Douglas Fisher (00:00):

It’s not that you have to become a reading specialist to integrate literacy into science. It’s how our brains work.

Eric Cross (00:10):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross. This season, we’re making the case for our favorite underdog, which of course is science. Each episode we’re showing how science can be better utilized in the classroom, and making the case for why it’s so important to do so. In our last episode, we examined the evidence showing that science and English instruction can support each other. And now on this episode, we want to give you some more strategies for really making that a reality in your own home or classroom or community. So to help me, I’m joined on this episode by Dr. Douglas Fisher, Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University. Dr. Fisher is actually someone who has conducted literacy training at my own school, so I’m excited to be able to share some of his wisdom with all of you. Oh, and just a heads up, Dr. Fisher dropped some gems about the ways teachers can integrate literacy and science in their classrooms. So you may want to have a notepad. Ready. And now here’s my conversation with Dr. Douglas Fisher.

Eric Cross (01:12):

Well, Doug, thank you for your time and for being willing to come and talk about literacy and science. I know you’re busy, all over the place, and so I was super-excited that we were able to lock you in and talk about this. And, on this episode, we’re gonna talk about the ways that science and literacy can support each other. And one of the reasons why I’m really excited for you is because you said some really key things for me as a science teacher, when you talked about literacy and supporting students. That just resonated so deeply in me. And I was like, “I need more Doug!” Because we’re on that same frequency. And I know it’s a subject that you’ve spent a lot of time writing about. So can you tell us a little bit about how this became an area of interest or a passion for you? Just literacy, and all of the work that you’ve put into it?

Douglas Fisher (01:54):

Yeah. So I’ve wanted to be a teacher for a really long time. And I went to San Diego State as an undergraduate, and I was taking English class and we were assigned topics. You know, like, you’ll do an assignment, you’ll write a paper for this English class. And I got the topic “illiteracy,” and I was a freshman at San Diego State reading all of these things about adults who don’t read very well or not at all. And I ended up writing my very first college essay on illiteracy — at the time, you know, called illiteracy, at the time. And so I got super interested in this. And so as I moved through college and into my teaching career, literacy became a really important thing for me to think about, because it’s the gatekeeper. You know, you can be taken advantage of, if you’re not very literate. People can use vocabulary against you, if you’re not very literate. We know that people who have higher levels of literacy have better health outcomes. They have better lifespans, longer lifespans. I mean, there’s just — literacy impacts so much more than “Are you reading your fourth-grade textbook?” It really has lifelong implications.

Eric Cross (03:01):

That part that you said about being taken advantage of … I just got a flyer in the mail yesterday. It was one of these mailers that looked like it was an authentic debt-reduction type of thing, but it was really just like a marketing email. If you read the fine print at the very bottom, it had all of this jargon about “This is a paid, you know, for-profit company.” But when you look at it, it had official stamps all over it. And I could imagine if someone’s receiving that, that probably fools a lot of people. Is that kinda like what you’re talking about, like being taken advantage of?

Douglas Fisher (03:28):

Yes. I had a student turn 18, got a letter from a “credit card company” that was offering her daily compounding interest. And if you don’t know what that means — at 23 percent! — if you dunno what that means, you are gonna be a victim. Literacy really influences a lot of our life. It’s also how our brain works. We have a language-based system in our brain. We read, write, speak, listen, and view. And the things we learn, we learn through speaking, reading, writing, listening, and viewing. From what we know, we are the only species that has an external storage mechanism. Like, we have the ability to store complex information outside of our body, in the form of notes. We can type them. We can write them. And we can then go back and retrieve that information, that complex orthographic information later. And it means the same thing. We can say we have a storage system and we’ve been doing this for a really long time. Way back to, you know, hieroglyphics and messages on cave walls. And throughout the ages of humans learning, how to store information that they can re-access again later. That’s become a super-complicated system. It’s how computers operate. And we send messages to each other and we text each other and we write things down, and we’re really good at putting ideas, information out there. Now, if it’s just speaking and listening, then we can forget it. We can say, “No, you said this,” or “I said that.” But when it’s written, and it’s print literacy, you know, it’s the orthographics there, you can go back to the same message and over and over again. Now, you might change the interpretation of it, but the message is still there.

Eric Cross (05:16):

Right. And that is such a key element, at least of modern education, is this written element of it. It’s what many schools live and die by. They’re quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed by it. It’s public. They can see it. And so there’s this heavy emphasis. And why do you think science and literacy can be powerful allies together?

Douglas Fisher (05:38):

Awesome. Well, it’s hard to learn science if you’re not literate.

Eric Cross (05:42):

This is true.

Douglas Fisher (05:42):

But that’s a one-way direction. And yes, science teachers and scientists do a lot of reading, writing, speaking, and listening and viewing. They use the five literacy processes all the time. When we interview scientists, they spend a lot of their time reading the work of other scientists and writing their findings, writing grant proposals, presenting at conferences, you know. So a huge part of the work of a scientist is not just at a bench conducting experiments. But even if you’re conducting experiments, you’re using your literacy processes to think about what you’re seeing in your experiment. So that’s a one-way direction. And I do think literacy has an influence on science. But since science goes the other way, it influences literacy. As you learn more and you understand more about the world, your background knowledge grows, your vocabulary grows, you become more literate in those different areas. And how you think. So if I’m learning about life science; I’m learning how the world works in a more, biologic physical world. And that knowledge helps me think about when I’m reading a novel, and there’s an appeal to some science knowledge or a concept that gets played with, you know, perhaps time-space continuums … well, if I don’t have the science knowledge of how I think the world works, it’s hard for me to understand what this author is doing. So it does go both ways. They feed each other. And the more literate we become, the more complex science information we can understand. ‘Cause our background knowledge and our vocabulary influence how much we understand about what we read. And as we access more complex science information, it starts to change the way we think about other things in our world.

Eric Cross (07:23):

There was a couple of things that you said in that, but one of the first things that kind of perked my ears is when you said grant proposals. Because I have friends that are scientists — and this is one of the things that when I was in school, they don’t talk about — but how much of their research is reliant upon getting funding —

Douglas Fisher (07:37):

Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,

Eric Cross (07:38):

— which you don’t think about if you’re becoming a chemist or a physicist or a biologist or working in the field, is that that funding, coming from the NSF or anywhere else. And sometimes students ask in class like, “Why am I writing so much? Like, I want to go into science!” Or “I wanna do this!” And this is a real-life example of how the writing could actually apply, in addition to all of the things of collecting data and conclusions and results. But that grant proposal thing just really perked my ears, yeah.

Douglas Fisher (08:01):

And if you can’t write a grant proposal, your ideas and experiments are not gonna get funded. And if you can’t write a strong proposal, that compellingly convinces your readers to fund you, you’re not gonna get funded. But then once you get the grant, you have to write publications. You have to share your work with other people. Make PowerPoint presentations and write journal articles or books or whatever. So it’s a cycle that literacy influences the things we do, including the things we do in science.

Eric Cross (08:31):

Now to get in maybe some data, if you were trying to convince someone that like this happy marriage can exist, what would be like your number one piece of evidence to support this, this back and forth of supporting each other?

Douglas Fisher (08:44):

Awesome. So the quote I’ll often say — and this is from studies from more than two decades ago now — but in general, in high school science, students are introduced to 3000 unfamiliar words, 3000. Each year! Because there are words that are used in a scientific way that are used commonly in other places. And there are discipline-specific words. So 3000 words a year in high school science. The Spanish 1 textbook only has 1500 words in it. So science teachers have double the academic-language vocabulary demand that a typical introductory world-language class has. So just the vocabulary alone should say to us, literacy is gonna be important if you’re gonna learn science. And if you don’t understand these technical words, and you don’t understand the way science uses this particular word in this particular way… . When you say the word “process,” it means something very specific In science. “Division” — cellular division is not the way we think about it in mathematics; there’s a similar concept, but cellular division is different than dividing numbers. And those are words that get used in multiple areas. Then you have all these technical terms that you have to be able to use, to understand the concepts. To share the concepts. To talk to other people. Whether you’re in, you know, fifth grade and talking science, or you’re a university professor, there’s a shared language, appropriate for our grade level, that we have shared meanings of.

Eric Cross (10:22):

And we’re essentially … what I’m hearing you say is … most of the people that are listening to this are science teachers. We’re we’re also language teachers. In a sense.

Douglas Fisher (10:29):

So my frustration is when people say, “Every teacher’s a teacher of reading.” And I don’t like that. I’ve written against that phrase. I don’t think all teachers are teachers of reading, any more than all teachers are teachers of chemistry. Or all teachers are teachers of algebra. But what I will say is the human brain learns through language. And all of us — every teacher that I’ve ever met understands that language is important in my class. If my students don’t have strong listening skills and speaking skills; reading, writing, and viewing skills; I’m gonna have a hard time getting them to learn things. If I can help them grow their speaking, listening, reading, writing, and viewing in my content area, I’m gonna do a service for my learning of my subject and also their more broad literacy development.

Eric Cross (11:16):

1. So, at a high level, what does it look like to integrate science and literacy? We’ve done education for the last, what, hundred years?

Douglas Fisher (11:24):

Mm-hmm. <affirmative>

Eric Cross (11:25):

—kind of pretty similarly, right? Kind of siloed way. What does this look like at the 30,000-foot level? You’re a professor, department chair. Run schools. Speak everywhere. Like, when you think about this from that high level, what does it look like?

Douglas Fisher (11:39):

A high level? Every time I meet with students in a science class, you know, biology or fifth grade or whatever? They should be reading, they should be writing, they should be speaking and listening. Every class. So what print do you want them to access? And it can be a primary source document, it can be an article, it can be from a textbook. Are they reading something? Are they writing to you? Because writing is thinking. If they are writing, they are thinking. As soon as their brain goes somewhere else, they stop writing. The pen won’t move or the fingers don’t type. And then speaking and listening, of course, is the dynamic of our classes. So every day we should see some amount of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, viewing in our classes. That’s at a high level. There are some generic things that seem to work across the literacy. So, learning how to take notes. Focusing on vocabulary. Using graphic organizers. These are generic things that as educators we can use in our classes. Then there’s more specialized things. So, scientists and science teachers think differently than historians and literary critics and art critics. So scientists, if you look at the disciplinary literacy work, there’s a whole body of research where they interview and study high-end experts in their field: chemistry, physics, biology, et cetera. And there are some characteristics that were more disciplined, specific. Scientists like cause and effect relationships. They look for them when they’re reading. They like sourcing information. “Where this come from?” “What’s the history of this idea?” Scientists have a long view in terms of time. Historians have a shorter view of time. English teachers have even shorter view of time. Scientists tend to think in long periods of time. And so all of that influences how a scientist reads and how we should apprentice young people after they get past the generic “I know how to take notes. I know how to study my vocabulary. I know how to do summary writing for my teacher in my notebooks and things,” there’s some generic tools. Once we get past those, we need to be looking at specifically how do people in science use literacy.

Eric Cross (13:52):

I’ve never had my thought process of reading deconstructed just now, but we just described how scientists read. I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty much how I read, right there.” I also like how you said how we should apprentice young people. And I feel like you as the literacy guy, you chose that word very specifically, as far as apprenticing young people. That is a view, I think, that’s really important to hold. ‘Cause that’s what we’re doing essentially … is, if we’re doing what we should be doing, we are apprenticing these young people.

Douglas Fisher (14:18):

Yes.

Eric Cross (14:18):

And helping them develop. Now, let’s imagine there’s a listener out there and they’re interested in getting better at integrating science and literacy instruction. They want to start somewhere. Before we dive in, do you have any initial words of encouragement for the person who’s like, “Everything is like a priority right now,” in their classroom or in their world?

Douglas Fisher (14:37):

Yeah. So I’ll talk about elementary for just a moment. When we’re reading informational texts in our literacy block, we should be reading information that is aligned to what kids need to learn in science and history in, in that grade level. Why are we reading things that are gonna be in conflict with what they’re gonna learn in science later that day in fourth grade, for example? So when we look at our standards, our expectations, what is it that third graders need to know in history, science, mathematics, language arts? And when we’re reading text and we’re learning to apply our reading strategies during our literacy block, why aren’t we reading topics that build our background knowledge for our science time? So we’re seeing some synergy there. We should be looking at life cycles in grades that are appropriate for life cycles and knowing there’s more to life cycles than the frog and the plant or the seed. There are all kinds of life cycles. And we call ’em life cycles for a reason. That’s a general concept. Now in science, we’re looking at this particular lifecycle right now. And so that’s a high level. If we could get more connection to the content standards during our literacy blocks, it would be very good. When we talk about the time at which we call “science” in the day, in more of the K–8 continuum, the science needs to include some primary source documents. Some real things that students are reading. Read about a scientist; read about a scientist’s discovery; read about what they discovered. So that we’re building our background knowledge. So when we go to do things, activities, labs, simulations, we have background knowledge and we understand what we’re experiencing. It can’t be like—I watched this awesome lesson on lenses and the teacher had all these different lenses in the room and the students came in and they were brand new. They don’t know anything. They were picking ’em up. They’re exploring them. They’re trying to figure out, and they’re trying to come up with theories about what this is and how it works. And then the teacher gave them a reading, a short reading, on refraction of light. And they read this thing. And the clarity that they had about what these lenses must do, well! All of a sudden they’re putting them up to the lights! They’re asking if they can go get the lights out of the storage unit! ‘Cause there’s — and they’re shining different lights through the lenses to see what happens to the light. Because that little bit of reading turned some focus on for the students. And it allowed them to take what I’m thinking about, what I’m trying to figure out, how this thing works in another direction. That’s the power of using literacy in our classes.

Eric Cross (17:20):

And what I’m hearing essentially is transfer across disciplines, across content areas, ultimately. And in an elementary school classroom, would it be fair to say, probably the teacher has more autonomy to be able to do that, since they’re teaching all the subjects? But secondary, logistically, planning and those types of things … from what you’ve seen, is it fair to say this kind of needs to be like a top-down, full vertical alignment, to teach like this?

Douglas Fisher (17:45):

I think that would be awesome to do that. But if I’m a sixth grade English Language Arts teacher and I’m working with my sixth grade science teacher, the conversation should be, “What units are you teaching?” Because I’m choosing informational text. My job is to teach them how to find central ideas. My job is to teach them how to find the details in the text. My job is to have them make a claim and support that claim with evidence. The stuff I use is generic. Yes, we do read some literature and some narratives, but we also read about 50% of the text in English around informational text. So if I can help you and accomplish my standards as well, fantastic. So let’s have this conversation and say, “Oh, this is what you’re teaching in science in the next three weeks? I’m gonna choose some texts and we’re gonna analyze ’em for central idea. We’re gonna analyze ’em for details. We’re gonna, for mood or tone or whatever that we’re teaching. And by the way, I’m building background knowledge. So when they come to you, they know some stuff about what you’re going to be teaching next.” So I don’t think it’s impossible to say teams of teachers could come together and say, “What do we believe that our students need to know and learn and be able to do? And then how do we choose things that are gonna help them accomplish exactly that?”

Eric Cross (19:01):

And that’s empowering. Because that’s one thing that we can control maybe is this East-West, peer-to-peer, different content areas. A system may not be able to change as quickly, but I can definitely go talk to my English team or math team and check in and kind of see, “Hey, where do we have overlap in that?” And I know the times that I’ve accidentally had overlap with the teams, it’s super-exciting. And the students have been more bought in! Because it’s like, we’ve done something on the human microbiome and we’ve talked about genetics and all these different things, and then when they read The Giver, or they read some book about genetics, they have all this knowledge. And they’re excited. And they talk about colorblindness or they come to my class and they’re like, “Hey, we read about this!” It’s almost like they saw a magic trick, the fact that these things linked up. And the engagement has been so much higher when it’s the same content in different classes, but through different lenses. At least, that’s what I’ve seen in my years of teaching.

Douglas Fisher (19:54):

I saw a lesson on space junk that was so cool. Middle-school students learning space junk. And the history teacher had a part of it, science teacher had a part of it, English Language Arts teacher had a part of it. And these students, I mean, you watch them look up all the time, ’cause there’s space junk up there. Where’d it come from? Why is it there? What are the politics of this? How do we clean it up? I mean, it was just so interesting to watch them when the teachers came together. And the teachers met their standards in this couple-week-long space-junk exploration. Investigation was met. Politics was met. All these different things. Economy. You know, how much does it cost to clean up this problem? So there’s really cool opportunities when teachers come together and realize we can work together and improve the literacy and learning of our students.

Eric Cross (20:50):

Absolutely. So before this recording, we picked your brain a bit. And I know that there were three specific strategy areas that you wanted to touch on. And one of those — which is kind of coming back to the 3000-words language teachers — was vocabulary. So what are the opportunities that you see, as far as the way of educators to approach vocabulary? Because, you know, there’s a lot. We got a lot of it. The 3000 words.

