IBTT 26 - Mandala

Yeah, actually similarly I had learned at one point that m uh infinite choices is just gonna lead everybody to paralysis. Really we need two to four choices and that's enough.

Hello and welcome back to IB Teacher Talk. I am your host. My name is Mr. Daniel Lambert, and I am here with the wonderful, the fantastic, the exceptional. Oh hi, I'm Rachel. Rachel doesn't have a surname. She doesn't need one. She's ra she's like Pele. I'm trying to get off my face. Everything to say. That's the first. And Rachel, who are we here with today? Dan, we're here today with Mandala Barab. Hi Mindala, how are you? Hey, I'm good. Happy to be here. Excellent. Hahaha

That's all right, don't worry. He'll he'll get used to it as the show goes on. Great way to start. Mandala, can you tell us about yourself? Um, yeah, so I am American. I've lived and worked abroad since two thousand nine. This is my fourteenth year teaching. I started in New York City with the New York City teaching fellows. And Mandala, did I say that right? Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching?

Uh yeah, so I studied philosophy. I went to the University of Texas and I studied philosophy and not a lot of jobs with philosophy. And so somehow I just had this sense that I needed to leave Texas and teaching was an option. So I applied for the New York City Teaching Fellows and went through a mini quarter life crisis about moving to the city and then went for it and so started teaching at a public school in Brooklyn. called PS one five nine. Um And got my master's degree at the same time.

Hold on. The school was called PS one hundred five nine. Yes. Sounds like a robot in a terminator. film. School one five it's actually PS one five nine K. Um but that school didn't have a uh playground. It was just a broken concrete yard. It was tough.

Oh man. Yeah, I've I've had many teacher friends from New York and uh I've only heard stories I've never Can you tell us how your teaching has changed from when you started in New York from n to now? So that job in New York taught me that so I began as a elementary school teacher, grade two. And if you couldn't manage students, you couldn't do anything. And then my next school was an international school in Abu Dhabi. And and now I'm out of school in Singapore.

And there's kind of been a trajectory of loosening the reins where initially everything has to be really tight. And then now at the school where I am, it's actually where can I give more freedom? Things need to be very clear what the expectation is. But where can I open it up for student choice and student voice and oh yeah, we could do that. You know, anytime students come to me, hey, could I do it like this? I like to say yes.

So Rach, I guess the question that comes up for me is how can we as high school teachers learn from elementary school teachers or even from middle school teachers? I I think I don't think that's a question for me. I think it's for Mandela. Okay, Mandala, over to you. I think that's a great question. Um Thank you, thank you. Ha ha. One thing that I would love to see is a peer observation program across divisions.

Because I think high school teachers could really learn a lot from just seeing, Oh, how do we get these kids to talk to each other? Um and I think it would work the other way too. Actually, maybe elementary school teachers would have less to learn from high school teachers because developmentally it's so different. But for sure, from the older kids to the lower kids, we could definitely there's a lot to learn.

Yeah, the patience, um, the time. You just listening to you speak, I can tell that you s you teach kids that are younger because you're very thoughtful about your words, but also you are you know Very thoughtful. What are you trying to say? I don't know. I'm saying that Dan sometimes says things and I can't understand what he's saying and he gets into a rush of word vomit. That's because I'm speaking British. Oh. Is that what that is? I'm so sad.

Mandala, what moral obligations do teachers have? That is such a question at this moment. You know, it's been clear for a decade. that teachers today are preparing students for jobs and responsibilities that don't already exist. So we're talking about like those twenty first century learning skills. But with the advent of generative AI, it's even more obvious that that teachers have a moral obligation to teach critical thinking and analysis.

You know, it was one thing when it was just I could access any information with a Google search. But now it's even easier. to get to new information and we need to have an even more critical mindset evaluating that information and then really making connections personally. So I think the moral obligation is around You know, with our parents' generation, it was what do you know? Can you cram all of this information into your head for short term regurgitation?

Now it's much more about the thinking and the connection making and the analysis. I mean, it feels to me like it's part moral obligation and part just doing your job preparing students for the future that they're gonna envisage or they're gonna live in, yeah? It's really pragmatism.

Yeah, exactly. And so in terms of what we're doing, the the idea of the the five paragraph essay may very soon just go out the window. And so we need to start to look for what else can we do instead of making them write essays. I love making them write But why does it have to be five paragraph? You make'em write five paragraph essays.

Okay, when I'm feeling wild, maybe six. But the the the idea is the same, is that that that that sort of strict structure of writing task is is pretty much done with because generative AI can do it a lot better we can and definitely better than our students can. So what do we how do we use that analytical how do we teach those analytical skills that can prepare the students better

I mean I have a couple thoughts with that. One, what that f classic five paragraph essay is doing is teaching us to structure an argument and provide evidence. So that's a good thing. Um one thing that we've done in the middle school INS department is pivot to some Socratic seminars.

It doesn't work well for everybody because some of us are really fast thinkers. And for those kids, it's awesome. Actually, I have to do less work. I can do a little bit of prep, and then I can BS my way through a Socratic seminar, use this vocabulary, and connect to everybody else. But those kinds of in-person tasks may begin to take precedence when we don't know if we can trust student work.

