the, the symposium and yeah, we do not have an answer, but we have, you know, what we have is a, just an understanding there’s a need to do more and to, provide tools to the developer community to ensure that, look, this is this is, something we want to do in a very safe

Sunil Gunderia

and effective way.

Catlin Tucker

Were there any like, I mean, obviously you guys didn’t like solve anything necessarily, but like were there any surprising insights or tensions that like surfaced when you get all these different kind of voices and perspectives in a room talking about AI in early education or AI in young children?

Sunil Gunderia

Yeah, sure. There’s a broad agreement across the sectors that we need guardrails. Now, how do we get there? I mean, there’s the tension is what I spoke about. It was like, tech is moving really fast and research and regulations move slowly. And I guess the tension was around. There is a tendency, a lot of time to make pronouncements like, don’t do this, don’t do that.

Sunil Gunderia

And, and I and the tension, the tension from an industry perspective is, is going to be, well, what is the evidence tell us. Yeah. You know, is that actually a thing or is that just a desire. And, you know, how do we balance the, the, the desire to do well or do good for kids with the, you know, also holding on to sometimes, strong rooted beliefs that may not be in evidence, for example, that tech is bad or, you know, even like with the, with, a lot of conversation around screen time, there isn’t consensus around screen time for young kids.

Sunil Gunderia

That’s based on evidence. It’s so. And also what it means when you say no screen time. That includes TV. So we know that would include YouTube. And then there is differences if something like what we offer is which with, you know, 30 to 45 minutes use per week, with our two product, with our school based products produce real outcomes.

Sunil Gunderia

It’s interactive, it’s engaging, it’s under the supervision of either a parent or a teacher that actually makes a difference, you know? And you what you see is a lot of times just, you know, based on preferences, just ban everything. And, you know, that’s just not going to work. So the tension is around, like, how do we know what’s going to be effective and how do we limit harms that we may not know in the immediate term?

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, I, I was thinking about the screen time piece when you were talking initially because I do hear a lot of, you know, it’s interesting, I work with so many different educators where kind of the conversation around technology in classrooms is almost like it’s just this huge nuisance, right? Like, that the technology is such a distraction or kids aren’t where they’re supposed to be online, or they’re just looking at a screen all day.

Catlin Tucker

And I think when we talk about technology in general and then obviously now like AI and the role, the expanding role that AI tools and apps might play in classrooms, I’m curious what you think, because I have my own perspective about what these tools and what this technology can allow educators to do that they’re not currently able to do in classrooms.

Catlin Tucker

I’m curious what you think. You know, when you hear people express concern about like AI taking teachers jobs and, kind of eliminating human connection in a classroom at do you think that like, really it’s not about AI, you know, replacing teachers, but maybe allowing the role of the teacher to evolve in ways that really needs to start happening?

Catlin Tucker

I’m just curious, you’re I’m sure you guys think about these things all the time.

Sunil Gunderia

But do we do we think about it a lot and we strongly believe in, in teacher augmentation using technology. I mean, that’s been a real core to our work. If I, you know, I mentioned our patents around my math and my reading academy, which are personalized mastery learning systems. And I know, Catlin, that’s something that you believe in, that we need to, go, you know, move away from the one size fits all model and realize and be able to teach to the great variability that exists in the classroom.

Sunil Gunderia

And what programs like ours allow you to do is take student data on where they are in their learning process based on, and the way a student would enter, our programs, my math or my reading academy, is that we have a, one. And both of the programs are game based. So a student comes into this with, learning that’s in context that we use games to, allow them to learn.

Sunil Gunderia

And, but what we start with is a, is a placement test that understand. And when I say test, it’s a game. But the game tells us what a student brings into the learning situation, and then serves them up, what they’re ready to learn next and provide scaffolded support. And they progress to mastery. So every single child receives a personalized, a personalized, learning path for their progress.

Sunil Gunderia

And what we do because we realize that learning on our platform does not mean that learning is going to transfer. And we enable the teacher then with, you know, rich data on what every where, every child in their classroom is. And now when the when this teacher interacts with the student, they’re able to do it based on where the student is in their learning trajectory and what they can do next to either help transfer that knowledge, support them if they’re struggling, or, you know, or bring in, you know, extra curricular stuff because they’re doing so well.