Douglas Fisher (21:14):

Yeah. There’s a lot of it. So the worry is, we make a vocabulary list and have students look up the words in definitional kinds of things. That’s not really gonna help. Students need to be using the words. They need to be using the words in their conversations, in their writing, in how they think about your content in science. So vocabulary is a huge predictor of whether or not you understand things. Vocabulary is also a pretty good predictor if you can read on grade level. So when we think about vocabulary, there’s something called word solving. You show students a piece of text and you’re reading it, you’re sharing your thinking, and you say, “Oh, here’s a context clue!” Or “I know this prefix or suffix or root!” And in science, a lot of the words are prefixed, suffixed, or root words. We tend to add things together with a lot of prefixes and suffixes and have roots and bases in science. So we can help students think about, “Oh, what does geo- mean? We already know what geo- means here. It means the same thing in this word. Let’s apply that knowledge.” So word solving is part of it, showing students how we think about words that we might not know. The second is more direct instruction of vocabulary. As students encounter the words, we work on what it means, how we say it. We practice it a few times. The process is called orthographic mapping. It’s kind of a scientific idea here. But you have the sound and the recognition of by-the-word, by sight, and what it means. And your brain starts to automatically recognize that word in the future. So I don’t have to slow down, disrupt my fluency, and try to figure out what the word is saying. ‘Cause I’ve seen it enough. I’ve heard it pronounced enough, I’ve pronounced it enough, and I know what it means. So teachers should be saying, “What words in sixth grade science, what words in third grade science, do my students really need to know?” And I’m gonna have them encounter those words over and over. I’m gonna have them use the words. I’m gonna have them see the words. I’m gonna have them say the words. I’m gonna say the word and we’re gonna be over and over with these terms, so that students incorporate them into their normal view of, “These are the things I know about the world.” By the way, when they go to read that next thing, and they understand “geology,” you know, for sixth graders, for example, they know how to say it. They don’t stumble on it. And it activates a whole bunch of memories in their brains. “This is what geology is.” There are branches of geology, there’s physical geology, there’s all this thinking that activates as they read.

Eric Cross (23:35):

There was a practice that I participated in and am trying to incorporate — I don’t know what the name of it is. But essentially what happened was we were dissecting a flower. And the instructor had us name parts of the flower. But we got to come up with our own names for it.

Douglas Fisher (23:49):

Ah.

Eric Cross (23:50):

So, for instance, the stamen we call “the fuzzy Cheeto.” And we all used our own words and then everything was legitimized. And so we went through and learned the whole activity using our own vocab words. But then, in the end, after we presented and talked about it, then the words, the actual academic language was attached to our word. And we were able to say, “OK, the fuzzy Cheeto is the stamen,” and this, this, this, and this. But it was such an interesting practice, because it kind of legitimized all of our definitions. But we weren’t stumbling on these long Latin terms and things like that. Is there a name for that? Or. … ?

Douglas Fisher (24:29):

Yes. I don’t know the name for that. I think it’s really smart. So here’s what I would say about that, is: we don’t learn words, we learn concepts. Words are labels for our concepts. So what that teacher did for you was allow you to develop concept, a concept knowledge. “There’s a part of this plant, it goes like this, we’re gonna call it fuzzy Cheeto. Now I have this concept. And look, it occurred in all these plants. And those people called it that and that other group called it that. We called it a fuzzy Cheeto. Here’s the part of it.” And then the concept is in your brains. And the teacher said, “It’s really called stamen.” And it’s an instant transfer, because you already had the concept. What we often see is students are trying to learn a really hard academic word and the concept for the word at the same time. And so it slows down the whole process. And there’s higher levels of forgetting. Because human beings, we don’t learn words; we learn concepts. If you don’t have the concept, if I gave you a word out of the blue that you’ve never seen, never heard, and a week from now I asked you to remember it, you probably would not, because it didn’t register. It wasn’t part of your schema. You didn’t have a way to organize the information. You don’t have a concept. So that teacher? It’s a great idea. Got you to develop concept knowledge. And then said, “Here’s a real label for it: What some other people called it when they had the chance to come up with their own names.”

Eric Cross (25:50):

Shout out to my teacher, who was—

Douglas Fisher (25:51):

Right.

Eric Cross (25:52):

It was learned then. It was a great practice. And the fact that you’re right, like, I just mean from my own personal experience, I agree that learning concepts versus complicated words. And it’s interesting that you said higher levels of forgetfulness, you know. And you often hear that complaint about it: “Students forget! Students forget!” But this complex topic and this complex word that’s new to me, and I have to remember both of those things.

Douglas Fisher (26:12):

That’s right.

Eric Cross (26:13):

And the other neat thing that it did, is it actually honored the background and like the founts of knowledge of all the different groups in the classroom. You just said something about “this group called it this and this group called it this,” and so by letting different groups share all of those names, now we’re starting to build these kind of interesting connections. That’s at least what I remember experiencing. And so this, even this practice of this approach is very layered, beyond just kind of generating new knowledge of things. So I appreciate that aspect of it. Now another area that you mentioned was complex text.

Douglas Fisher (26:41):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (26:42):

And how we can get students into complex text. So what can we do there?

Douglas Fisher (26:46):

I think science is an ideal place to get students reading things that are hard for them. And I do believe that some parts of school should be a struggle. Not all day, every day. But there should be doses of struggle, which are good for our brains. And these complex pieces of texts that don’t give up their meanings easily allow students to go back and reread the text and maybe mark the text and talk to peers about the text and answer questions with their groups. And the whole point of complex text is to say, “We persevere through it. We may not understand it fully on our first read. But we go back and we might underline, we might highlight. We might write some margin notes. Our teacher might say, ‘What did this author mean here?’ And we go back and look at that part and we take it apart. What do we think about that? And we talk to each other. It’s showing that when we read things, we work to understand. We work through our thinking, often in the presence of other people. And our understanding grows as we go into the text over and over and over again.” So I said geology earlier. There’s about a two-page article on “what is geology” that sixth graders often read. And some kids find it super boring. It’s a once-read, “OK, geology, I don’t really understand it. There’s a bunch of words in here that I don’t understand.” But if you go back to it a few times and you start taking apart, “What are the branches of geology? Oh, I’m gonna go reread that.” How are these two branches related to each other?” “What are the subtypes of each branch of geology?” “How do geologists do their work?” You start asking questions where students are going back into the text. You spend a little bit of time. Now, the introduction to geology, the students know so much more. So whatever you do next— video experiments, whatever—they have a frame of reference, because of that deep, complex read. It’s probably better than simply telling them, “Here’s the information.”

Eric Cross (28:45):

Right. And I even feel like as an educator, when I reflect on my own learning in the classroom, and then looking at it through the perspective of an educator <laugh>, you find this difference between how you were taught and then what the data says good teaching is.

Douglas Fisher (28:59):

Mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Eric Cross (29:00):

It’s so easy to slide back into how you were taught!

Douglas Fisher (29:02):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (29:02):

Even though, you know, you mentally assent to, “This is the best way. This is the data shows.” And you find yourself kind of sliding back at times.

Douglas Fisher (29:10):

Yep. And there’s good evidence to support what you just said, that most people teach the way they experienced school. And it is very hard to change that. And people have studied this. And it’s very hard to change that. Because it worked for us. And we have an n of 1, and it worked for us. Now, remember, there were a whole bunch of other kids in the class that it may not have worked for. And we chose to be in school the rest of our lives, and some of your peers did not choose to be in school the rest of their lives. In fact, some of them hated school and found no redeeming qualities of their experience. So just because it worked for us in a case of one, n of 1, doesn’t mean it worked for all of the kids, or even the majority of them.

Eric Cross (29:57):

Very well said. It’s that, what is that, the survivor bias? Survivorship bias? Where you were the one that made it. But you don’t think about all the other folks. ‘Cause we’re thinking about ourselves.

Douglas Fisher (30:05):

That’s right.

Eric Cross (30:06):

Great case for empathy too, is thinking about the people left and right. Because my friends are like, “I hated science.” And I say, “Who hurt you? Like, what did they do? It’s so amazing, so much fun!”

Douglas Fisher (30:16):

“What happened to you? Science is the coolest. Right? It’s so amazing!”

Eric Cross (30:21):

But I also had a unique experience in seventh grade with my teacher who did some of these things, and made it accessible for so many of us, in opening opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But you’re absolutely right. That was my story. That wasn’t the story of everybody that was around me. And I think that’s really important. Now, I know this is also a big one for you, but I wanna talk about writing. What are the opportunities that you see in terms of writing specifically?

Douglas Fisher (30:51):

So would love it if science teachers had short and longer writing tasks in the science time. Of course, you can integrate some of the science writing, the longer ones, in the English language arts time, especially if you’re the elementary teacher and you can have control of the whole day. But I said this earlier; I’ll say it again. Writing is thinking. While you are writing, there’s nothing else you can do but think about what you are writing. Your brain cannot do something else. So if a science teacher wants to know, do their students really understand the concepts? Have them write. Now some of the shorter ones, I like something called “given word” or “generative sentences”: “I’m gonna give you a word: CELL. C-e-l-l. We’re in science. I want you to write the word ‘cell,’ c-e-l-l, in the third position of a sentence. So it’s gonna go word, word, cell, and then more words.” You could also say, “I want the sentence longer than seven words,” or whatever. But the key is, I’m telling you where I want the word. You will know instantly if your students have a sense of what the word “cell” means in the context of science. If they write “my cell phone,” they don’t get it. If they write about spreadsheet cells or jail cells or whatever, they didn’t get it. But if they talk to you about plant cells and animal cells and the components of those cells, and then once they have that sentence down, you can say to them, “Now write three or four more sentences that connect to that sentence.” It’s super simple. So whatever concepts you’re teaching, put ’em in a specific position. Now you don’t have to only put it in the third position. You can say the first position, the fifth position, the fourth position. But it forces them to think about what they know about the word and then how to construct a sentence for you. That’s a very simple way to get some writing from your students that helps you think about what they understand. Other kinds of writing, you can have quick writes, you can have exit-slip writes. There’s something in the research space called the muddiest part, where halfway through the lesson you have them write so far what has been the least understood or the most confusing part of this lesson. And they do a quick write, right there, at the muddiest part. And as a teacher, you flip through these and you start to say, “Oh, these are the points that are confusing to my students.” So if 80% of them all have the same thing, I gotta reteach that. If these five got, “This is the muddiest part,” If these five thought, “This is the muddiest part,” these seven, “I thought this was the muddiest part,” what do I need to do? Because it’s gonna be hard to move forward if this is their area of confusion. There are also all kinds of writing prompts that have a little bit longer. My favorite one is RAFT. What’s your Role? Who’s your Audience? What’s the Format? And what’s the Topic we’re writing about? Super flexible writing prompt. When you teach something, we don’t want students to only think they write to their teacher. So your role is an atom. You are writing to the other atoms. What do you wanna write about? What’s the topic? What’s the format of it? Is it a love letter? Is it a text message? Is it … so we, we mix it up with students in saying, how do they show some knowledge through a prompt that we give them? And then of course, longer pieces as they get older. More opinion pieces through fifth grade. More claims and arguments starting in sixth grade. So that they’re starting to see, “I have to use the evidence from things I’ve learned, read, listened to, watched, and construct something: an opinion, an argument where I back it up with reasons or evidence.” And those longer pieces, you know, less frequently. The shorter pieces, pretty regularly. So the teacher sees the thinking of the students.

Eric Cross (34:29):

When you were speaking about these really creative writing prompts, there were specific students coming into mind, that were coming into mind … they’re, they’re great science students, but they also have this really strong artsy side drawing, creative writing, and things like that. And when you said something about atoms talking to each other, it elicited, in my brain, certain students that would really love this aspect of creativity in the sciences. And it’s not how we’re typically trained as science teachers, to kind of incorporate this, like you said. A book of props. But I’m imagining, like, as a science teacher, if I took this, this would be a great way to reach more students to be able to show what they know, in a way that might resonate with their own intrinsic “Oh, I get to write creatively!” So I was kind of writing furiously as you were sharing all that information there.

Douglas Fisher (35:12):

So here, I’ll give you another example for elementary people. Again, with RAFT. There’s a book called Water Dance. It’s a pretty popular book for elementary teachers. It’s really about the life cycle of water. For example, you are a single drop of water. You are writing to the land. The format is a letter. And you’re explaining your journey. Now, if they can do this, they’re essentially explaining to you the cycle of water. But you got it in a way that people are now, “Oh, I’m a drop of water. So it’s me. My perspective. Where do I go from? Where do I start?” Because you can start anywhere in the cycle, right? My drop could have started in the clouds. My drop could have started in the ground. My drop could have started in the lake. But it has to show you the journey. So there are many ways of showing you the right answers.

Eric Cross (36:02):

And that’s using the RAFT protocol.

Douglas Fisher (36:04):

That’s RAFT: Role, Audience, Format, Topic. It’s been around 20 or 30 years.

Eric Cross (36:09):

You just gave the name to something a teacher shared in our podcast community, Science Connections: The Community, on Facebook. Teacher shared a Google slide deck and on it were just three slides. And the role that the student had to have is they had to show, then tell, the story of a journey of a piece of salmon being eaten, a piece of starch from pasta being eaten, and then an air molecule in a child’s bedroom. And they had to give the path of travel and the experience from the mouth and then breaking down into protein and all those kinds of things. And this teacher shared it and I wish I knew the teacher’s name because I wanna give ’em credit, but they shared it. And so I used it with my students and then had ’em read aloud their stories and dramatize it. And they were so into it!

Douglas Fisher (36:49):

So cool.

Eric Cross (36:50):

But through it, I was able to see that they understood different parts of the body. They understood cell respiration. The whole thing. And it was fun! To watch them get so into this creative writing. And now I know the name of it. That’s been 30 years they were using RAFT. So you just talked a bit about complex texts and writing. And before we go, I wanted to circle back to something that you said, because I think it’s important, and if you could elaborate on it a little bit, about the value of struggle. Can you talk more about that?

Douglas Fisher (37:21):

Sure. I do believe in a lot of the U.S. we’re in an anti-struggle era of education. And it predates Covid. I think it made it worse during Covid. We front load too much. We pre-teach too much. We reduce struggle. We quote, “over-differentiate” for students. And there’s value in struggle. The phrase, “productive struggle” — if you haven’t heard it, Google productive struggle — it’s an interesting concept, that we actually learn more when we engage in this productive struggle. Now, productive struggle originally came from the math world, and it was this idea that it’s worth struggling through things to learn from it, that you’re likely to get it wrong, and then there was productive success. And there are times when we want students to experience success and we make sure we put things in place for productive success. But there are times where we want them to struggle through a concept. ‘Cause it feels pretty amazing when you get on the other side, when you know you struggled and you get to the other side. If you think about the things, listeners, think about the things in your life where you struggled through it and you are most proud of what you accomplished. I want students to have that. I don’t wanna eliminate scaffolding, eliminate differentiation. But I do want some regular doses of struggle. So if you look at the scaffolding, we have a couple choices. We have front-end scaffolds, distributed scaffolds, and back-end scaffolds. Right now we mostly use front-end scaffolds: We pre-teach, we tell students words in advance, that kind of stuff. But what if we refrained from only using front-end scaffolds, and we use more distributed scaffolds, when they encounter. So there’s a difference between “just in case” and “just in time” support for students. So we tend to plan on the “in advance, here are all the things we’re gonna do to remove the struggle before students encounter the struggle.” What if instead we said, “Let them encounter some struggle. Here’s the supports we’re gonna provide. We’re gonna watch; we’re gonna remove those scaffolds, and allow them to have an experience of success, where they realize, ‘I did it. I got it.’” Every science teacher I’ve ever worked with, when they do an experiment or a lab or simulation, they are looking for productive struggle. They don’t tell the answers in advance. They don’t tell if the answers are right. That’s your data. What does your data tell you? I mean, this is what you do. But then the other part of your day when you move into, like, reading, you don’t do that. You fall into the trap of removing struggle. And so allow them to grapple with ideas. Allow them to wonder what words mean. Allow them to say, “I’m not getting this, teacher! It’s really frustrating!” And you say, “Yeah, this is really hard. This is why we’re doing it at school. ‘Cause it’s really hard. If it was easy, I’d have you do it at home. But we’re doing it here, ’cause it’s really hard and it’s OK not to get it at first.” And create a place where errors are seen as opportunities to learn, and struggling through ideas and clarifying your own thinking and arguing with other people to reach an agreement or reach a place where we agree to disagree is part of the power of learning.

Eric Cross (40:38):

There’s a teacher, who I took this from. My master teacher when I was student teaching. And she said that there’s no such thing as failure in science, just data. And I took that same mantra. And I resonate with what you said about how science teachers, all of us, hold onto that productive struggle, because it’s part of being a scientist. It’s part of the experiments. That genuine “aha” moment. Or it didn’t work out? That’s great! That’s totally fine! Let’s write about it and let’s take photos and let’s publish it and let’s be scientists. That’s totally true. As we wrap up, Dr. Fisher, is there any final message that you have to listeners about bringing science and literacy together? I know you speak everywhere, but for everyone that’s listening, if you can put out your encouragement or message or suggestion … you’ve given so many great tips and practical applications. But, any final thoughts on the subject?