I I appreciate that you're trying to do that with your class because If I was a sixth grade teacher, I think I would avoid it, but I I can see how it'd be good for them to try it out at that age. Well and it's kind of in line with universal design for learning that we have a range of assessment tests. So some kids are great at writing and Socratic seminar causes a lot of stress. But then we also want to get the other side too.

Can I ask you to just break down a little bit universal design for learning, which is also known as UDL? What d what does that mean to you? Universal Design for Learning is a very elegant system where we're thinking about how can we open up possibilities at different stages of learning. So an easy example is not everybody's a great reader.

So if the only way I have for students to learn about a topic is they need to read this article, then those kids who aren't great readers are gonna be locked out of classroom discussion. But if I include some videos, well then their difficulty with reading won't block them from the content. The idea is the material itself. But it's also wider than that. It's also about how are students showing their understanding and how are we keeping students engaged. What do you think, Rach?

Why do you keep asking me what I think? What do you think, Dan? Thanks, Rach. Um I I've I I actually did a trailblazer course for UDL and I found it fascinating. But there were definitely some areas that I found quite um difficult to work in. And one was the what I like to call the easy path option. is in often in creating a selection of pathways for students to show their knowledge.

students would often like go for the easiest path. And so I'd have to create methods of forcing them to choose different paths at different times. So it was still a little bit You've got the choice, but you've got only certain choices at certain time and only so many times. So it was about managing the choice I think more than anything. Yeah, actually similarly I had learned at one point that Mm uh infinite choices is just gonna lead everybody to paralysis. Really we need two to four choices.

And that's enough. I remember the first time I went to the US, I went into one of those convenience stores and they had and I wanted to get a drink. And I went I went up to the fridge and it wasn't a fridge. It was like seven fridges and they were just all full of these drinks. And I was so confused that I walked out without a drink. That was the infinity of choices that just That's a classic New York City story. You go to the bodega and there's 1,000 choices and they're all Wow.

How do we create classroom environments that make students feel like that's a place that they belong? Something that I do is I always start every lesson with a discussion question. Not related to the lesson at all. So students come in and we sit down and we talk about some random thing and often I'll have students report out what someone else at their table said.

So that they are still listening and engaged. And then I also have these it's called like popsicle sticks. You know, I have every student's name written down and then I pull them. So everybody's voice is heard in class at least once every lesson. And then I keep going with the random calling. And if a student doesn't know, then they say I don't know. And it's okay. And we keep moving. But everybody's kind of on the hook all the time.

I want to know what you think and I'm not gonna have those those kids that used to sit at the front of the room and raise their hand all the time. They're not gonna overpower it. But also those kids that like to sit in the back, we're gonna hear from them too.

I actually I do I do those same things as well. And at first I've had some pushback from high school students because I think they get really comfortable sitting in the back and having that one person um raise their hand all the time. But I think that

It's good to keep them on edge and they need to be ready. They need to be thinking. What I tell them is I say, the reason why I do this is because I'm giving you time to think. And every time you think, you're making those connections, you're learning. The moment that somebody raises their hand and yells the answer, you're not learning anymore. You're done. You know you don't have to. Exactly. But that time, that wait time, that's when you get the you know, the connections in your brain moving.

Uh something else I'll do is so I'll give some kind of question or prompt and the table will talk about it. And then it when it comes to share out, you don't have to tell me your idea. You can say what came up at the table. So really it's putting the emphasis on the ideas, not just that person or their recall. I feel like I'm talking to a mere image of myself as a teacher. It does sound like your classroom, Rachel, which I visited a few times.

It's it's one of the best. That's that's for sure. And I'm being honest for once. I've really enjoyed visiting your classroom because I've I really like the activities that you do that really include everybody.

Mandala, can you tell us if you have any advice for other teachers that they might not agree with? Haha. Can you share it with us? I'm excited too. Yeah. Um you know when I was going to school it was Don't show anyone your work. So there's this shroud of privacy around student work and of course around grade.

And so the bit of advice that maybe teachers today are savvy enough to easily accept, but definitely yesterday's teachers weren't, is that every student should be able to see every other student. So I in all of my classes, I have students just post regularly in a Padlet. Which is just a format where you can kind of scroll across and see.

Because and the reason I started doing this is because I realized There's something that I call the feedback processing delay, which is that time that it takes for a teacher to evaluate and put feedback on student work means That feedback won't have any impact on learning. So we've all had that experience of I submit something and an oddly long amount of time later it comes back to me and it doesn't even matter.

Because it's too far outside the timely window. But as teachers we know that's just how long it took. If each assessment takes fifteen minutes, twenty minutes to mark, it's just multiple cases. So I have to deal with that delay in a way that means my students will benefit from feedback.

And one way I can do that is if everybody can see everybody's work. So then we could just do, okay, everybody, scroll across scroll across the Padlet right now, read every single post, and then I want to know which three you think are best. So then we begin co constructing success criteria. And another move we've done is we've depersonalized the learning. So it's not about that kid. This isn't about Dan's work. This is about, oh, look what what's there.