Sunil Gunderia

And we’ve seen all of these scenarios through our data. And yes, so this the model shifting, it’s knowing that we have this great struggle with so many of our kids not reaching proficiency in foundational subjects like math and reading does suggest that we need a different way to approach, education. I and technology products can enable that.

Sunil Gunderia

And it can, I believe, enrich a data driven approach to education where the educators can really focus on being, or, or they can add to that focus or do more around enrichment and, and support and coaching for the student in terms of, you know, learning. And I think that’s, exciting, especially if we start moving the needle in terms of outcomes because we have to do that.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. I there is an interesting graphic that somebody, I think the first time I was at this symposium shared and it almost looked like, kind of a student walking up, kind of like a brick road. And it was showing how so often, like, there was green bricks and red bricks, and the red bricks were like the concepts or the skills where they weren’t proficient and they, they hadn’t mastered those.

Catlin Tucker

But then showing how so often we’re building on this increasingly weak foundation for learners and how using some of these personalized programs, really, to your point, helps us to identify and target what are the concepts or skills students haven’t mastered? Where might they need a teacher to intervene with some kind of additional instruction guided modeling support? Or, you know, to your point, like assisting transfer so that students really can develop the firm foundation on which they’re going to need to build, especially when we’re talking about things like math and reading and those kind of literacy skills.

Sunil Gunderia

What you saw is our what we call our architecture of understanding. And we think about that for every student is, and you think and learning is works at that, right? You, you learn the most basics and then you build on those skills. But if you have weakness in your foundation or practice, as we like to call it, what we find is that those cracks, we reemerge over and over again, and you can imagine for a first grader coming in or a teacher with 25 kids in their first grade classroom, they have they have 25 kids that are coming in that are going to be all over the place.

Sunil Gunderia

And, I’m a big fan of Todd Rose and, the end of average. And, you know, we know and it relates a lot to the work you’ve been doing and how you think about, personalizing learning. Is it’s unfair to ask a teacher to be able to do that for 25 kids? You just you just don’t have the time or resources.

Sunil Gunderia

I mean, we’re breaking it down. Let’s say that you have a 60 minute math session. You basically have two minutes per child. If you have just over two minutes for a child, you know, in a 60 minute period. So how much can you personalize? So I think where this really works is where technology can serve to identify where red bricks are and to, to, to, strengthen the foundation, where, you know, a first grade teacher where a kid has or a student has issues with pre-K skills or kindergarten skills.

Sunil Gunderia

Those can get handled, you know, through the program. And yet a student that’s ready to advance is ready to move on to second grade or a or above can also do that as well. And, you know, the teacher then can make a decision on where do I want to focus my time, what do I need to do with small groups?

Sunil Gunderia

And, you know, how do I just make it so that I can actually address the variability that exists in every classroom?

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And it’s so interesting because I work so often with educators around how do you design in order to be able to work with small groups and pull them? And there’s still this, like tension of, you know, no, I need to present everything to the whole group and then whatever, it doesn’t work. I’ll fill in those gaps and holes in small group, and I wish we could really find those tools and opportunity to, like, release some of that load over to tech and over to programs.

Catlin Tucker

So teachers are really free to say, I don’t have to march this class full of different learners in different places with different needs through this kind of set lesson. Instead, I can allow them that opportunity to self pace a little bit through a program, follow the pathway that really speaks to their specific needs so that now as a teacher, I can do I can have a much bigger impact by pulling those small groups for whatever specific instructional needs that they might have.

Catlin Tucker

And I feel like we’re at this moment in education where, like teachers know, the whole group approach isn’t really serving them or most of their students, but just this intense fear of like letting tech do what tech does well. So like, we can do what humans do well and work with these small groups to meet their needs. It’s it’s fascinating.

Sunil Gunderia

You know, it’s, rethinking that approach. And I and I know it’s hard the and so much instruction is, I do we do, you do and perhaps it needs to be flipped. You do and then I do based on it being based on what you’ve done and what I understand about you. I mean, our data is pretty clear.

Sunil Gunderia

There isn’t. You know, we don’t see averages emerging, right? And there’s so much variability within a class that there is not a, a, a, a, cluster around the norm right there. So how much of that I do from a teacher, you know, stage on the stage teaching is actually who’s it reaching. If anyone in the classroom where they’re right at their zone of proximal development.

Sunil Gunderia

So you know, and it also then impacts engagement because if you.

Catlin Tucker

Oh yeah.