Douglas Fisher (41:32):

I think many science teachers are intimidated because they think they have to be reading teachers. And there’s a knowledge base to reading. And some teachers are reading teachers and science teachers, and I don’t wanna dismiss that. But it’s not that you have to become a reading specialist to integrate literacy into science. It’s how our brains work. And so as you think about the way in which you are learning and the ways in which you want your students to learn, what role does language play? What role does speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing, play in your class? And then provide opportunities for students to do those five things each time you meet with them.

Eric Cross (42:12):

Dr. Fisher, thank you so much for being here and for your encouragement, and sharing your wisdom and experience. And then personally serving my city, here in San Diego, and my students, when they make it to your high school and ultimately the alma mater of San Diego State University.

Douglas Fisher (42:30):

That’s right.

Eric Cross (42:31):

Yeah. We really, really appreciate you in serving all kids and lifting the bar and making things more equitable for all students. And encouraging teachers. So thank you.

Douglas Fisher (42:39):

Thank you very much.

Eric Cross (42:42):

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Douglas Fisher, Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University. Check out the show notes for links to some of Doug’s work, including the book he co-authored titled Reading and Writing in Science: Tools to Develop Disciplinary Literacy. Please remember to subscribe to Science Connections so that you can catch every episode in this exciting third season. And while you’re there, we’d really appreciate it if you can leave us a review. It’ll help more listeners to find the show. Also, if you haven’t already, please be sure to join our Facebook group, Science Connections: The Community. Next time on the show, we’re going to continue exploring the happy marriage between science and literacy instruction.

Speaker  (43:26):

I had this moment of realization I felt a few months ago: I’m like, if I don’t teach them how to use the AI as a tool, as a collaborator, then they’re gonna graduate into a world where they lose out to people who do know how to do that.

Eric Cross (43:39):

That’s next time on Science Connections. Thanks so much for listening.

Courtney Plumley (00:00):

We asked teachers how much science, professional development, they’ve had in the last three years, and nearly half of elementary teachers said none.

Eric Cross (00:10):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross. I am super-excited to be kicking off the third season with the show. This entire season will be exploring the theme of science as the underdog. And we’re gonna make the case for science, by showing how and why it can be used more effectively. In the coming episodes, we’re gonna talk about how science can be better integrated into other content areas like literacy and math, and explore some of the benefits that you might not be thinking about good science instruction. But first, science as the underdog. I bet some of you out there feel like science is the underdog in your community at school. I know I have at times. To kick off this season, I’m gonna talk to two people who really studied this question by looking at the state of science instruction across the US. Eric Banilower is Vice President of Horizon Research and Courtney Plumley is Senior Researcher at Horizon Research. Eric was the principal investigator and Courtney an author of the latest in a series of studies called “The National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education.” We’re gonna dive into the findings of their most recent report to see what the data’s showing us. Please enjoy my discussion with Eric Banilower and Courtney Plumley. Courtney, hello. And thank you so much for joining us.

Courtney Plumley (01:25):

Hi Eric. It’s nice to be here.

Eric Cross (01:26):

And Eric, welcome.

Eric R. Banilower (01:27):

We’re thrilled to be here, so thank you for having us.

Eric Cross (01:30):

I was reading through the report. Four hundred…a very thorough report, 471 pages, I think, as I got it?

Eric R. Banilower (01:37):

And that’s only one of the many reports from that study.

Eric Cross (01:40):

Yeah. You all have done your work, so I’m really excited to to talk to you about this. And on this season of the show, we’re exploring the theme of science as the underdog. And I think a lot of our listeners, we feel like science is an underdog either in their school or in their district. But you’ve actually done some research on this, in a 2018 study, “The National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education.” So I wanna talk about this report. But first I was hoping you can kind of set the stage. How did you come to work on this report, and then, big picture, what were you hoping to find out?

Eric R. Banilower (02:10):

So the 2018 study that you just mentioned was actually the sixth iteration of a series of studies dating back to 1977. And we collect data every decade or so—you know, plus or minus a few years. And really, what we’re trying to do is get a snapshot of what the science and math education system looks like in in the nation. So my role grew. I started working at Horizon in about 1998, after teaching high school for five years in California. And then going to graduate school. And right about that time, the company was doing the 2000 iteration of the survey. And I worked on it with the team here at Horizon. And then we did it again in 2012. And I had a much more prominent role in that study, and became the kind of leader of the study. And in 2018, the most recent version, we just did it again. So the goal of this study is really to kind of examine key aspects of the K–12 STEM education system. And the main audience of the work has traditionally been policy makers, researchers, and practitioners who work at the federal, state, and district level.

Eric Cross (03:30):

So this study, you took kind of a sample size, but it’s reflective of trends that we tend to see across the nation as a whole. Would that be fair to say?

Eric R. Banilower (03:38):

Yes, definitely it is. It is a random sample of schools in the country. So we start with a list of all the public and private schools in the nation, and then do a random sample of those schools, and then work really, really hard to recruit schools to agree to be in the study. And that has gotten harder every time we’ve done the study, for many understandable reasons. And then once we have schools on board, we sample teachers within schools. So we don’t even survey every teacher in a school. It’s really a sub-sample. So that we can make inferences about the nation as a whole.

Eric Cross (04:14):

Makes sense. And so Courtney, what did you find out about the time spent on science instruction in US schools?

Courtney Plumley (04:22):

So, I’m gonna talk about elementary teachers to begin with.

Eric Cross (04:26):

Because that was your past life, right?

Courtney Plumley (04:28):

I am a former elementary teacher, yeah. So that’s kind of where my head is. And that’s relatable for me. Right? So we asked teachers, like, how many days of the week or weeks of the year that they teach elementary school. And fewer than 20% teach science every day of the school year. They kind of do one or two things, for the most part. They teach a couple days a week or they teach every day of the week, but only for, like, maybe six weeks, and then they swap with social studies and they kind of do that across the school year. Which is really different from, like, math, right? We also asked elementary teachers, how often do they teach math, and it’s every day of the year. Then we also asked them how many minutes they teach when they’re teaching, and we kind of did the math to figure out, all right, if they taught science every day of the school year, how many minutes would it be in a single day, so that we could make a more comparable comparison with math and ELA. If you were to work it out, how many minutes of science an elementary teacher teaches across the year, and break it down to per day, it’s like 18 minutes for the lower elementary grades, 27 for the upper elementary grades. Which is not a lot. But it’s pretty much an hour a day in math, and 80 plus minutes in ELA. So, a lot less. And then, you know, when I was teaching, the first thing to go was always science, right? If there was an assembly, if there was early release or whatever, that was the first thing to go. So those numbers might even be higher. Just because they aren’t factoring that kind of thing in, too.

Eric Cross (06:05):

So, now I’m curious. That is something that I’ve seen just anecdotally, science being the first thing to go. I feel like I’ve seen that almost…it’s almost become a meme, that I’ve heard that so often. Just in your experience, why do you think that is that huge disparity between the two?

Courtney Plumley (06:26):

Well, I mean, when I was teaching, I was teaching third grade. I had an end-of-grade test in math and ELA for my kids. I didn’t have one in science. So the administration said, “Hey, if you’re gonna drop something, drop something that’s not tested.”

Eric Cross (06:41):

Simple as that. And Eric, you, past life: physics teacher. High school. What did you see? ‘Cause our listeners run the gamut from elementary all the way up to high school. What did you see, as far as relative science instruction in the secondary level?

Eric R. Banilower (07:00):

Sure. You know, secondary is just a whole different situation than elementary. Rght? Because you have departmentalization. I taught science. I didn’t have to teach other subjects. And students had periods, and they still do, sorry, they still have periods, even though it’s been a long time since I taught. And you know, they rotate from one class to another. So all the classes were essentially the same length. So, you know, when I was teaching, it was about 50-minute periods. So in terms of minutes of a class or minutes on a subject, it’s not really different. But what is different is what students are required to take in order to graduate high school. One of the things we asked schools about in this study was how many years of a subject do students have to take in order to graduate? And what we saw was in mathematics, over half the schools in the nation require students to take four years of mathematics to graduate. OK? And the vast majority of the rest, about 44%, require three years in science. Most schools require three years. Very few require four years. And many, or a fair number, still only require two years to graduate. So the expectation of what students are taking is lower in science than it is in mathematics.

Eric Cross (08:20):

So you were seeing the same trend in secondary, essentially.

Eric R. Banilower (08:24):

Yes.

Eric Cross (08:24):

The amount of time devoted to the instruction of science…we’re kind of seeing it mirrored just across K–12 across the board.

Eric R. Banilower (08:33):

That’s correct.

Eric Cross (08:34):

And that’s across the country. ‘Cause the sample size represents teachers from Alaska, Hawaii, the South, SoCal, everywhere. So what’s been the reaction to that number? Like 18 to 20 minutes is…I mean, it’s, it’s half of my lunch at our school. What’s been the reaction to that number since this data has been published?

Eric R. Banilower (08:58):

I don’t know, Courtney, if you want to take that…

Courtney Plumley (09:00):

It’s a lot of what you just did. Like, what??? Like, how is it possible to teach all the things you need to teach in such a little amount of time?

Eric R. Banilower (09:08):

What’s really kind of surprising to me, though — though now that I’ve worked on three iterations of the study, it no longer surprises me, but it did at first — is that these numbers really aren’t changing since we’ve started doing this study. You know, people thought maybe with No Child Left Behind and the increase in accountability, time on science might actually go down, because there was more testing in math and English Language Arts. It didn’t happen. It was pretty much constant, that this has been kind of the state of science education for a long time.

Eric Cross (09:44):

So Eric, if I’m hearing you right: The past studies, we’re not seeing an increase or a decline. This has been this way for how many years, roughly, would you say? Since it’s been studied?

Eric R. Banilower (09:54):

You know, I’d have to go back to the 1977 report to get the numbers, but I’m gonna say since then, it has not changed much, if at all.

Eric Cross (10:03):

So this has kind of been entrenched. This has been the norm for almost for the career of a teacher, almost generationally. We’re looking at anyone who’s been in the highest levels of leadership to someone just entering the classroom, this has been the way it’s always been. This is kind of for many people what they’ve only known.

Eric R. Banilower (10:20):

Right.

Eric Cross (10:21):

Kind of become the norm.

Courtney Plumley (10:21):

We didn’t even have science when I was in elementary school. We had science on a cart that came by, you know, every other week.

Eric Cross (10:28):

Was that like a food truck, but like the science version of it? It shows up and does quick science and takes off?

Courtney Plumley (10:35):

And New York was, I mean — we always watched Voyage of the Mimi. I don’t know if you ever watched that. But that’s what we watched every single time the Science on the Cart came. So it’s like a marine biology show. Ben Affleck was on it when he was a kid.

Eric Cross (10:48):

<laugh> Really? For me it was, Mr. Wizard. For some of my students, even now, Bill Nye. You know, the Bill Nye show or something would come on. So what happens when you look at less wealthy districts? Is there a relationship between community resources and science instruction, or is it pretty much equal no matter what the district resources are, the school’s resources are? Did you see any data there?

Eric R. Banilower (11:12):

Yes. We actually did a lot of disaggregating the data by community type, student demographics in the schools, to look to see whether there were areas of inequities across the country. And, you know, one of the factors we looked at was kind of a measure of socioeconomic status. You know, wealth in the community. By looking at percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. And interestingly, in terms of time on science instruction, there is actually not a relationship between income level and how much time is spent at the elementary level on science, which actually surprised us.

Eric Cross (11:54):

Because you might have expected it to be the other way now. And granted, it’s 18 to 20 minutes, there isn’t much more to shave off off of that. But were there other differences, like when you compared those communities? Maybe it wasn’t the amount of science instruction, but was there anything else, like teacher preparedness, resources? Were there anything else that you did see discrepancies in? Or was it equal across the board?

Eric R. Banilower (12:13):

No, unfortunately there, there have been, and still are, a number of areas where community resources are related to pretty substantial differences in educational opportunities that students have. So, you know, we’re talking about the high school science requirements. One of the things that we saw was that high schools in less wealthy communities tend to offer less rigorous science courses than high schools in better-off-financially communities. So they may not be AP courses or second year advanced courses to the same extent that there are in the wealthier communities. That’s one big difference that we saw. Another one was what you were just saying about, sort of, the teachers who teach in these communities. You know, I think that for many years people have had a feeling that the best teachers go to the better off schools because it’s easier to teach there. Well, we see that the schools with the most poverty, they tend to have the newer teachers, who are just starting their career. They tend to have teachers who are less well prepared to teach their subject. And there’s a host of other differences we found. And you know, you mentioned the report being 400 pages. This other report that looks at these differences is also quite long, and, you know, identified a number of areas where there are these disparities in the system.

Eric Cross (13:43):

Well, we appreciate you synthesizing this for us, because this is super-important. And you’ve fleshed out a lot of things. And the fact that it’s driven by data, we as science teachers, we as scientists, being objective, really, really value that. Because this is actually validating a lot of the things that our listeners and myself, we experience anecdotally. But you don’t have a lot of things to network you. And sometimes, when you see this, you wonder if it’s just you, or is are other people experiencing this? And so as you start talking about this data, realizing, oh wow, this is not something in isolation. This is systemic. This is something that’s impacted. And then Eric, what you said about schools that were lower-income, that were under-resourced, and didn’t offer those advanced classes, what are some of the impacts of that, maybe downstream, of doing that? Not having those AP classes? I just kind of wanted to put that out there and ask you.

Eric R. Banilower (14:31):

You know, this is a really…this is a current debate right now, about what the goals of schooling K–12 should be. You know, are all kids meant to go to college? Should there be alternative paths? And you know, I know when I was teaching, I would have students say, “Why do I need to know this? I’m not gonna go into science. I’m not gonna study physics. Why do I need to take this?” And, you know, the answer I used to give them was, “You never know where your life is gonna end up and what opportunities you’ll have. And by having these educational experiences, you have more opportunities available to you. Whether or not you choose to go down those paths, you have opportunities. And when you don’t take this kind of coursework, you know, even if you don’t want to go to college, you limit your potential careers. Because so many careers nowadays require some technical knowledge, some knowledge of science, even if it’s not explicitly a science job. It is embedded in our society now. We are a technological and science-based society.”

Eric Cross (15:37):

It reminds me of something that I’ve told my students, that if you become a scientist, that’s awesome. I love that. But if you don’t, and you want to be a dancer or an actor or a lawyer or anything that may not be directly related to STEM, I want you to choose it because it was a choice, and not a lack of options. So as long as you’re choosing not to go in STEM, and you don’t make that decision because you can’t, or because you weren’t given the opportunity. So that’s how I’ve always had this mindset as a teacher. And I’ve explained it to my students. So if you say, “Cross, you know what I want to do, I wanna be an awesome chef,” which, you know, low-key that’s science, right? <laugh> Molecular gastronomy, we know that. But like, you be the best chef. But as long as you’re being a chef because you choose that, and you’re like, “I love science, but I don’t wanna go that direction,” we’re good.

Eric R. Banilower (16:26):

Right. And if you think about, a lot of social justice issues with pollution and climate change, and you look at which communities are more affected by some of these larger environmental problems and challenges, it tends to be the lower socioeconomic communities, the more poverty-stricken communities have worse water, have worse air quality. And so if, if people from these communities are going to make informed decisions about who they’re gonna vote for, about what policies they’re gonna support, those are science topics that you have to have some understanding in order to make informed decisions in your life.

Eric Cross (17:09):

Courtney, you were one of the Swiss Army Knife teachers. This is how I perceive it for elementary. You had to teach everything. And shout out to all of my elementary school teachers that have to be mathematicians and grammar whizzes and scientists and PE instructors and social emotional, all of those different things. you also looked at teacher preparedness. How did teachers feel about teaching science compared to other subjects like language arts and math? Did you see anything there?

Courtney Plumley (17:39):

We did, we did. And I’m glad you said, “How did they feel about it?” Because one thing that, you know, in a survey you can’t really do is capture how someone actually…how good someone actually…the quality of someone’s instruction. But you can ask them how prepared they feel. And you can even ask them like stats, like, “What did you major in in college?” You know. But you really are going on based on what what they say. So we ask them how prepared they feel to teach all the core subjects. And two-thirds of elementary teachers felt very well prepared to teach reading. They felt very well prepared to teach math. But when it comes to science, it’s less than a third felt very well prepared. And you know, like you said, when you’re teaching elementary school, you’re teaching all the subjects. But also in science, there’s usually four main instructional units in a school year. And they’re all from different science disciplines. So not only are you going on, like, “Maybe in college took a lot of bio classes, but I didn’t take any physics classes, and now I have to teach physics to my kids and I have no experience there.” So, you know, we also ask them how well-prepared they felt in these different disciplines. And the numbers are even smaller, you know. Fewer than a quarter felt very well-prepared in life science. And like 13% felt very well-prepared in physical science. So there’s definitely a big difference between how much teachers feel prepared for ELA and math versus science.