Which also makes the feedback easier to take. Right. So all of these moves are kind of embedded there. And so I call this moving from a kind of private learning to a public learning paradigm. And I that's controversial. Not all teachers are ready for that because there's always the fear like, what about that one kid? What's gonna happen? And a few years ago when I started doing this, I had a student who dealt with anxiety.

And at first she was like, No, I don't wanna do this and I was like, Okay. You're still gonna look at other people's work, but you can privately submit. And by quarter two, she was just in it. This is just how we operate. It didn't become a thing. So that's one way I deal with this delay. But AI is another way potentially going forward that we may be able to skirt the feedback processing delay. Here's another scenario.

Of you. And it the the discussion of unit design is really what made me think about it. It's something I've been considering recently. What do you think about the idea of giving students the opportunity to reassess? Once they've finished, they've got their feedback.

and they feel like they didn't do it correctly and they want a chance to do the same task again, perhaps different prompts, but testing exactly the same skills. How can we make space for that? Should we make space for that in our classrooms and in our unit designs? I think that's a great question. It's something that comes up in the world of UDL a lot. On the one hand, it's great because everybody makes a misstep.

Everybody, it's easy to give students another chance to show us what It can create a dependency where, oh, I know I'm not going to do well, so I'll just fail this one, get some feedback, and then do the thing that the teacher told me to do. On the other hand, it also creates additional workload for teachers. And we can't ignore that. So I think it's about achieving some kind of balance. I d what I love to do is a near transfer, formative to summative.

So what I mean by that is my formative isn't my formative is a very similar kind of rich task. So we're researching and we're doing some w thing with the research. And then I changed the context for the summative. So we create that opportunity. And plus that's how we can measure growth.

I if if students are doing radically different tasks that we call formative and then we're expecting them to put it all together mysteriously on a summative, that's not the same thing. And we can't really measure growth from that. What do you think, Dan? What are your thoughts? You gotta give me the No. Dan, what do you think?

When when I've introduced the idea of reassessment into a class, I I front load it and I say in this class I'm interested in of offering the opportunity to reassess I want everybody to be in full agreement with that in terms of the equity, which is if we do an assessment and two students choose to reassess, everybody in this class has to be fine.

And so we kind of set that as a rule of the class. Reassessment can happen in this class if you choose to do the extra work and like you said, and then I choose to do the extra work of giving you even more um feedback. You find students take advantage of that? Uh in in I feel that you're talking about in a negative way or a positive way? I'm thinking in a negative, but it could be both.

nearly always in a positive way. Nearly always. Because the student has to be um ke uh keen enough to put the work in again and do the extra work and do the task twice. And the the kids that aren't or maybe more interested in like taking The easy route are not those kind of stu students. Those are the ones uh who will just like do it once and not get a good job and not

Mandala, we sometimes ask people to recommend books to us. Do you have any for us today? I have two that I would love to recommend. Uh Um what do you think, Rach? Are we gonna allow for two? Um if one book you had to burn. I'm just kidding. No. Yes, we are going to have to. Kill Don't get all Fahrenheit four five one. Okay. So I've got two books that I want to recommend. The first book is a book for teachers called Powerful Teaching. By Puja Agarwal and Patrice Banks.

And this book breaks down learning science into these four moves that we can easily incorporate into our units. So that's spacing, interleaving. Medica uh metacognitive feedback and then retrieval practice. These are the building blocks of learning. And when teachers don't know about them, we disadvantage ourselves. And for me, that's been powerful because I realized for many years as a teacher, I was working myself into the ground.

And we would come to the end of a unit and only then do I realize that, oh, my students didn't get it. Mm-hmm. And that's because I wasn't doing enough of this. And so a classic example of what is what do we mean by interleaving is In a math unit, I do a whole worksheet of multiplication problems and then a whole worksheet of division problems. And the first time students see a mixed set is on the assessment, and suddenly they don't know what strategy.

So when we interleave these skills, we create much more powerful learning. The other book I would w want to recommend is for more than just teachers, really for school leaders. This one's called Thinking and Systems a Primer by Daniella Meadows. So systems thinking is a whole other ballgame. where we begin to broaden our scope.

to look at where systems don't achieve their stated ends. And this happens in schools every day. We say that we wanna do this and this and this. And sometimes we don't even realize that we're not doing that. Or that what we're doing will not do. So when we begin to s see the world in systems, we can identify leverage points where, oh, maybe that thing isn't happening because of- And thinking in systems is about more than schools too. You know, no one wanted the climate to change.

But that's an unintended system effect from what we're doing. So if we're going to tackle big problems, we need to be able to think consistently. And so this one is just a great book, it's very highly reviewed. It breaks down these system principles in ways that's easy to understand. And so you walk away thinking like, oh, oh, that I I noticed that too, but I didn't have language for it.

So it was after reading Think and S thinking and Systems that I realized the feedback processing delay. As teachers, we all know that. Everybody knows that, but there's no name for it. We don't understand how the delay is a system effect that means teachers' hard work doesn't create impacts on learning. Mandala, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been enriching and educational. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, Mandala.

Thank you. It's been a great it's been great being here. Thank you. 拜拜 I B teacher.