Sunil Gunderia

You know I, you know I come out of the games business I worked at Disney for 11 years working on mobile gaming. And you know, the idea of, of flow is, is really similar to the idea from Vygotsky, about, you know, zone of proximal development that you, you have to be in to achieve optimal, motivation. You need to be at that point, what a if you’re playing a game, what you’re ready to take on in the game next, if you’re learning what you’re ready to learn next, it just needs to be at that, right level of difficulty.

Sunil Gunderia

And that optimizes motivation and interest. And I think that is, where, like, you know, my background in gaming and then, you know, kind of the work we’ve done and why we felt like a game based approach would be so, so empowering and, and make a difference from a motivation perspective for, for students.

Catlin Tucker

Absolutely. I, I go into so many different classrooms and I’ve, experiences myself as an educator, but I think so many of the, the classroom management issues that teachers encounter, so much of the frustration around lack of student engagement, a lack of general motivation for learning, is blossoming out of the misalignment between the pace at which the learning is moving and the pace at which learners actually needed to move.

Catlin Tucker

It’s also the kind of like in the mismatch of the complexity and rigor for what they’re ready for. To your point, and if we could find ways to kind of meet students where they’re at individually, allowing more control over that pace and pathway, I just think so much of that just challenge in classrooms would be dramatically reduced if not eliminated for from my perspective.

Catlin Tucker

So, I think the engagement motivation piece, which is something a lot of teachers talk about, is a real benefit of, like, hey, let’s reimagine some of the ways that we do this work. So hopefully we’re keeping these kids excited to learn and engaged in the process.

Sunil Gunderia

Indeed. And, you know, that is, you know, in addition to the research that shows that our product, accelerates learning, improves results, gets better outcome outcomes, are we our research also tells us, because we interview and survey teachers as a part of what we do, that not only the teachers are seeing that gains those gains that we’re reporting to our research.

Sunil Gunderia

It in their classrooms, they’re seeing three things that, that are really, I think, long term important. And it was intentional in our design. We, we designed for motivation and, and it’s improved interest by the student in their learning. And that’s the subject areas of reading and math. More confident in their abilities in reading and math and more confident overall.

Sunil Gunderia

And the third one is more confident overall as a learner and identification of themselves as a learner. And that learning happens through some trial and error and making mistakes. And the you, you know, and the you know, the last piece of it is like the resilience that you gain because you know that. All right, I’m going to make a mistake.

Sunil Gunderia

But I can learn from that mistake. And so rather than say, I don’t know something, it becomes I don’t know something yet. And through a learning process I can learn anything. And I think, you know, changing that mindset will have benefit not only especially because we start at such a young age. Our programs are focused on kids from pre-K to second grade.

Sunil Gunderia

Yeah, that if we can get them there with both the mindset and confidence and interest in learning at a young age, and we can get them with the actual, foundational skills they need, I think we do create an environment where more kids will thrive and flourish.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And honestly, like the young ones as the disengaged teenager authors like share in that book, young kids are generally really positive about learning. They’re really positive about school. They’re excited to be there for the most part. But I think part of what I have to imagine happens for learners after third grade is there are a lot of changes that happen in the way I think that we approach teaching third grade and up in elementary, but I also think like third grade stuff starts to get hard.

Catlin Tucker

And without that foundational strength of like, I have what I need to be successful to build in terms of these math or literacy skills, then I can see kids just getting so frustrated and disillusioned with like, wow, I don’t feel like I can be successful in here. Which is why I think that focus on foundational skill building for really young learners is probably critical to set them up, to continue loving school and being excited about this experience.

Sunil Gunderia

And in, in, you know, putting going back to the architecture, my understanding is it’s really especially hard if you have weakness in your foundation. Getting into third grade to third grade does get so much more complex. And, you know, the expectation is that you’re going from learning to read, learning to decode, to actually reading with, you know, with a high level of comprehension and vocabulary.

Sunil Gunderia

And as we know, we have a very diverse population that has a lot of different lived experiences. And, you know, a lot of the context that’s missing in reading, is about prior knowledge. I believe in some of the things that we see. So if you can’t decode, going into second grade and third grade or you having issues with decoding, yeah, you’re going to have, you know, school becomes really difficult and really hard.

Sunil Gunderia

And, you know, that’s why, it’s so important. And we’ve seen some really great gains. I want to talk about one example in really early, in, pre-K with my reading academy. And this also speaks to like some of the role as a chief innovation officer because it is at Florida’s, we had a, implementation.