Eric Cross (19:08):

And just from a human perspective, when we don’t feel prepared for something, we’re not really gonna probably lean into it as much as we are into our strengths. Like, that’s just kind of how we are across the board.

Courtney Plumley (19:18):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (19:18):

I’m even like that with my own chores in the house. Or when I have things I need to get done, and I might not be as good at doing those things—it’s gonna be a heavy cognitive load; I’m gonna have to do some background research—I tend to find other areas to excel in. Like, I’m gonna be productive in this other area. I’m gonna really crush it here. But this other thing gets put to the back burner.

Courtney Plumley (19:36):

Totally. And the same reason I might skip science today, <laugh> ’cause it’s scary.

Eric Cross (19:41):

Yeah, exactly. But I love this book. <Laugh> Or we could do this math, and let’s really, really dive deep into it. Now, did you also look at professional development and instructional resources that are being provided?

Courtney Plumley (19:53):

We did.

Eric Cross (19:54):

And on the whole, how was the amount—and I’m seeing a trend here, so I’m kind of feeling like I know where this might go—but I wanted to ask it, did the amount of professional development and resources for science, was there much of a difference between that and other subjects?

Eric R. Banilower (20:10):

Well, I’ll start on this, and Courtney, feel free to jump in. You know, one of the things that we asked was how much kind of discretionary funding do schools devote to science and how much to mathematics? So, for consumables or equipment and supplies or computer software for teachers to use in the classroom. And it’s hard to compare, I think, across subjects because the demands for this kind of supplies, et cetera, is very different, I think, in science than it is in mathematics. Right? We have a lot of, you know, equipment for doing investigations, consumable supplies in science. And those things need to be replenished on a regular basis. It turns out, when we look at the data for school discretionary spending on this kind of stuff, the median school spends less than $2 per student at the elementary level on science, compared to over $6 for mathematics. At the high school level, it’s kind of reversed. Schools spend more money on high school science than they do on high school math. but even still, at the high school, it’s less than $7 per student. Which is not a lot of money being devoted to thinking about all the materials, supplies, chemicals, et cetera, that you need to teach science well, at the high school level. More disturbing is the fact that, you know, we were talking about inequities before, schools that serve less well-off communities spend less than schools that serve wealthier communities, by quite a big amount.

Eric Cross (21:46):

So essentially the per-student thing just kind of popped out to me: So, like, an expensive Starbucks drink is what we’re spending on science per student.

Eric R. Banilower (21:57):

At the high school level. Yes.

Eric Cross (21:58):

At the high school level. And I get those catalogs in the mail, from all of those big science companies. You can’t get much for seven bucks. At least, nothing high-level. And I know I do a lot of 99-cent store science. I go down the street, go to the 99-cent store. Thankfully we could do a lot of awesome science with just, you know, cheap things. But a lot of the higher level experiences, they’re pricey. But the experiences are so rich! And $7 at the high school level is nothing. It’s not much at all.

Eric R. Banilower (22:28):

Yeah. It is definitely, you know, kind of shocking to think about what we’re investing in our children’s future.

Eric Cross (22:37):

Now, just to put you both on the spot, ’cause I feel like that we’ve identified some…we’re seeing a trend here, we’re seeing a pattern. We’re talking about, you know, being science teachers. There’s a pattern going on here. Do you think it’s fair to characterize science as the underdog?

Courtney Plumley (22:52):

I think in elementary school, it is a fair statement. Because, like we said before, I mean they’re gonna preference math and ELA almost all the time. I mean, the other thing you’d asked a little bit ago was about professional development, too. And we do have some data on that. And we ask teachers, you know, how much science professional development they’ve had in the last three years. And nearly half of elementary teachers said none. And I know I didn’t have any science professional development. If I was gonna pick from among the catalog, I was picking one that I needed more, like math. Math and ELA. I keep making that statement, but just over and over, it’s the truth.

Eric Cross (23:31):

And going back to what you said earlier, because that’s where the accountability was, right? And that kind of came top-down.

Courtney Plumley (23:38):

Yes.

Eric Cross (23:38):

And influenced everything else.

Eric R. Banilower (23:40):

Yeah. Now, really interesting thing that we did, a year or so ago, ’cause someone asked us, you know, “Hey, could you look at this?” is we compared elementary science instructional time among states where science counted towards accountability versus states where science doesn’t count towards accountability. And at the upper elementary grades, more time was spent on science in schools in states where they had science accountability. Now I’m not arguing for adding science to accountability systems. But that’s a pretty telling piece of data.

Eric Cross (24:19):

What gets measured gets done.

Eric R. Banilower (24:20):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (24:20):

Or what was getting evaluated was getting done. And that raises, that opens up a myriad of other questions about testing, and what that reveals, and all of those different things. But at the end of the day, what you’re finding is that the things that were getting tested were the things that were getting the priority.

Eric R. Banilower (24:36):

That’s right.

Eric Cross (24:37):

How did we get to this point? And Eric, you said it goes back at least to ’77, but we look at society and we’re…I wanna say we’re post-pandemic, but we’re we’re not. but we’re trying to, we’re trying to get past that. But we’re looking at…we had innovations in biology, we have innovations right now in green energy and electric cars and all of these things that are STEM-based. We know that these are things that have moved humanity forward. And we look at the pipeline of people who are in STEM and we, we see the disparities and things like that. Why was science given less of a priority? I’m just curious. Maybe, Courtney, we could start with you, if you have any ideas. Or Eric. Either one. But how did we get here?

Eric R. Banilower (25:22):

<laugh> I think Courtney wants me to take that one. I’m older so I’ve seen more <laugh>. So, you know, I have the gray hair. She doesn’t. I think it’s complicated. And I know this sounds cliche, but but schools are a reflection of society, right? And, and so science education, you know, if you think back when Sputnik was launched, there became this great demand in America to improve and produce more scientists and engineers in response to this Cold War threat. Right? And then in the ’80s there was rising, oh, the gathering storm was an economic argument that we needed to increase science and math, you know, education and people going into those fields in order to compete economically against the global competitors. And I think that America has always produced a fair number, a large number, of high-quality scientists and engineers, you know. And we still lead the world in many ways. But where we’ve identified as a problem is who has those opportunities to go into those fields. You know, it used to be a very select, a very male-dominated, white male-dominated field. Right? And other people didn’t have the opportunity, or they were shown the way out pretty early. And we, I think, have come to realize as a country that, you know, the, the greater the diversity of thought that we can get into these discussions, the more innovative we can be and the more productive as a society we can be. And so I think we’ve had this shift in the country to, instead of thinking about just the quality for the select few, but to be thinking about the quality for everyone. And so that makes it seem like some of these challenges are greater than they used to be. And I think they’re different challenges, right? We’ve evolved as a society and I think schools have evolved.

Eric Cross (27:40):

There is a conversation I was in on a plane with a person who was a materials manager for a company that made the adhesive for sandpaper. And we were flying…I was flying to Denmark and he was flying to some other Scandinavian country. And we were just talking about it. And he came from another industry, and somehow the conversation led to science. I don’t know how that happened. But somehow I just started talking about science and I asked him about, Eric, kind of what you said about the US kind of leading the way in science innovation versus the rest of the world. And I asked him why. And he said one of the reasons why is because the heterogeneous thought. The different groups of people that are coming to a problem actually create more innovative and novel solutions. Versus when it’s more homogeneous. And everyone’s either culturally or just for whatever reason, kind of thinks a certain way. While they might have a more efficient way, the variety of solutions are not as varied and not as novel. I was reminded of that story based on what you just said. So it’s really interesting. So it seems to be that it benefits if we have more heterogeneous groups, more folks who are contributing to STEM, because that’s gonna be solving the next problem more efficiently. Or I guess maybe in my head it seems like the next we need…we do really well when we have a dragon to slay. I mean, it seems like we come together when that’s the case, right? Like, I dunno.

Eric R. Banilower (29:06):

No, I think that’s…I think that’s accurate.

Eric Cross (29:09):

Later on the season of the podcast, we’re gonna explore ways to better integrate science with other subjects like literacy and math. Were you able to study at all any more integrated approaches to science instruction? Does any of your research support that approach?

Courtney Plumley (29:25):

Not on the national survey, we didn’t study that. And it’s something that we’ve talked about before, because it’s difficult to get teachers to…we were talking about instructional time. It’s hard for teachers to put a number on it when they’re integrating, because, you know, it’s not like I have my science block from 3 to 3:30 anymore. Now it’s kind of scattered about. But it’s something that has been in the ether. We’ve been looking at it in a couple of projects. So there’s some evidence that it can be effective, especially for getting more, you know…the idea is you can get more time for science if you are integrating with other subjects. But one thing to kind of caution is like, students need to have opportunities to learn each discipline when they’re doing integrated instruction. So you don’t wanna just have, like, math in your science. Kids already know to just, like, support it. Then it’s hard to take time from math to put it into science when they’re not actually learning anything new. That’s the easy thing to do, though, is say, “Oh, my kids already know how to measure. We did that in a previous unit. So now we’ll we’ll do it as part of our science instruction.” So it’s a lot of work to make it so they’re learning something new, mathematics and science, at the same time. And it’s not really something that we think that teachers should be having to do on their own, with all the other things that teachers have to do. The last thing they need to do is be creating their own, you know, curriculum. Something that’s already…you know, it’s not straightforward. So we’ve been talking about it, we think it’s really something that instructional materials maybe need to be focusing on instead of teachers having to do that on their own,

Eric Cross (31:01):

Teachers would implement it, but asking them to create it is a whole different thing, and it’s a huge ask.

Courtney Plumley (31:08):

Yes.

Eric Cross (31:08):

Yeah. And, did I hear you right? So the ideal situation would’ve been the students learning a newer math concept, but embedded in a science kind of context? Or was that the better way? Versus, “I’m gonna take a math concept they already know and then just put it into the science setting?”

Courtney Plumley (31:26):

Well, if the idea is that you can get more science time if you’re, you know, integrating things, so you can maybe take time away from a specific math block by putting it with science, or whatever, then if the math is something that the kids already know, now you’re just taking away. I think that that has to be new in both cases, in order to justify having more time.

Eric Cross (31:49):

Right. Eric, in the secondary level, any thoughts on that? On integrating these disciplines together?

Eric R. Banilower (31:56):

I think, you know, just like at the elementary level, it can be challenging to do it well. When I taught, I taught my last couple years in a kind of school-within-a-school kind of situation, where our goal was to try to integrate science, mathematics, and language arts. And it’s hard to do that in a meaningful way. And we did not have curriculum materials given to us to help us do this. We were trying to figure out how to do this on our own, while we were teaching 200 kids a day in our subjects. Right? And five preparations. And you know, it’s a big ask of any teacher. And there are teachers who thrive on this and are great at this. And, you know, that’s one thing I wanna, make clear: our data is about the system, and we are former teachers. Almost everyone who works at Horizon is a former teacher. We have the greatest respect for teachers and what they do. And what our data is showing is are kind of like areas where the system isn’t providing teachers and their students the opportunities to do great things. I think at the high school level, there has been this idea of project-based learning where students are bringing together different skills, different ideas from across disciplines. And I think there’s, again, a lot of potential in doing that. But trying to develop those experiences so that they are doing service to the different subjects, so students are learning what they’re supposed to learn in English Language Arts, that they’re learning, important mathematics, and that this is in a science context, where they are getting to do and understand what science is and how science, as a discipline, operates…that’s just a really hard thing to develop.

Eric Cross (33:53):

So what I’m hearing—and I really appreciate the nuance in this, because it’s not a simple “Yes. Integrated is better,”—I’m hearing “Yes. Quality control.” “Yes. It needs to be written not by teachers; they’re the practitioners.” It’s “Yes. And,” not just simply binary. Which…it’s so easy to wanna chunk things and say yes or no on things. But this one seems a much more nuanced approach. And in a future episode, you mentioned project-based learning, we’re gonna try and talk to people who have thoughts on this. And I really appreciate that you talked about project-based learning, because also, how do you evaluate that? How do you evaluate whether or not it is high quality? Is this is something I see? You know, high-quality standards, highest quality science teaching, highly qualified teachers. It’s something that I see often. Now, based on all your research, this is kind of the 30,000-foot view. What advice might you have for people who are thinking about changing the way science is taught in this country? Which hasn’t changed since 1977, at least since we’ve been measuring it. Any advice for people who do want to act? Another way to ask, it might be, if you were given a magic wand, <laugh>, you have all power, what might you do if you can control the entire vertical system?

Eric R. Banilower (35:07):

Yeah, so a clarification, I do think science instruction has changed. It has evolved. I think there’s a lot of really good things going on in different pockets of the country. One of the challenges is bringing those good ideas and good practices to scale. Right? There are approximately 1.2 million teachers of science K–12 in this country. That’s a lot of people. And about 80% of those are elementary teachers who are responsible for teaching other subjects as well. So my thinking is often about, “How do we take what we know and that we’ve learned through decades of research is effective, and impact a large number of teachers, and therefore a large number of students?” And you know, Courtney I think has hinted at this already. And you’ve mentioned it too, Eric, is that teaching is a profession, right? And it’s a craft. But in no other profession do practitioners have the expectation that they’re developing their own tools and methods for their work. I know when I was in my teacher preparation program, and it’s still extremely common, one of the assignments perspective teachers are given is to develop a unit and develop a lesson, right? You don’t have doctors being asked to develop new treatments and new tests to use. Their job is to get to know their patient, assess what’s going on, and then using research-based methods to develop a plan of action, right? And I think that analogy works really well in education and is a way that we could have a scalable approach for kind of raising the floor across the country for the quality of science education. Giving teachers research-based materials, high-quality instructional materials, that they can then use and adapt to meet the needs of their students, would allow them to focus on getting to know their students, seeing what their strengths are, seeing where they have room for growth, and using the materials they’re given to help those students progress. And I think that is definitely a way where we could have a big impact at a large scale.

Eric Cross (37:39):

Courtney, same question: Magic wand, all power. You can change systems from the elementary perspective. What would you do? I’m assuming part of it’s gonna be changing that 18 to 20 minute time. But even for that to happen, what would you do? What would you change?

Courtney Plumley (37:57):

Well, I don’t know. Like, for it to change, I don’t know the answer to that. But yes, increasing the time would be great. And like Eric was saying, giving teachers— ’cause again, I’m coming in, not enough probably background in science—and then, you know, when I was, when I was teaching, we had one set of textbooks for the entire grade. Six classes, right? Like, share them. But third graders aren’t gonna read textbooks anyway, right? So instead I’m going to the teacher store. I’m pulling things off the shelf. And like, “OK, yeah, sure, I’ll use this.” And nowadays, teachers are going to Teachers Pay Teachers or whatever. Because I didn’t have anything good to use. So like Eric is saying, if I had instructional materials that were good instructional materials that were gonna teach my kids, that they were gonna be engaged, that they weren’t sitting and listening to science, but they were doing science, you know, and I had professional development to actually help me do it? That’s what I think we need to have. And I mean, I know there are some people out there that are working on that, but it’s not a lot. I mean, if you look at Ed Reports, they rate how well-aligned science curriculum are to standards. And there are two right now that have Ed Reports green lights. There’s Amplify and there’s OpenSciEd. You know, so there’s not much out there for teachers to use. And, so it’s hard. It’s hard. Where am I gonna go and get this stuff if it doesn’t exist? And so I’m making it up by myself. Which we already said is not the best use of teachers’ time, when they’ve got so many other demands on their time.

Eric Cross (39:27):

Eric and Courtney, listening to both of your responses, it created a visual in my mind. And Eric, I loved your analogy of…I started thinking of a chef, a welder, and a farmer. And I thought about the chef saying like, “You’re a great chef! Now, can you go farm, and make your own food, so that you can cook it?” Or the welder who has to make his own welding tools and go smelting. You know, making the different rods. I’m not a welder. But you know, all those different parts. Or the farmer who has to build his own tractor and innovate all that stuff. You’re absolutely right, the way you articulated that. And then Courtney, you essentially said, “Give them the tools and then teach them how to use it so they can go and actually be effective with it, because you’re in front of kids doing so many different things.” There’s only so much time in the day, and teachers want to do these things; they want to, but you end up having to triage when you’re asked to. Going back to Eric’s analogy, if you’re in the ER, but you’re also creating the vaccines and you’re also doing the research on which types of vaccines are gonna be the most effective, that’s, that’s a lot to ask. And so, I appreciate both your responses on that. Now, last question, what are you both working on now? This report came out in 2018. What’s, what’s next on the horizon? Actually literally, that’s no pun intended. <laugh> What’s next? <laugh> What’s next for, for you both? What are you working on?