Sunil Gunderia

We’ve been implemented in Florida, in Palm Beach County, which, despite what people think about Palm Beach, it’s actually a very diverse county with almost 50% of the students there. Eligible for free or reduced price lunch or, you know, being title one student. So there’s, there’s, you know, a lot of different parts of Palm Beach.

Sunil Gunderia

We, we work with the early learning Coalition of Palm Beach there, to offer my reading Academy to about 8000, 8000 students, of which 5000 actually used our program and, or my reading academy over the course of a school year. Florida’s added, measurement in, in pre-K to determine whether, we determine progress. They as a business community, and as from a legislative perspective, they have a target by 2030 of getting all kids kindergarten ready.

Sunil Gunderia

That means ready to read. So they come in ready to adjust school, you know, very important and I think very interesting that a the business community, because this is backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the blueprint Florida blueprint to actually move the needle in terms of early learning, because they’ve identified that as so powerful in terms of changing the trajectory of their workforce and the ability, to grow and thrive.

Sunil Gunderia

Both as an economy and for their populace. And so we worked with, the Early Learning Coalition there to offer our program 37 minutes of using my Reading Academy per week on an average of just about 20 weeks over the school year. So a 45% improvement in literacy results at the end of the school year, based on looking at pre and post results and that kind of moving the needle and you know having and Florida system is universal access.

Sunil Gunderia

So anybody can go to pre-K. It’s available to all. You know now that allows us to have conversations at the state level, not only in Florida and say, look, high quality programs that are offered. Yeah. And I forgot one thing. The model is also interesting in that it’s a, mixed delivery model. It’s not just to a district school.

Sunil Gunderia

It can be a child care center, privately owned, publicly owned, parochial. It doesn’t matter. They’re all eligible to offer, pre-kindergarten classes, and all students can go there, without any eligibility requirement. So there’s no limitation on income. That so now you can have a conversation about like, look, you have a program that’s really lifting results, making a difference.

Sunil Gunderia

What else can we do? How else may we want to approach this legislatively. And, you know, as you look at the investment in pre-K across the country, does this now start serving a model so other states can replicate? Like, not only do we want to offer pre-K because it’s good and there’s really, you know, a lot of relationship, building and social emotional skills that happen during that time that you want to develop.

Sunil Gunderia

But can we get academic results that are really going to help our low income populations, thrive when they come into a district environment, into the K-12 environment?

Catlin Tucker

Wow. No, that’s really exciting because I know there are so many, so many conversations happening in education about early, you know, education and how to strengthen it and how to make sure kids like, to your point, are walking into kindergarten with the skills and, you know, the basic foundational stuff they need to be successful right off the bat.

Catlin Tucker

So that’s exciting. So when we think about, like, AI and young children, is there anything for you as chief Innovation officer or like moving forward, thinking about your products and offerings? That is something that concerns you or worries you or is just on your mind because, I mean, we talk about AI even like when I talk to secondary teachers who are experimenting with certain AI tools, there’s like concerns about everything from what kids share to safety to accuracy to all those pieces.

Catlin Tucker

I’m just curious from your perspective for early in education yet such young learners, is there anything specific that you think about or you’re concerned about?

Sunil Gunderia

Yeah, I would say that, first, you know, look at and we’ve talked about this previously. Innovate. Edu offers, something called the Ed safe. I framework that it’s called safe. It’s, you know, is the technology safe, accountable, fair and effective? I think, you know, looking at, for all of us looking at it through that, a level, that lens, AI does tend to have a lot of bias.

Sunil Gunderia

And, it can go off the rails and we hear a lot of horror stories about that. But I think the most basic, the basic way to look at it is it’s safe and safe, you know, is, is, a big word. And, you know, as an educator, you need to be you need to be certain or as a parent, that is what are the potential harms and what can I find out about that?

Sunil Gunderia

For a product, is it grounded in how kids learn? If it’s a learning product, is it developmentally appropriate? You know, think through that lens. And then, you know, as a, as a, with a big focus on evidence, is it effective? Look at what research they’ve done. Is it going to improve? What is it going to help?

Sunil Gunderia

Look at the theory of change at a minimum, like what is this product going to do for my child and or my student? And using that as a lens I think is really helpful. I would say that, I’m, I’m a techno optimist, but also a techno realist and that, I see, there is, great potential, but I you got to weigh the peril as well.