Eric R. Banilower (40:42):

Well, you know, we would love to do another national survey, in a few years. We have to get funding to do it. And you know, that’s always something that takes effort and isn’t a guarantee. We’ve written grants to do these studies in the past, and there’s also the dealing with the reality of the situation. I think a lot of schools, still coming off the tail end of dealing with Covid, are overwhelmed. And we’ve had a hard time, I mentioned before, recruiting schools, and it gets harder every time, just ’cause they have so much on their plate. And I couldn’t see going to a school now and saying, “Hey, one more thing. Do you mind?” So I think we have to kind of wait a little bit for things to settle down before we can do another one of these studies. It just doesn’t seem feasible right now. But we’d love to in the not-too-distant future. Other than that, Courtney and I actually work on some projects together and some projects not together. One of the things that we’re working on together is a study of a fifth grade science curriculum that was developed by Okhee Lee at NYU and her colleagues, that is both aligned with the NGSS and purposely designed to support multilingual learners in developing both their science knowledge and skills as well as their language skills. And we’ve been working with the crew at NYU to study this curriculum and try to figure out, how well it’s working and under what circumstances. So that’s been a really interesting project that’s going on right now.

Courtney Plumley (42:26):

I recently worked on a report with the Carnegie Corporation in New York that actually I think, compliments what we’ve been talking about a lot. It’s about the status of K–12 education in the US—or science education in the US! <Laugh>—and so as part of that report we interviewed like 50 science education experts across the country. We surveyed teachers, people in the university settings, researchers, and everything to kind of get a little bit more update of the state of science education right now. And so a lot of the things we’ve been talking about, we still are talking about with the people in this report four years later. So, work in progress. <Laugh>

Eric Cross (43:09):

And again, going back to 1977, based on what Eric was saying earlier, we’re looking at these large systems, these systemic changes don’t happen overnight.

Eric R. Banilower (43:20):

That’s right.

Eric Cross (43:21):

It’s very slow-moving.

Eric R. Banilower (43:22):

That’s right. I would say there is progress. I think we’ve learned a lot. We are getting better. Are we there yet? No, we’re not happy with where we are. But I think, you know, I think it’s important to be hopeful about the direction things are going in.

Eric Cross (43:37):

Well-said. I agree. Courtney. Eric, thank you so much for unpacking that report that speaks to, that validates what so many teachers across the country are experiencing. And thank you for your advocacy for high-quality science education and your passion for supporting teachers and being that voice from a data-driven perspective of what teachers experience and then advocating for solutions for them. It’s super-encouraging for me, and I know it’s gonna be really encouraging for a lot of our listeners. So thank you.

Eric R. Banilower (44:10):

Thank you for having us.

Courtney Plumley (44:12):

Yeah. Thank you, Eric.

Eric Cross (44:15):

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Eric Banilower, Vice President of Horizon Research, and Courtney Plumley, Senior Researcher at Horizon Research. For much more, check out the show notes for a link to the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education. And please remember to subscribe to Science Connections wherever you get podcasts, so that you’re not missing any of the upcoming episodes in Season three. Next time on the show, we’re gonna start laying out the road map for using science more effectively. And we’ll start by looking at the how and the why of integrating literacy instruction.

Susan Gomez Zwiep (44:49):

When we look at Science First and build language development around it, the experience tends to be more authentic and organic.

Eric Cross (44:58):

That’s next time on Science Connections: The Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.

Melanie Trecek-King (00:00):

We say knowledge is power, but it’s not enough to know things. And there’s too much to know. So being able to think and not fall for someone’s bunk is my goal for my students.

Eric Cross (00:12):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross. On this third season, we’ve been talking about science’s underdog status. And just this past March at the NSTA conference in Atlanta, I had the chance to speak with science educators from around the country about this very topic.

Hermia Simanu (00:28):

Right now, there’s only two teachers in our high school teaching science.

Shane Dongilli (00:32):

I have 45 minutes once a week with each class. The focus is reading and math.

Alexis Tharpe (00:38):

Oftentimes science gets put by the wayside. And you know, I love math and I love my language arts, but I also think science needs to place be placed on that high pedestal as well.

Askia Little (00:46):

In fifth grade, oh, they teach science, because that’s the only grade that it’s tested.

Eric Cross (00:50):

That was Hermia Simanu from American Samoa. Her team flew for three days to make it to the conference. You also heard from Shane Dongilli from North Carolina, Alexis Tharpe from Virginia, and Askia Little from Texas. All of these teachers were excited to be at the conference and had a lot to say about the state of science education in their local schools. Throughout this season, we’ve been trying to make the case for science, showing how science can be utilized more effectively in the classroom. We’ve explored the evidence showing that science supports literacy instruction. We’ve talked about science and the responsible use of technology like AI. My hope is that all of you listeners out there can use some of this evidence to feel empowered to make the case for science in your own communities. And on this episode, we’re going to examine how science can help develop what might be the most important skill that we try to develop in our students: Good thinking. On this episode, I’m joined by a biologist who actually advocated for eliminating the Intro to Bio course at her college. Instead, Professor Trecek-King created a new course focused on critical thinking, information literacy, and science literacy skills. In this conversation, we discuss why the science classroom is such a good environment for helping students become better thinkers. Now, I don’t think that you can make a much stronger argument for science than using it to develop the skills that Melanie describes in this conversation. So, without further ado, I’m thrilled to bring you this conversation with Melanie Trecek-King, Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College, and creator of Thinking Is Power. Here’s Melanie.

Eric Cross (02:29):

Well, Melanie, thank you for joining us on the show. It’s so good to have you.

Melanie Trecek-King (02:34):

I am so happy to be here.

Eric Cross (02:35):

Now, I went to your session at NSTA in Chicago … I think it was two years ago. A couple years ago. And I was listening to your session, and as I was listening to you, I started Reverse Engineering in my mind what you were doing with your college students. I started reverse engineering the K–8. I was like, “This is amazing.” Where has what you’ve been doing been hiding? We need this not just in the college, higher ed. We need this all the way up and down. Because I hadn’t seen it before. So I think a good place for us to start is gonna be like the story of how and why you as a biologist wound up making the case to actually eliminate the Intro to Biology course at your college. So can you start off and tell us a little bit about that story?

Melanie Trecek-King (03:20):

Sure. So I started teaching at a community college in Massachusetts. And I absolutely love teaching at a community college. And I was teaching the courses that people who don’t wanna be scientists when they grow up have to take to fulfill their science requirement. And that course was Intro Bio. And I tried every way I could figure out to make that class be useful,] relevant to students. I mean, the thing is, our world is based on science and you have to understand science to be a good consumer of information, to make good decisions. And I’m a biologist, so it pains me to say this, but you know, somewhere in the middle of teaching students about the stages of mitosis and protein synthesis, I thought, “Is this really — like, if I have one semester that’s gonna be the last chance that someone’s gonna get a science education, is this really what they need?” And I just decided, “No.” So, to my college’s credit, they were very supportive. I went to them and said, “You know, I think we should assess the non-majors courses. Like, why do we teach non-majors science?” And we all agreed, well, it was for science literacy. OK, great. Do our existing non-majors courses do that? And so we evaluated each of the courses. I made a case that Intro Bio was not doing it. And so we actually replaced it with a course that I call Science for Life. And the whole course is designed to teach science literacy, critical thinking, and information literacy skills.

Eric Cross (04:48):

And so you did this while you were looking at mitosis. And you’re looking at students who may or may not be science majors. And then kind of asking that question. I know every educator asks this, and whether or not it’s welcomed or supported is a different question: “Is what I’m teaching actually gonna be relevant and useful later on down the road for this group of students?” And you actually got to run with it and then create this course, this new course. So, what were the skills that you were hoping to achieve with the new course you developed, and and why were those skills so important?

Melanie Trecek-King (05:21):

Well, if I just go back for a second to what you said, ’cause it, really hit me: I remember the actual moment — it had been building up to that point, but the actual moment that it hit me — I was teaching students the stages of mitosis. And I was applying it to cancer, because the thought is that if we use issues that are relevant to students to teach concepts, that it will be more meaningful to them. They’ll learn it better; they’ll be able to apply it. And they just looked absolutely deflated. They didn’t wanna be there. And I had this moment where I thought, “You know, if, if these students ever have cancer somewhere in their lives, is what I taught them going to be something that they remember? Is it going to be useful to them?” And quite frankly, like, no. <Laugh> They’re not gonna remember proto-oncogenes. And quite frankly, is that really what they need to know at that moment? What they need to know is, “What does this mean? Who is a reliable source of information here? If these treatments are recommended, what is the evidence for them? What are the cost-benefit analyses? Where do I go to find reliable information?” And in that space, cancer in particular, we have this whole field of — I wanna say charlatans, ’cause they may not actually be lying, but they’re pedaling false cures, false hopes. And people need that kind of hope, and so in their time of need, they’re more likely to fall for that kind of thing. Which leads me to the skills that I teach students. I call them this tree of skills. And the order is important. I start — and there’s a lot of overlap to be fair — but critical thinking, and then information literacy, and science literacy. The idea is that students carry in their pockets access to basically all of human’s knowledge at this moment in time. And if they needed to access it, they could. The question is, do they know what they’re looking for? Are they aware of their own biases that are leading them to certain sources, or certain false hopes? Are there certain things that are making them more vulnerable to the people that might prey on them? Are they able to use that information to make good decisions? There’s a great Carl Sagan quote, and it’s something like, “If we teach people only the findings of science, no matter how useful or even inspiring they may be, without communicating the method, then how is anyone to be able to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?” So yes, the process of science is a process of critical thinking. However, we do tend to present science most of the time. Like, here’s what science has learned. And to be fair, those things that we’ve learned from science are really useful and inspiring. But if we don’t teach the process, so you’ve got somebody now who let’s say has been diagnosed with cancer and is on their phone and they’re scrolling through social media and everything looks the same. And of course the algorithms learn who you are. Next thing you know, there’s all of these like pseudo-treatments popping up. It all looks the same. Somebody who says that acupuncture can be used to cure cancer can feel the same, from someone who doesn’t understand the process of science, as a medical fact. And so the process is the process of critical thinking. My class everything is open note. The quizzes are open note. The exams — and I say open note, they’re also open online, because I know for the rest of their life they’re gonna have resources available to them; I want them to be good consumers with that information, which to me requires metacognition and critical thinking and information literacy and all those skills that I’m trying to teach them.

Eric Cross (08:58):

You’re basically taking what … we’ve taught science for so long. And more recently, it’s changed to more focusing on skills. At least in K through 12. But a lot of it was just memorization of a ton of different things that now we can pull up our phone, go on the internet. You can pull up a lot of those facts. But those facts don’t necessarily translate to actual real-world skills. When I listen to… I kind of make this analogy sometimes: students say … it’s funny, I have 12-year-olds that say this. They go, “How come they don’t teach us how to do our taxes?” And you know they’re regurgitating what they hear from adults, right? “Teach us real-world skills!” And I was like, really, if we taught you right now how to do your taxes, how many of you would really be like, “Oh, this is an awesome lesson! We’re really engaged!” But their point is that “I wanna learn something that I could actually use later on, that’s that I’m gonna carry on.” And in your course, you’re talking about these skills that actually can apply. Like you said, if I had cancer and I’m looking at different types of medical procedures, do I have the skills to really be able to evaluate and make informed decisions on that? And that’s, that’s not something that I’ve seen explicitly taught really anywhere. And I hadn’t heard anybody talk about it, really, until I heard your session, where you’ve kind of unpacked this, and over the last couple of years, have created some programs or resources for educators, where they can take this into their classroom. So what were some of those skills, again? What were were some of the skills that you thought, “I wanna make sure that my students can walk out and they know how to do this and apply it to maybe several different fields”?

Melanie Trecek-King (10:35):

Oh, that’s a really good question. Because the whole thing was a process for me. Like, when I finally let go of Intro Bio, I was so glad to see that class go, by the way. ‘Cause I just felt like I was beating a dead horse. So when I let go of it, I thought, “What do they need instead?” And for me, what I realized was I was trying to make the class I would’ve wanted to take. I realized the things that I personally didn’t know, that my own education maybe let me down a bit. But things that I thought were important. So then I took all of those, synthesized them, tried to figure out the best order. The class is currently in its third iteration. And I hope every iteration is an improvement. But I’m thinking about the students that I taught before the pandemic. It was Intro Bio. Up to just maybe the couple years before the pandemic, and during the pandemic, we had a new virus and we had a new vaccine and we had new treatments. There was hydroxychloroquine and there was ivermectin and then there’s masks. Are masks effective? Well, you know, in what circumstances? What kind of mask? There are all of these questions. And that whole thing was we saw science playing out in real time.

Eric Cross (11:50):

Absolutely.

Melanie Trecek-King (11:51):

And so were my students able to follow that? And then what happened in that process is that science became politicized. And in a time where things are uncertain and we need answers, ’cause it’s scary, people want certainty and science doesn’t tend to provide that. Especially when it’s just starting out. And then when it becomes politicized, people decide that they’re going to — it’s not necessarily a conscious decision — but they retreat into what people in their camps are saying or their groups are saying. Which actually leads me to one of the more important parts of information literacy skills in there, which is most of our knowledge is shared. We tend to have overinflated senses of what we individually know. And studies actually show that with Google, if you have access to Google, you think you’re smarter than if you don’t have access to Google. But we all have access to knowledge in our communities, and that’s one of the reasons humans are so successful, is that we can each specialize in different things and share our expertise and become greater than the sum of our parts. The problem with that, of course, is that we forget what we don’t know, and we assume that we know what the community knows. And so recognizing the limits of your own knowledge and how different communities produce knowledge, like the different epistemic processes that communities use to come to knowledge. When it comes down to it, an important part of knowing is knowing who to trust, right? Knowing where the source of knowledge lives. And in order to do that, you have to understand the processes that they’re using to come to that knowledge and the limits of your own knowledge. And then how to find who has that knowledge so that you can use that to make better decisions.

Eric Cross (13:38):

So, when I hear what you’re doing with your college students, and I think about what I’m doing in the classroom, in the middle school, we are really focusing on literacy as skills. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. And then when I think of the next step of the journey, your information literacy and the literacy you’re teaching is really the application of those things in the real world. And the examples that you gave are very critical examples. Evaluating claims about Covid. Making informed decisions about a medical procedure that you might need. And we all get that applied to us. We’re scrolling through social media and somehow social media is listening. It’s figuring out exactly what I’m doing, because all of a sudden the ads are telling me … how did you know I was alking about KitchenAid mixers now? I just said KitchenAid mixers and it’s gonna show up in my feed! But <laugh> I take that in the same way from the same place that I take in maybe an oncologist. So it’s it’s coming through the same channels. So now I kind of wanna pivot. So we’ve talked about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, the connection between “am I really teaching the skills that my students need in the science class? Is it really critical thinking explicitly or is it just kind of implied?” Now I wanna ask you how you do it. What’s the annotated, abbreviated kind of syllabus of your course?

Melanie Trecek-King (15:03):

So the course is called Science for Life. And the premise behind it is the kinds of skills and understanding of the process of science that they would need to make good decisions to be empowered in a world based on science. And so the very first lecture, I say, “OK, I’m gonna tell you a story and I just want you to listen to the story. And at the end I’m gonna ask you why I told the story.” And the story that I tell them is some of the history of the witchcraft trials in Europe. And I start with the Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches, from the Pope, and about how people would accuse witches of causing birth defects or storms or crops dying. And, the best evidence that they had to absolutely know somebody was a witch was if somebody accused them, and then if they were accused, if they confessed. OK? But the problem is, to get them to confess, they would torture them. Roasting over coals, or splitting until somebody broke. And so I tell my students, “OK, this was absolute proof that someone was guilty of witchcraft. I don’t know about you; I would confess to anything, right? Make it stop!” So this is where I get to ask students, “Why would I ask you this? Why would I tell you this story? And traumatize you on the very first day of lecture?” And they see the reasoning, right? They thought they had evidence. The question was, is that good evidence? And so, you know, I’m getting students to have a basic understanding of epistemology, right? Without calling it that, or without going into all of the philosophical background of epistemology. Apply this to your own reasoning. What are you wrong about? Well, you probably wouldn’t know. OK, how would you know if you were wrong? Like what kinds of things do you feel that you’re so right about? How good is your evidence for that? So what I want them to do is internalize the thinking about thinking, and analyzing how they come to conclusions, and proportioning how strongly they believe. Their confidence in how right they are. So I think starting with that kind of misinformation, and getting students to internalize that process is important. But I think the example is really useful, because most of my students don’t believe in witchcraft. Right? So it’s not an issue that would immediately threaten them in some way. So when, when a belief is tied to identity or how we see ourselves or is really important to us, then it’s very difficult to be objective about that belief. And so by starting with witchcraft, it’s not triggering. I get them to think about thinking and practice that muscle so that when we get to those more important issues, they have the skills they need to evaluate them.

Eric Cross (17:55):

So would it be fair to say that your Science for Life class is really applied scientific thinking for the real world?