Sunil Gunderia

And I think that, you know, I wish I could have a clear answer on this. It is, incredibly great times to live in. We can do so much more. We see with ABCmouse in our in our, in our company that we’re able to do things that we couldn’t do. One of the things that we just recently launched that would have taken, you know, a long time, multiple years to develop.

Sunil Gunderia

The for is multilingual support in our, in our reading and math products. Right. So how can we you know, now we can do it, you know, address a lot of languages, not only for the student as they use our product, but also at home for parents that we know in the school setting are going to speak many, many different heritage languages so we can get them more involved as well.

Sunil Gunderia

Those are all on the potential side. Again, I think on the, parallel side, we just have to continue to evaluate, you know, use a lens of is it safe and, and, and keep vigilant about that. Yeah. I, I that is, that is the way I would approach it or how I think about it.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And so there’s obviously so many conversations happening about I. Do you have any advice you’d give to educators or families that are really just trying to kind of like make sense of the noise around? I, I know that a lot of educators and a lot of parents are like, I feel inundated by AI and the conversations about it, and I don’t really have a clear sense of how to make smart decisions for my students or for my children.

Sunil Gunderia

I mean, I can empathize with that. All right. I’m sure you are as well. I, I am inundated by AI for my own use. My kids use everyone’s use. Right. I think it’s, you start with them just, you know, don’t be afraid to ask for proof. You know, ask those direct questions, you know? How do I know?

Sunil Gunderia

What say you know, how do I know that? It’s not bias. How do I know, that it’s effective? You know, those questions should be something you’re thinking about, or you should be asking developers, you know, send them an email, send them, you know, if it’s in a school setting and you’re asked, during your actions, you know, a new product that’s coming out, ask those questions like, hey, how do I know this is this is going to benefit my kids or my students?

Sunil Gunderia

And then I would say, save for the parents at home and, you know, in the classroom setting, what outcomes are you looking for? Let those drive your goals, not the tech. It’s not about tools. It’s about outcomes in all ways. You know, think it through that way. Like, this is what I need to achieve for my kids.

Sunil Gunderia

This is what my classroom looks like. These are the students that show that are there. This is where they’re from. This is what they tend to know and not know. And then how does how does your technology program support who I am responsible for? I think that’s the way to approach it.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And I would love to see school leaders really not just like getting excited to this conversation about the AI tools themselves. Like, yeah, they’re great, but are we actually providing that professional learning support? So that educators know how to kind of like, pull it into their practice, weave it into the fabric of a lesson so that it is truly elevating the instructional, the learning experience, the quality of learning.

Catlin Tucker

But also like, did teachers know, okay, if kids are using this product and doing this self-paced work, what should I be doing? How do I read this data? How do I pull small groups? What instructional strategies can I use? Because I think so often it’s like, hey, here’s this tool we’re adopting that you’re going to use. And professional learning is all about like navigating the tool instead of like, what does this mean for the way we’re actually design learning experiences?

Catlin Tucker

And for me, that’s like an area I feel like needs more investment.

Sunil Gunderia

And I do think that’s going to be a, a big part of the future is these tools are, especially when you when you look at human in the loop tools that focus not just on a single part of this experience, but look at it holistically. You know, one of the parts of the work we did was we, we looked at a personalized mastery learning ecosystem, which not only looked at the student data, but how the student data informs the what the teacher can do and what the parent can do.

Sunil Gunderia

I mean, we have this incredible opportunity to use learning data on an individual student basis to inform, better support, better, better, transfer better intervention on this, on the, on the teacher side. And then at home, this incredible opportunity to really engage as a parent with what your kid learned, not at the end of a quarter or a semester or a week or on an exam, but every day.

Sunil Gunderia

And, you know, if your child learns to count to 20 and you’re able to say, I heard you learn to count that I’m so proud of you, and why don’t you do that for me? That is going to really change the whole perspective, that learning isn’t relegated to this classroom I go to. But it’s it’s at home and my parents care about it.

Sunil Gunderia

My grandparents care about it. And then I, you know, as a parent, you know, you know, they’ve learned to count to 20. Let’s go. Here’s some activities to do with you, with them when you’re in the grocery store, in the car. And that can, you know, really transfer to like learning isn’t just for the classroom. It learning is for life.

Sunil Gunderia

And that is you know, and I think that’s our goal as educators.