Melanie Trecek-King (18:01):

Absolutely. That’s the idea. I mean, science is too good to keep to ourselves, right? And it’s everywhere. So how can you understand the world through a scientific lens?

Eric Cross (18:10):

What are the nuts and bolts of how you teach your students these strategies? What do you do? What are some strategies and techniques that we can maybe share with listeners? And then where I want to go after that is I wanna ask you, how early do you think this can be started? So lemme start off first with, what do you do?

Melanie Trecek-King (18:28):

So I use three different strategies. One is, I provide students with a toolkit. And the toolkit is one that I created and it is like my one toolkit to rule them all. It is trying to apply critical thinking and science reasoning all together in one place. So that if students are met with a claim, they’ve got the toolkit with an acronym. They can now start and have somewhere to go. In that if I gave you a claim and said, “Just critically think through this claim,” I mean, that’s a mighty task. But if you have a structured toolkit, then it’s hopefully a systemic way that’s helpful. The toolkit is summarized by FLOATER. I have published it on Skeptical Inquirer. It’s free. So it’s Falsifiability, Logical, Objectivity, Alternative Explanations, Tentative Conclusions, Evidence, and Reproducibility. So I provide students with a toolkit. The next thing I do is I use a lot of misinformation in class. Back to what Carl Sagan says: What I heard was we should use pseudoscience to teach students the difference between a pseudo-scientific process and a scientific process. So, I use science denial, conspiracy theories, and give my students a lot of opportunities to practice evaluating claims with the toolkit. And the other thing I do is, I use inoculation activities. So inoculation theory is based on William McGuire’s original research in the ’60s, which is basically like a vaccine analogy. Where you can inject a small amount of a virus or bacterium into the body, so that it creates an immune response, so that it can learn the real thing. And so in the real world, it can fight it off. Inoculation theory does the same thing, but with misinformation. So, what we can do is, in controlled environments, expose students to little bits of misinformation so that they can recognize it in the real world. There’s different kinds of inoculation, but I’m a big fan of what’s called active and technique-based inoculation. So technique-based means that students are learning not the facts of misinformation, not factually why this thing is wrong, but about the technique used to deceive. So maybe the use of fake experts. Or maybe the use of anecdotes. Or the use of logical fallacies. The other part of that is active, which is where students create the misinformation. So for example, my students, just now, we finished covering pseudoscience. And I teach students the characteristics of pseudoscience. And basically we have fun with it. Where they pretend to be grifters and they sell a pseudoscience product. And so they have to make an ad like they’d see on social media, using the different techniques. And the point there is that it’s supposed to be funny, right? And lighthearted. But in a real way, by using the techniques used to sell something like pseudoscience, it’s opening their eyes. You can’t unsee how every alternative product has, “it’s an all-natural and used for centuries and millions use it and look at this person who says, ‘Wow, it worked for me!’ And it’s certified by some society that doesn’t exist, but this doctor behind it says that it’s really great!” I mean, it’s all the same stuff. So they create the misinformation using their own techniques.

Eric Cross (22:02):

That’s one of my favorite things that you’ve talked about, and I want to dive in that a little bit more. But when you’re teaching the toolkit, FLOATER, what does that look like in the classroom, when you’re actually breaking all of those things down? What does it look like as you’re walking your students through this, and you’re kind of coaching them on all of those different things? ‘Cause I feel like some things might be like, “Oh yeah, I got that.” And then some of them might be, “Oh, what is that?”

Melanie Trecek-King (22:24):

Yeah, it takes me probably a good solid lecture to get through the basis of the toolkit. But then over the rest of the semester, I’ll spend more time going into different parts, different rules, a bit more in-depth. So, for example, logical fallacies and objectivity. So the rule of objectivity basically states that you need to be honest with yourself. I’m gonna quote Feynman here, so: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” We don’t tend to think that we can be fooled. But of course we can. So actually, if you wanna talk about it, I start class by fooling my students.

Eric Cross (23:03):

Wait, what do you do? What do you do for that?

Melanie Trecek-King (23:05):

Oh, so this is really fun. Day 1 of class, after the syllabus, I tell my … so you’re in my class now, Eric. “So I have a friend, and she’s a psychic. She’s an astrologer and she’s pretty good at what she does. I mean, she’s got books and she’s been on TV and stuff. She knows I teach this course about skepticism. And so she’s agreed to test how effective she is by providing personality assessments to students in class. So if you wanna participate, what I need from you is your birthday, your full name, answer a few questions. Like, if your house was on fire and you could take one thing, what would it be? Or if you could get paid for anything to do anything for a living, what would it be? Um, there’s a third one. Oh! If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” So the next class, it’s usually over a weekend. The next class I say, “OK, I’ve got your personality assessments back, but remember, we wanna test how effective she is. So in order to do that, I need you to read your profile as quietly as possible. And then I’m gonna have you rate her accuracy on a scale of 1 to 5. OK? So close your eyes; rate her.” Over the years doing this, it’s about a 4.3 to 4.5 out of 5. They think she’s pretty accurate. OK? “So now, if you feel comfortable, get with a person next to you. And I want you to talk about what parts of the personality assessment really spoke to you and, and why, and why you thought she was accurate or not.” And it takes them 5, 10 minutes before they realize they all got the same one. So, this is not my original experiment. It was first done by Bertram Forer in … I think it was the ’50s. And it’s done in psychology classrooms. James Randi made it famous. But the personality assessment itself is full of what are called Barnum statements. So, named after P.T. Barnum. These are statements that are very generic. So, “You have a need to be liked and admired by people. You are often quiet and reserved, but there are times where you can be the life of the party.”

Eric Cross (25:13):

How do you know this about me, by the way? This is a — I feel like you know me right now.

Melanie Trecek-King (25:17):

“There are times where you’ve wondered whether you’ve done the right thing.”

Eric Cross (25:19):

This is getting weird.

Melanie Trecek-King (25:21):

I’m just on fire, right? So these are Barnum statements. They’re the basis of personality assessment.

Eric Cross (25:29):

Mel, can I pause you right there? You said Barnum. Is that the same Barnum, like Barnum & Bailey Circus?

Melanie Trecek-King (25:34):

Yeah. P.T. Barnum, who didn’t actually say “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but we attribute him with that kind of ethos. These statements though, if you read a horoscope or even like personality indicators, like the MBTI, it is basically pseudo-scientific. And it ends up with lots of these Barnum statements. They produce what’s called the Barnum Effect, which is, “Wow, that’s so me! How did you know me?” I could even do more. Like, you have a box of photos in your house that need to be sorted. Or unused prescriptions. And these can apply to nearly everyone, but they produce this effect where we go, “Wow, that is so me!” Right? So by fooling them this way, I get to … well, so the next thing is, “Yes, I lied to you. And I’d like to tell you I won’t do that again. But I’m not going to, ’cause I might. So be on your guard.” But I did it for free. And why did I do it? “I did it because I could tell you ‘I could fool you,’ but you wouldn’t necessarily believe me. So I fooled you, so that you would learn what it feels like to be fooled.” It’s not fun. But we’re gonna make a joke outta this. And students are almost never upset about this ’cause it’s a fun process and they’re all fooled. And again, the point is, I didn’t disprove psychic powers. I didn’t just disprove psychics with this exercise. But I did show you how easy it was to fake. So if somebody is gonna tell you that they can know these things about you through some way, hopefully the evidence they provide should be stronger than something that’s easily faked. Right? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim to be able to read my personality based on my birthdate, then I need more than something that you can be taught to do in 15 minutes. So, I fool them to convince them that they could be fooled.

Eric Cross (27:27):

You’re giving them a practice scenario for thinking. And I was thinking about basketball. I grew up playing basketball. And my coach would have our own team be the defenders of the next team we were gonna play, so that we can be prepared for the defense. We were gonna see. Now, when I’m thinking about education, and what you just said reminded me of this, it’s like we’re often just teaching offense. We’re always teaching the plays. We’re always teaching what to do. But we rarely teach defense. What happens when someone comes towards you and, and they challenge you or they come at you with claims? How do we evaluate this? And I think in pockets we do it. We do claim-evidence-reasoning. We present claims and evidence and reasoning. But we don’t always have practice defending them. And I think there’s great resources. There’s Argumentation Toolkit and there’s all these awesome resources that do this. But does that fit? You’re kind of having them practice defense?

Melanie Trecek-King (28:26):

Yeah. You know, that’s brilliant. I never considered that analogy. But, yeah, in the real world, you don’t just get to always try to score all the time. Someone’s gonna challenge you and give you a claim that maybe you haven’t heard before. So how do you think through it?

Eric Cross (28:41):

Yeah. And you become better. So now I’m thinking about how early could we start doing this? For one, I love the idea of lying to your students, because I do that. And it’s just such a fun scenario. How early could we start implementing these strategies or these ideas or these toolkits? In your mind, what do you imagine? How early could we start this with young people?

Melanie Trecek-King (29:07):

Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that question, ’cause honestly, by the time they get to me, it’s almost too late. And I don’t wanna say it’s too late, ’cause it’s never too late. But, oh, we need to start so much earlier! That example that I gave about the selling pseudoscience argument? I have a wonderful colleague, Bertha Vasquez, who’s a middle school teacher in Miami and the director of TIES at CFI. She did this with her middle school students. And quite frankly, their examples were just as good, or in some cases better, than my college students. And they had so much fun with it, too. And she just said that, you know, <laugh>, they actually are more savvy with the kinds of things that they see online than we — I don’t wanna say give them credit for. But almost that we want to believe. My students give me examples of things that are from corners of the internet that I didn’t know existed. And quite frankly, that’s probably a good thing for my own mental health. But students are on there too, like middle school students, and we need to prepare them for the kinds of things that they see in the wild.

Eric Cross (30:13):

So in middle school, definitely. Now, you’ve also done some work in high school as well, right? In Oklahoma? Did you do some. …?

Melanie Trecek-King (30:17):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (30:18):

…some work with high schoolers? What was that like? Did you see any impact there?

Melanie Trecek-King (30:21):

So I didn’t actually do it in Oklahoma. I have taught the course … actually, you were talking about younger kids. I’ve taught the course to high schoolers in my area that are parts of dual enrollment. And they absolutely ate up the curriculum. And they were wonderful, wonderful students. And it was completely appropriate for … they were juniors, actually. But the course has also been taught in Oklahoma, through a dual enrollment program as well. And it was a small sample size. But we have pre-post testing that showed that it improved their critical thinking, their acceptance of science. But anecdotally the head of the program there said that in his years doing this, he’d never seen a course that helped them improve in their other courses so well. So, I felt very rewarded by hearing this. But apparently their critical thinking skills and information literacy skills helped them succeed in their other courses that they were taking. And I love that the students were transferring those skills to other classes. That’s the whole point.

Eric Cross (31:23):

And that’s a big … I think that what you just said is really the core, especially of what we’ve been talking about this season: What you’re talking about and what you’re teaching can transfer and supports literacy. And this is an example of science doing that across all other content areas. So I think that that’s huge, that that was said. What do people say about this course? I know I went on your website, and I looked at some of the comments that some folks were saying, and I know it’s just a snippet, but what do you hear from the education world about this? Because I don’t see it in many places. I see it kind of embedded, sprinkled into different content areas. But you’re actually teaching it explicitly. Do you tend to find positive feedback, overwhelmingly? Or do you get pushback on on some of this? What’s it been like for you?

Melanie Trecek-King (32:16):

I think the biggest pushback — and it’s good pushback, and I would agree entirely — is with inoculation activities, you do need to be careful to, when you debrief students, you wanna tell them why you did what you did and to use their powers for good and not for fooling other people. And I think importantly, for not putting misinformation out into the wild without having context around it. So if you do these kinds of inoculation activities, like if you have your students create pseudoscience ads, don’t just let them put them on social media. Obviously, you can’t control everything that they’re doing. But explain to them why you wouldn’t wanna do that. As far as everything else, I’ve heard really great feedback. You’re referencing my website. So, when I put together the course, I was trying to find resources for students to read. Textbooks are ridiculously expensive and I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted students to buy. So I just started writing, and I put it on my site. I have a site that’s basically the core of the curriculum. More in progress. And then I’ve got some of the topics that we explore and those are all assigned readings. My students are captive, in that I know they want a grade, and for four months they have to sit with me for the entire semester, in that I’ve specifically ordered the content in a way that would be most conducive to them learning these things. On the internet, though, and on social media, ’cause I post on there as well, people come in from all kinds of entry points, and so the goal would be to have them start at the beginning and go to the end. But people … I’m pleasantly surprised that there is an audience for critical thinking and science literacy content out there. And so that really warms my heart. But I am doing more and more for educators. And so I have a section for educators. I put content on there. I put assignments, the assignments that we’ve talked about and more, are on there. And the educators that I’ve had use it have just been really wonderful. Like, I hear great things. If I might, the biggest issue that I’m having is actually reaching educators. I’ve gone to — I met you at NSCA, actually, that was only last summer.

Eric Cross (34:30):

Oh, wow. Wow.

Melanie Trecek-King (34:32):

Right?

Eric Cross (34:32):

Yeah, you’re right. It wasn’t even a year.

Melanie Trecek-King (34:35):

Yeah, I think it was like July last year. So, um, you’ve been to the conferences. And I just went to the last one as well. But I have yet to figure out a way to really get in front of enough educators to share the content. So if anybody’s listening and is interested in learning more, please let me know! <Laugh>

Eric Cross (34:52):

Yes. And we talked about your website, but I didn’t say what the website was. So it’s ThinkingIsPower.com.

Melanie Trecek-King (34:57):

Yes.

Eric Cross (34:58):

And on there, there’s tons of resources. There is the toolkit. And it’s all free.

Melanie Trecek-King (35:06):

Yes.

Eric Cross (35:07):

And there’s a dope t-shirt on there that I just bought today, that Melanie’s actually wearing right now. It says, “Be curious, be skeptical, and be humble.” And I love that. Because I think one of the things that we can’t forget about teaching people how to think and critically evaluating information, sometimes those conversations can become very dehumanizing. And what I mean by that is it sometimes can become, like, intellectual sport, where we forget that there’s a human being on the other other side. And we lose that empathy and compassion. We can kind of see that. It just becomes this intellectual jousting and arguing. And one of the things I know about you, and when you talk about this or you talk about the work that you do, and even the shirt that you’re wearing, there’s this, “be humble.” There’s this human that is never lost in this. And you said it, too: When you’re teaching your students and you’re equipping them with all of these intellectual skills and all of these tools, to use it for good. So to maintain your humanity, to maintain your character, and then to use it to edify and lift people up, not to go out and do harm. That balance, I think, is so, so important. So it’s something that I really appreciate about you and how you teach.

Melanie Trecek-King (36:19):

I appreciate those kind words. Actually—

Eric Cross (36:21):

Oh, of course!

Melanie Trecek-King (36:22):

—and if I might, I sometimes see people using critical thinking like a weapon. It’s like, “I have learned fallacies and I’m just gonna use the tools of critical thinking to tell you why you’re stupid, or why you’re wrong, and why my position is right!” But real critical thinking involves applying those same standards to your own thought processes. And even something like argumentation: the goal of our argumentation is not to BE right; it’s to GET it right. And so we’re on the same team. If we’re arguing about something, if the idea is in scientific argumentation we’re trying to find the truth, which one of us is making a better argument based on the evidence? Can your perspective help me see my own blind spots and vice versa? And the more different perspectives that we have, the more able we are to find whatever reality is. But we are in this together. And so, yeah, I think … I’m glad to hear that that’s coming through. But if you don’t have the kind of humility that says, “You know, I could be wrong,” then you’re never gonna change your mind anyway. So having the humility to say, I’m wrong. <Laugh>

Eric Cross (37:33):

Yeah. You end up just seeing people just defend turf, as opposed to support “look for truth.” And I know for me, my own education journey, I end up with more questions than answers anyways. So I go in trying to find an answer for something and I end up with 10 more questions. And I go, “OK, this is kind of how it is.” You go down this rabbit hole and you just end up with all these different questions. And it forces the humility, because you’re like, “I don’t know! I think this is what it could be, but it could also be these other answers or explanations. So this is just where I’m at, based on what we know right now, at this present time, which might shift.”

Melanie Trecek-King (38:07):

And that sounds reasonable. Yes. Which might shift. Yes.

Eric Cross (38:11):

And especially for us as life-science biology teachers, our content is something that definitely shifts. I know some of the things I teach now are not things that I learned when I was even in middle school. Just because things evolve. They change. We learn, we get new data. That’s just the way it is.

Melanie Trecek-King (38:24):

<Sighs> And Pluto is no longer a planet.

Eric Cross (38:26):

I know. Rest in — well, no, Pluto’s still there. Yeah. It’s no longer a planet. But that was one part of my kindergarten memorizations <laugh> is Pluto being in there.

Melanie Trecek-King (38:36):

Gotta change your mind.

Eric Cross (38:38):

I know. Any words of advice for science educators out there who want to focus more on honing these critical thinking skills and strategies with their own students, but they don’t know where to start? Where would you point them? Or what advice would you give them?

Melanie Trecek-King (38:52):

I think start with what you want the students to know. And not necessarily the FACTS that you want students to know, but start with the skills that you want them to know. And then really be honest with your process. When I designed Science for Life, I started with, “these are the skills that I want students to know.” And everything was in service of that. So this sort of backwards design, I think, helped me follow a path that was more likely to be useful, if that makes any sense. But it really required doing it all over again. So don’t be afraid to question the things that you’re currently doing, even if that’s all you’ve been taught or all you know.

Eric Cross (39:41):

What I’m hearing is, don’t be afraid to question your own assumptions about what you’re doing. And don’t be afraid to adapt or change or modify. Kinda, pivot. Be flexible.

Melanie Trecek-King (39:51):

Yes, be flexible and pivot. And this is where I’m in a different position than middle school and high school educators. Because I have complete freedom over what I teach in my class.

Eric Cross (40:01):

Sure.

Melanie Trecek-King (40:01):

At the end of the semester, I always joke with non-majors that there’s nothing they have to know, which actually gives me a lot of flexibility, because I could teach ’em a lot of different things. So if there are things that you have to teach students, obviously that’s one thing. But I personally think that the way that we’ve been teaching science needs a refresher. A rethinking. And so I would say, “If you want your students to learn science literacy, honestly ask, what does that mean to you? And what would that look like to get to that point?” For me, though, it was also keeping in mind that maybe I didn’t already know the best way to do that.

Eric Cross (40:43):

One of the things you mentioned earlier is trying to reach out to educators. And I know that when we work together, it’s a force multiplier. And what you’re doing is developing skills. And there’s these skills that are happening right now in academia that you’re doing. And then how do we transfer that into middle and high school. Or, I’m sorry, middle and elementary school, high school. We need to get more people into this conversation to kind of brainstorm and figure that out. We have a Facebook group, Science Connections: The Community, where we have educators that gather. That can be one place we start the conversation. And again, I know on your website you’ve been super active on social media; you’ve grown your presence on Twitter and all these different places, engaging with folks. Which is awesome. ‘Cause I know I see your posts and I’m saving the things that you’re posting and I’m thinking of ways that I can do it in my classroom. I’m gonna take that product. By the way, is that on your website, the lesson that you do with the product?

Melanie Trecek-King (41:43):

No, actually. So the article, “How to Sell Pseudoscience” is … I know Bertha Vasquez wrote up a version of it.

Eric Cross (41:50):

Maybe we can grab that. ‘Cause we might be able to put that into the show notes for folks, because she’s a middle school educator. If there’s already something that’s been done for teachers like us, we’re like, “Yeah, let me get that and let me remix it and make it my own!” if there’s already a exemplar out there.

Melanie Trecek-King (42:04):

Yeah, she’s done it. And so I will absolutely share that with you.

Eric Cross (42:08):

So, all season long, we’ve been talking about science as the underdog. We kind of framed it, you know, science oftentimes takes a back seat to math and English. It’s kinda the first thing to go. Or the first area where time can get cut. Because of what gets tested gets focused on, oftentimes. And then in addition to that, when you’re a multi-subject teacher, elementary science isn’t just one thing — it’s every field. You know, you’re a biologist, which is different than a geologist. And when you’re teaching every subject, that’s a lot. And you might not have had a science class for years. And the realities that we’re seeing over and over with different researchers and practitioners is that science could actually enhance literacy, and building those skills. And I think you really talked about it with the critical thinking skills. Those can transfer. Or the administrator that said, “This is one of the only courses I’ve seen where it transfers to other areas.” Could you share maybe with our listeners, just any advice for advocating for science in their own world?

Melanie Trecek-King (43:13):

Wow, I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that question! One of the things that comes to mind though — because I was listening to your last episode and educators … I honestly didn’t realize how little time they had for science. And how often science was then the first to go, to allow room for other subjects. But science overlaps with a lot of other issues. And so I feel like there could be a way to bring in science when teaching these other subjects. So, for example, argumentation and logical fallacies are easy to apply to reading and writing. Information literacy, and being able to find good information online, teaching students how to laterally read, to be able to check a source, or how to use Google effectively, to put in neutral search terms to find sources, or teaching students how to recognize the characteristics of conspiratorial thinking: All of these things can overlap with so many other subjects. So the scientist in me is a little biased towards science being important enough to do this. But try to bring it into the other subjects. It doesn’t have to be completely separate.

Eric Cross (44:43):

So integrating science into other things. And I … big believer. And a hundred percent agree with you. Now I’m gonna ask a question that kinda like takes us backwards. You shared an app with me when we first met that I thought was really cool. And I know it’s a friend or colleague of yours. But as a middle school teacher, I thought it was great, because it was something that my students could download and practice some of the skills that you’re talking about. Would you talk a little bit about the cranky uncle? Is it the Cranky Uncle app?

Melanie Trecek-King (45:17):

Cranky Uncle.

Eric Cross (45:18):

Could you share a little bit about that?

Melanie Trecek-King (45:20):

Yeah. Cranky Uncle is awesome. So, Cranky Uncle is the brainchild of John Cook, who is the founder of Skeptical Science and the author of the 97% Consensus study on climate change. Cranky Uncle … so he’s also a cartoonist. And Cranky Uncle is a cartoon game where … I don’t even have to explain who Cranky Uncle is to my students. Everybody inherently gets the, the character, right? So he’s like the guy at Thanksgiving that you don’t wanna talk to because he denies climate change and he’s just really cranky. But Cranky Uncle uses the techniques of science denial, which are summarized by the acronym FLICC: So it’s Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry-picking, and Conspiratorial thinking. So he uses those techniques. Again, this is technique-based inoculation. So they recognize the techniques in the game, and you earn cranky points. And as you make Cranky crankier and crankier because you’re recognizing his techniques, you learn the techniques of science denial, and level up and open up other techniques. This is another one of those examples where climate change has a lot of science behind it, right? And if you wanted to get to the science behind climate change for any particular issue … so let’s say it’s cold today, so I’m gonna say there’s no climate change. OK? If I’m gonna unpack that at a factual level, and with science, we could be here for a while. But if I told you, “That’s like saying, ‘I just ate a sandwich so there’s no global hunger.’” OK? So that’s a parallel argument. Humorous. Love to use this kind of argumentation, ’cause it makes for some … I mean, it’s funny, but you get the point. It’s an anecdote. And anecdotes aren’t good evidence. So just like that, you could teach the technique of using an anecdotal fallacy for climate-change denial. So, I have my students play this game. You could do it when you’re studying argumentation. You could do it for science denial. I use an inoculation extension with that, where I have my students pretend that … um, actually, back up for a second. So I teach a class on critical thinking. And at the end of semesters I would get emails from students on, well, they’re failing the class, but they really shouldn’t, for all of these reasons. And reading these emails, I’m like, “If you think that’s a good argument, you clearly didn’t learn what I was hoping you would learn.” So I now have my students, early in the semester, after they play Cranky, pretend that it is the end of the semester and you’re failing the class and you’re failing because you didn’t do the work. Use at least four of the fallacies from class to argue for why you should pass. So they have to put it on a discussion forum, and they’ll say things like, “Well, if you fail me, then I won’t get into graduate school and then people will die and it will all be your fault.” Or, “My dog died, and so I was really sad.” Or, um, “You’re just a terrible teacher. And you’re short. So I don’t like you.” Or that kind of thing. So, oh, they love to attack my character. It’s really funny. But it’s supposed to be funny. And the point is, the students are using those arguments, they’re using the fallacies, to argue for something. And so by creating that misinformation themselves, they learn how those fallacies work. But taken together, I mean, everything that we just talked about there, Cranky Uncle, and the fallacy assignment, or whatever iteration you want that to be in, that doesn’t have to be in a purely science unit. Right? That could be sociology. It could be argumentation. It could be English.

Eric Cross (49:01):

Absolutely. That could be totally a prompt in an English class. And practiced in there. And then this could be an interdisciplinary thing, going back and forth between English and and science. Just having these discussions and looking at it from different angles. And you’re practicing the skills in two different contexts. So you get into argumentation. And then that app, I know I had fun with it. And the questions on there definitely resonate with people in my own family. I’m like, “I feel like I’m talking to exactly somebody that I’m related to right now.” <Laugh> Melanie, anything else that you wanna share, or discuss or highlight, before we wrap up?

Melanie Trecek-King (49:39):

So we could talk about lateral reading, if you like. ‘Cause I know a lot of educators use the crap test.

Eric Cross (49:45):

Please, please, please talk about that.

Melanie Trecek-King (49:47):

So, when evaluating sources, a lot of educators teach what’s called the CRAP test. And I wish I remembered what it stood for. But basically what you do, a lot of us have been taught when you go to a website, to figure out if it’s reliable, you wanna go to the about page. Read the mission; see who they are; maybe read some of the content; evaluate the language. So is it inflammatory? Are they making logical arguments? Are the links to reputable sources as well? And the problem is that if a site wants to mislead you, they’re not going to tell you that it’s a bunk site, right? They’re just gonna do a good job of misleading you. And so, what you wanna do instead … the CRAP test basically is an evaluation of a site. And that’s what’s called vertical reading. So you’re looking through a site to determine if it’s reliable. Uh, I think his name’s Sam Wineberg at Stanford, proposed something called lateral reading. Where, instead of on the site, what you wanna do is literally open a new tab and into the search engine type the source. You could do the claim, too. And then something like Reliability or FactCheck or whatever it’s that you’re checking, and then see what other reputable sites have to say about it. So, in their study, actually, they did a really interesting study where they compared professional fact checkers to PhD historians to Stanford undergrads. And they evaluated — I wish you could … um, there’s two pediatrician organizations. One’s like the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Pediatricians, something like that. They’re very similar sounding. So you give them to students. I do this with my students as well, the same study. So I give my students those two websites. And I say, “Which one of these is more reliable?” And they do exactly what most of us do, which is spend time on the site looking around. And most of the time, if not nearly all the time, they come to the wrong conclusion. And so then I tell them what lateral reading is: “OK, instead of looking through the site, open a new tab, search the organization and reliability.” Something like that. And it takes probably 30 seconds before they realize one of them has been dubbed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. As opposed to the other one, which is like a hundred year old huge pediatrician organization that produces their own journals and so on. But nearly all my students are fooled. And in the study, none of the fact checkers were fooled. I’m gonna get the number right. It’s something like 50% of the historians and 20% of the Stanford undergraduates got the correct answer. And they spent a lot more time on it. So it’s a great way to teach students how to use the power of the internet to evaluate sources much more quickly and, effectively. And yes, use Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia is not a final answer, but Wikipedia is actually pretty accurate. So if Wikipedia is the first place you stop, then yes, go there, see what Wikipedia says, and then follow some of their sources.

Eric Cross (52:47):

What popped in my head was like, Yelp reviews for websites. That almost sounds like what it was. It’s like when I search for a product, I don’t go and read the product description marketing. ‘Cause that’s all designed to sell me on something. But I’ll go and look in Reliability, if it’s like a car, or just other sites to cross-reference. And that sounds like what you were talking about is like cross-referencing. Seeing what FactChecker [sic] said about this site, versus seeing what a site says about itself.

Melanie Trecek-King (53:14):

Well, that’s a great analogy. Because if I wanted to know if a product was effective, what the manufacturer says about the product, clearly there’s a strong chance of bias. Right? They’re going to be on their best, um, put their best foot forward. Versus, what do independent reviewers say about this product?

Eric Cross (53:35):

Yep. And I am known to research something to death. And I get something called “paralysis by analysis.”

Melanie Trecek-King (53:42):

Ohhhh, yeah.

Eric Cross (53:44):

And it’s so bad that even if I’m trying to buy, like, towels, I need to find the best-bang-for-the-buck towel. I have to defer some of these decisions out, because I’m on the internet for three hours now. I’ll be a pseudo-expert in towels, and thread count, and all of that stuff. But yeah, that maybe that’s just the science person.

Melanie Trecek-King (54:03):

I mean, I feel your pain. I do the same thing. <Laugh> It’s annoying. Like, it’s just towels. What does it really matter? But yeah.

Eric Cross (54:10):

Coffee! It doesn’t matter what it is. I just need to go, “OK, I have to use these powers for good. Otherwise I’m gonna be researching forever.”

Melanie Trecek-King (54:16):

I wanna say one other thing. So, again, this is a college class and I have a lot of freedom. But one of the driving philosophies behind the class is a wonderful quote in a book, Schick and Vaughn, How to Think about Weird Things. And they said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your decisions, and the quality of your decisions is determined by the quality of your thinking.” And I know my students want a grade. But I’m really trying to teach them how to be empowered through better thinking. That’s where the name “Thinking is Power” came from. I mean, we say “Knowledge is Power,” but it’s not enough to know things. And there’s too much to know. So being able to think and be empowered to have your own agency and not fall for someone’s bunk is my goal for my students.

Eric Cross (55:07):

And doing that is gonna help them through the rest of their lives. Not be swindled, not be taken advantage of, be able to make better decisions. There’s so many benefits to building that skill. And I know your students have definitely grown and benefited. I’m sure you’ve heard, long after you’ve taught them, heard back from them and how they’ve applied that course to their lives. Melanie, thank you so much for being here. For a few things. One, for providing and filling this space where there’s such a need. Again, the critical thinking resources, the tools that you used, are so, so important. If we ever lived in a time where they were critical, it was really what we experienced during the pandemic in the last few years. We watched people’s information literacy and science literacy play out in real time. And we literally saw life-and-death decisions being made based off those skills. That highlighted, I think how important this is. And then, taking the time to generate resources for educators like myself, that we can take and adapt and put into our classroom and start teaching our students. ‘Cause like you said, by the time they get to you, they’re, they’re so far downstream or so far in a system that, depending on the teachers that they’ve had and the education system they’ve been in, may or may not have even touched on these things. They might have learned a lot of facts, but they may not have built their muscle to be able to critically analyze and interpret the world around them. And you’ve just — even the last year, it hasn’t even been a year since we talked the first time — I’ve watched your resources continue to grow, and you share them. And so I, on behalf of those of us in K–12, thank you. And thank you for being here.

Melanie Trecek-King (56:49):

Oh, well, thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you for everything that you do, reaching out to other educators and for giving me a platform to hopefully reach other educators.

Eric Cross (57:00):

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Melanie Trecek-King, Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College and creator of Thinking Is Power. Make sure you don’t miss any new episodes of Science Connections by subscribing to the show, wherever you get podcasts. And while you’re there, we’d really appreciate it if you can leave us a review. It’ll help more listeners to find the show. You can find more information on all of Amplify shows at our podcast hub, Amplify.com/Hub. Thanks again for listening.

Jennifer Roberts (00:00:00):

If a kid graduates from school without knowing that AI exists, they’re not gonna be prepared for what they face out in the world.

Eric Cross (00:00:07):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross.

Eric Cross (00:00:12):

This season of the podcast, we’re making the case for everyone’s favorite underdog, science. Recently we’ve been highlighting the magic that can come from integrating science and literacy. So if you haven’t checked out those recent episodes, definitely go back in your feed after you’re done with this one. This time around, we’re going to deep dive into what artificial intelligence means for literacy instruction, and how science can be a force for good, in responsibly exposing students to AI. To help me out, I’m joined by two extremely accomplished educators. Jen Roberts, a veteran high-school English teacher from San Diego, who among many things runs the website LitAndTech.com. And I’m also joined by fifth-grade teacher Donnie Piercey. In addition to being Kentucky’s 2021 Teacher of the Year, Donnie also has an upcoming book about bringing AI into the classroom. Whether you’ve never heard of ChatGPT or whether you’re already using it every day, I think you’ll find this a valuable discussion about the intersection of science, English, and technology. Here’s Jen and Donnie.

Eric Cross (00:01:17):

So first off, welcome to the show. It’s good to see you all. What I wanna do is kind of start off by introducing both of you. And so we’ll just go K–12. So <laugh>, Donnie.

Jennifer Roberts (00:01:30):

Donnie goes first.

Eric Cross (00:01:31):

Donnie’s gonna go first. Donnie out in Kentucky. Just a little background. What do you teach; how long you’ve been in the classroom; and what are you having fun with right now?

Donnie Piercey (00:01:38):

Yeah, so my name is Donnie Piercey. I’m a fifth-grade teacher from Kentucky. Live and teach right here in Lexington, Kentucky, right in the center of the state. I’m the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year. But I’ve been teaching elementary school for the past … I think this is year 16 or 17. It’s long enough where I’ve lost count, and I can’t even count on fingers anymore. My friends like to joke that I’ve taught long enough where now I can count down. You know, it’s like, “All right, only so many more years left.” But yeah, teach all subjects. Science definitely is one of the subjects that I don’t just try to squeeze into my day, but make sure that … it’s not even a devoted subject, but one that I definitely try to — don’t just have that set time, but also try to do some cross-curricular stuff with it. So definitely the rise of AI in these past few months, which feels like years by this point, has definitely played quite the role, in not just changing the way that I’ve been teaching science, but really all my subjects. So, excited to chat with y’all about it.