Catlin Tucker

I love that so much because it is creating, you know, I always say like learning is a partnership between teacher and learner, but it also is a partnership with the parents and the families at home. Right? The more we create kind of connection to your point about what’s happening in classrooms, create like little windows into the work kids are doing in the successes they’re having, and have a better sense of how we reinforce and celebrate and kind of, support that in the home environment.

Catlin Tucker

I could see just how much more powerful the learning happening in the classroom would feel for students when they’re like, ooh, I can like, do all kinds of stuff everywhere with these things. I’m learning.

Sunil Gunderia

It. Absolutely. And it’s a I think it’s it’s a one of the big if you think about AI literacy for all of us is that this idea that learning is terminal and ends, you know, when you graduate from high school or graduate from college is no longer a reality that we live in, we are going to need as humans to continue to learn and adapt as technology moves really quickly.

Sunil Gunderia

And, you know, our roles change and our jobs change. And I think that’s, you know, across whether you’re teaching in a classroom, or you’re, you know, a parent like you and I are in our jobs, they’re really going to change in what we do and how we deliver what we do and the value of it is going to change in the way we stay ahead of it by just committing ourselves to being lifelong learners.

Sunil Gunderia

And I think that if we can establish that early for, for our, for our, our, our, our students and our kids, that don’t approach learning is and that’s why that motivation aspect also is so important. You know, if we can make a learning something that is both, interesting and practical and, and, and thoughtful about the human learning experience, I think we’re going to have a lot more, kids, embrace that is learning is something I want to do.

Sunil Gunderia

And I love to do.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love that. Well, I always conclude our conversations by inviting my guests to share any like, tip routine kind of strategy that they use to create some semblance of a healthy work life balance. To the name of the podcast. So I’m curious what works for you.

Sunil Gunderia

You know, and then I thought about this question a lot, and I’m like, what are my strategies? And, oh, it’s really interesting. And this is, from a balanced perspective, I love what I do. I love my job and, and I, and I really gain a lot of, of, peace of mind by, by even in my free time, you know, when I’m on, you know, what would I like to do is I like to go on hikes and, you know, like to read.

Sunil Gunderia

I like a podcast, but, you know, using those moments to expand my, my understanding knowledge about what learning is, how education works, what it’s going to look like in the future. I find that really fulfilling. I mean, it’s not in front of a screen necessarily, but it is, something that I like to look at. Anything. Look, I like to read, near science fiction.

Sunil Gunderia

It’s, really interesting to me because I feel like I love seeing, like, what we’re doing now and what it may look like from the lens of a futurist that’s thinking about what impact it’s going to have. And in ten years, 15 years, 20 years. So, I don’t know that, you know, if you can find something you really love to do, then it doesn’t.

Sunil Gunderia

It’s no longer work. And that balancing works out. It’s certainly an ask for me.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, yeah. Well, it seems very appropriate that’s your reading as an innovation officer. Always thinking about thinking forward about the next thing or the possibilities. So thank you so much for joining me. I am thrilled that we were able to connect. I appreciate all your insights and just appreciate you being here.

Sunil Gunderia

Thank you for doing what you do. It’s it’s, it’s, great to have gotten the opportunity to see Scotland. And I look forward to listening to this. Thank you very.

Catlin Tucker

As I reflect on this conversation, one of the things I keep thinking about is kind of the disconnect between the rapid pace of change when we’re talking about AI and how it’s being used in all different sectors, but particularly in education, where we’re using it with learners who are young or learners really of any age, and not really sure exactly what best practices are, because the research is so much slower to be done and published and out there compared to this rapid rate of change.

Catlin Tucker

And how important it is, like the, Harvard conference or symposium that Sunil was referencing about the importance of getting lots of different stakeholders in a room together, having conversations about how we’re using AI, what are the things we’re concerned about, how do we keep students safe in this moment where the AI is changing so rapidly and it has so much potential, but there are really real challenges and dangers associated with it, too.

Catlin Tucker

So I really appreciated his perspective as somebody who is like in it kind of co inventing AI powered personalization, kind of learning systems to shed some light on where we’re at in this moment as educators with AI. So as always I want to thank you guys for spending this time with me. If you have any questions for me, you can reach out on, social.

Catlin Tucker

I’m on @Catlin_Tucker I’m on Instagram @CatlinTucker. You can always leave me a note on my website. CatlinTucker.com. And I will also include Sunil’s contact information for anybody who wants to reach out directly to him. And I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week.

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