Eric Cross (00:02:47):

Nice. I’m excited that you’re here. And Jen?

Jennifer Roberts (00:02:51):

Hi, I’m Jen Roberts. I teach ninth-grade English at Point Loma High School, and that’s where I usually stop when I introduce myself. But for your sake—

Eric Cross (00:03:00):

I will keep introducing you if you stop there. <laugh>

Jennifer Roberts (00:03:04):

I am nationally board-certified in English Language Arts for early adolescence. I am the co-author of a book called Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning, from Stenhouse, with my fabulous co-author Diana Neebe. Shout out to Diana. I blog at LitAndTech.com about teaching and technology and literacy and the intersection of those things. And I’m looking forward to talking about how AI is showing up in my classroom and the fun things I’m doing with it.

Donnie Piercey (00:03:31):

And one of us is actually secretly a robot, and you have to guess which one.

Jennifer Roberts (00:03:35):

Have to guess which one. Yes. <laugh>

Eric Cross (00:03:37):

That would be super-meta. And you were the CUE — Computer-Using Educator — outstanding teacher or educator? Whatever. Either one. Of the year.

Jennifer Roberts (00:03:45):

I was the CUE ’22 Outstanding Educator. Yes. And I’ve won a few other things as well.

Eric Cross (00:03:53):

The gaming backpack.

Jennifer Roberts (00:03:54):

I’ve won a gaming backpack recently! Yes. I once won an iPad in a Twitter chat.

Eric Cross (00:03:58):

What?

Donnie Piercey (00:03:58):

What’s a gaming backpack? Hold on. We need to talk about that.

Jennifer Roberts (00:04:01):

We will talk about that. <laugh> And then, I was once a finalist for county Teacher of the Year. That’s as close as I got to Donnie. Donnie was the Kentucky Teacher of the Year. He got to go to the White House and stuff. That was exciting.

Donnie Piercey (00:04:13):

<laugh> I mean, to be fair, there’s only three million people in Kentucky, and about what, 50 million people that live in California? <Laugh> So odds are definitely stacked in my favor, I think.

Jennifer Roberts (00:04:23):

So you’re saying we’re even there? Is that, is that what you’re going for?

Donnie Piercey (00:04:25):

Yeah, evens out. Evens out.

Eric Cross (00:04:27):

So I’ve been looking forward to talking to you both for a while now, and talking about artificial intelligence. It’s like the big thing. And both of you, at different ends of the spectrum and in my life, have contributed to this. Donnie, you’ve been sharing so much great information online about how you’re using AI in elementary. Jen, you are the reason I got into education technology years ago, right when I was becoming a teacher. And so being able to talk with you both about it excites me a lot. So first off, for the listeners who may not have any experience with it — and there’s still a lot of people out there who have not been exposed to it, haven’t got their feet wet with it yet — I’m hoping we could start off maybe with an explanation of … we could do AI, ChatGPT, I know that’s the big one. But simply explaining what it is, just for the new person. And whoever wants to start off can tell us about it. Or maybe we’ll start … we’ll, let’s actually, let’s do this: Let’s continue going like K–12? So Donnie, maybe you could … what’s your pitch to the new person of, “Hey, this is what it is”?

Donnie Piercey (00:05:31):

All right. So, AI, artificial intelligence, probably the way that most people are exposed to it, at least since November when it launched, is through ChatGPT. Where if you Google it, you know it’s made by a company called OpenAI. The best way to describe what it is … when you go there for the first time, make an account, it’s free. You have like a little search window, looks like a Google search bar. And instead of searching for information, you can ask it to create stuff for you. So for example, like on Google search, you might type in a question like, “Who was the 19th president of the United States?” Where on ChatGPT, instead of just searching for information, it creates stuff for you. So you could say, you could ask it to, “Hey, write a poem about the 19th president of the United States.” Or, “Write a short little essay comparing, I don’t know, Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr.” And it would do that for you. You know, that’s most people’s first exposure to AI, at least in these past few months. Instead of … you know, it’s artificial intelligence, but it’s not just chatbots. There’s lots of other AI that exist out there.

Jennifer Roberts (00:06:47):

And I think that’s the thing: that people don’t realize how much AI is already in their lives.

Donnie Piercey (00:06:51):

For sure. Yeah.

Jennifer Roberts (00:06:52):

You know, they just haven’t seen … the term that I see being used a lot now is “generative AI.” AI that can produce something. It can produce writing, it can produce art, it can produce a script, it can produce a character. But the AI that has been helping you pick what to watch next on Netflix and the AI that’s helping Google help you get where you wanna go on Google Maps faster, those are forms of artificial intelligence as well.

Donnie Piercey (00:07:21):

Yeah. I mean, even those, when you get that that message in Gmail, and instead of having to type out that response that says, “Yeah, that sounds great,” you can just click the little button that says, “Yeah, that sounds great.” I mean, that’s been in Gmail for years, but that’s artificial intelligence too.

Eric Cross (00:07:39):

Absolutely. So why is it important, do you think, for educators to, to be familiar with it? Like, why are we all so excited about it?

Jennifer Roberts (00:07:47):

So, educators need to know what kids are into, and kids are obviously into ChatGPT. And anyone who’s an educator right now has probably already had something cross their desk — or more likely their computer screen — that was written by AI and passed off as a student’s own work. And that is, of course, the great fear among teachers everywhere, that this is what kids are just gonna do these days and they won’t be able to catch it and children won’t be doing their own work and this and this. But I think the big reason teachers need to know what’s going on is because teachers need to be futurists. Our clientele will live in the future. We teach kids, kids will become adults, adults will live in the world. And so if we’re not thinking about and trying to predict on some level what’s gonna happen 5, 10, 15 years from now … we might be wrong, but what if we’re right?

Jennifer Roberts (00:08:38):

And if we’re not at least trying to think about what is their future world gonna look like, then we’re not serving our students well. I did a whole night talk on that. So I think ChatGPT is part of that. I teach seniors. I had this moment of realization I felt a few months ago. I’m like, “This is gonna be the world they graduate into. They need to know what this is before they leave me.” If I don’t teach them how to use this well, and not the way they’re using it — which is to copy and paste the teacher’s assignment and drop it into ChatGPT and take whatever it spits out and turning that in without even looking at it — if I don’t teach ’em how to use it critically, if I don’t teach them how to write effective prompts, if I don’t teach them how to use the AI as a tool, as a collaborator, then they’re gonna graduate into a world where they lose out to people who do know how to do that. And I think the advantage goes to kids who have access and knowledge of what’s in front of them and what’s available, and can use all of the tools at their disposal. Because when you’re writing in school and you write with a collaborator, that could be considered cheating. But when you do that out in the adult world, that’s considered doing a good job. <Laugh> Being a team player. <Laugh> You know, adults don’t work alone for the most part. And adults are expected to churn out beautiful, perfect content no matter how they got there. So if I’m not teaching my kids how to use this, they’re not being ready. They’re not gonna be ready to be the adults that I want them to be.

Donnie Piercey (00:10:07):

A hundred percent agree. And I also believe … as you know, I teach elementary school. I also don’t think anybody is saying that on the first day of kindergarten, you hand a kid a Chromebook and load up an AI chatbot or ChatGPT and say, Hey, this thing’s gonna do all your work for you for the next 12 years; just coast through life. You don’t have to think creatively. You don’t have to learn how to develop a paragraph or learn how to write a speech or develop an idea. Like, I don’t think anybody’s saying that, because as an elementary school teacher, there’s many days when I’m like, “Y’all, we’re just putting the Chromebooks away today and we’re just gonna go old-school. We’re just gonna maybe just jot down five quick ideas and stand up and present those ideas to the class.”

Donnie Piercey (00:10:54):

Because while AI definitely will, like you were saying, Jen, play a significant role in the lives of our students who are, not just graduating, but the 10- and 11-year-olds in my classroom this year. A significant role in their lives. It’s also really important to recognize that we’re not saying that this means that “Hey, kids don’t have to work anymore.” They still have to put forth that effort. There’s still — one of the ways that you become a good writer is by trial and error. And sometimes that trial and error comes through talking to a teacher or talking like you were saying to a peer or collaborating with a peer and saying to them, “Well, this sentence here, this paragraph here, really doesn’t make sense.” And I do believe one of the ways — especially as AI starts to become more fine-tuned and starts to be embedded more and more in tools like Google Docs and Microsoft Word — is it’s almost going to be a tutor to students.

Donnie Piercey (00:11:56):

Mm-hmm. <affirmative> Where I could very easily see in a few years, or maybe a few months, who knows what Google or any of these other big companies has rolling out, where a student could highlight a paragraph that they wrote simply, and then say, “Hey, proofread this for me,” or “Check for coherence.” Or even just ask a simple question: “Does this paragraph make sense?” Because you can already do that. You can copy a paragraph over into a chatbot and say, “Hey, does this make sense?” You know, “Rate my idea from one to 10,” and it’ll do that for ’em.

Jennifer Roberts (00:12:26):

We did that last week <laugh>.

Donnie Piercey (00:12:28):

Yeah. Right. I mean, that’s the thing. That technology exists now. It’s just not totally embedded yet. But based on what I’ve read and what I’ve seen, that’s gonna happen sooner rather than later. And it’s really, really important that we teach our students that, “No, you’re not just gonna use this, this tool to cheat, but you can use this tool to help you become a more creative student.”

Jennifer Roberts (00:12:50):

This is the use case in my classroom. Can I talk about that? You ready for that?

Eric Cross (00:12:53):

Please.

Jennifer Roberts (00:12:54):

OK.

Eric Cross (00:12:54):

Please.

Jennifer Roberts (00:12:55):

So my ninth graders are writing a comparative analysis essay, where I took them to the student art gallery and I made them pick two pieces of completely unknown student art and take notes on it, so they could go back and write this essay. And as soon as we got back to class, I said, can ChatGPT write this for you? And they all kind of froze ’cause I didn’t tell them what ChatGPT was. And they weren’t sure if they were allowed to know or not. And finally one of them kind of bravely raised his hand and said, “No.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Well, the AI hasn’t seen the art. How can it write an essay about art when the art is completely original that we just went and looked at?” I said, “It’s almost like I planned it that way, isn’t it?” And they laughed nervously. And then I said, “Does that mean it can’t help us with this assignment?” And they said, “Well, no — of course it can’t help us, because it has not seen the art.” And I said, “Well. …” And I open ChatGPT, and I typed in what they were trying to do: “I need to write a comparative analysis essay comparing two pieces of student art on these reasons. And I need to choose which one did it better, basically. Can you help me with an outline?” and ChatGPT produced a lovely outline. And I looked at that with my students and we looked at it together and I said, “This is what it gave us. Would this be helpful to you?” And they’re like, “Yeah, that would be helpful to us.” So we — to be clear here, I was the only one using ChatGPT in the room. They were not actually using it. We were using it together. I copied and pasted the outline that it gave us and put it in their learning management system where they could access it so they could use the outline that the robot provided, and then they could use that to make their own writing better. So then I let them write for a little while, and, after they’d written for a little while, I said, “Does anybody wanna let me share your first paragraph with ChatGPT and see what it thinks of how you’re doing?” And a brave student raised his hand and we took his paragraph and we put it in ChatGPT, and it spit back advice. We said, “This is what I have so far for my first paragraph. Do you have any advice for me?” And we gave it the writing, and the first piece of advice it gave back was very generic, you know, “Add a hook,” you know, like kind of thing. But after that, it started to get more specific about things he was actually doing in his writing. And it started to give him some feedback. And we looked at that together as a class. And I said, “Does any of that feedback help you?” And he said, “Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m gonna go add some revisions to my paragraph.” And other students did too. They looked at the feedback he got and used that to improve their writing. And so everybody went and revised. And I said, “Look, if you take what the robot gives you and you copy and paste it, and you turn it in as your own work, it’s gonna get flagged for plagiarism. And that’s not gonna go well. But if it gives you writing advice the same way I would give you writing advice, and you decide that advice is good, and you take that advice and you incorporate it into your own writing yourself, then the robot’s making you better, but you’re still the one doing your own writing.” And the writing they turned in from that assignment was, was better. It wasn’t written by ChatGPT; it was still about the student art that they found in the gallery. But I showed them a path. Like, it can help you with an outline, it can help you with feedback. Right? These are fair ways to use it that’s gonna make you better. And they really liked that. They really liked — no one had shown them that before. The idea that you don’t just take the teacher’s prompt and give it to it … like, these are new uses to students and worked well.

Eric Cross (00:16:17):

So right now, you both just laid out these ways that you’re using it. And I do this with people that I’m trying to introduce to ChatGPT or AI. ‘Cause I get excited. Anyone could write a 500-word persuasive essay on the use of color in The Great Gatsby or The Outsiders, and they can get something back within seconds. But for a lot of educators, it might feel like the sky is falling.

Donnie Piercey (00:16:43):

Oh, understandably! Understandably. I mean, that totally makes sense.

Eric Cross (00:16:49):

What would you say to them? Donnie, go ahead.

Donnie Piercey (00:16:51):

Yeah. Well, I feel like every teacher kind of goes through the same experience when they see like a generative chatbot. I mean, all these major companies are gonna start incorporating AI, the generative AI piece. And a lot of times, when they see it for the first time, two things. First they’ll say “Oh, but I’ll know that that’s not my students’ writing.” Which, frankly, I think is a good thing, because that tells me that the teachers know their students’ writing. They’ve seen them write in person. They’ve conferenced with them one-on-one. And if a student were to turn something in to me, who I know might be a struggling writer, maybe it’s not their strength, and all of a sudden they’re turning in this10-page dissertation-worthy thesis written at a PhD level, I’m like, “All right, man, you’re nine. Can we talk about where this came from?” <laugh> But I also don’t think that at like the heart, I don’t feel like kids want to cheat. I really don’t. I feel like sometimes like kids are in a situation where they’re like, “OK, I’ve got nothing left. I gotta get this assignment done.” And when those kind of things happen, that’s when we as teachers, we have those one-on-one conversations. Even when I showed my students ChatGPT and even some of the AI image-generating stuff for the first time, and I talked to them about, “What do y’all think about this?” Because, you know, they’re under 13. In my district, ChatGPT is blocked for students. Staff, we have access to it. And that’s just because one, it’s so new, and at the same time, we need to figure out, “What’s the best way they can go about using this tool?” But when we were talking about it as a class, you know, I didn’t want to ignore the elephant in the room. So I asked them, I said, “Hey, do you feel like this is something that you all would use to. …” I mean, I used the word. I said “cheat.” And to be honest, the majority of the students in my class, they were taken aback. They’re like, “What? You think we just would cheat all the time?” Right? <Laugh> And I’m like, “Oh, well good. I’m glad to know that integrity is still alive and well.” But yeah, that’s definitely my thoughts on it, as far as not only the student integrity piece — I think that that’s the big thing that you need to just bring up with your students. Because again, I like to think that I’ve seen my students write enough that if they were going to turn something in that wasn’t their voice, or it didn’t sound like them, like I could have that conversation. And don’t be surprised, too, if in the next … I don’t know, one month to a year, there’s lots of AI detectors that exist. A lot of them are these like third-party things. You can go ahead, but I would not be surprised if in the next year or so, like you start to see those AI detectors be built into Google Docs, into Microsoft Word, into even Canva. And honestly, it’s almost like a fail-safe button for teachers, that we could say “All right, this is telling me that this is 99% probably written by AI.” So you can have that conversation with a student that way.

Jennifer Roberts (00:20:03):

I mean, if you’re worried about it, Formative, right now, will even tell you if something is copy-and-pasted into the boxes that they give you for students to write in. I find that kids who cheat are desperate, you know. Especially at the high school level. They’re panic mode. And, and usually their panic comes from, “I have no idea how to even start this assignment.” And so part of what I wanna use ChatGPT for is to lower that barrier for them. Like, you’ve got an assignment, you don’t know where to start. Tell the robot, tell ChatGPT, about the assignment and ask it for a list of steps. You know, ask it for an outline. Ask it for a time management plan. I see so much tremendous potential for this to help many of my students with IEPs who have executive functioning issues.

Donnie Piercey (00:20:49):

Oh, a hundred percent, right?

Jennifer Roberts (00:20:51):

Yes, a hundred percent. This can be their personal assistant who, you know, instead of me sitting with them one-on-one and saying, you know, “This is the task you need to do, let’s break it down into these six discrete chunks,” the artificial intelligence can do that for them. And it can do that for teachers too. <laugh>

Donnie Piercey (00:21:09):

Jen, I was just thinking about, how long until we see like the phrase artificial intelligence written onto a student’s IEP? I could see that happening very, very soon.

Jennifer Roberts (00:21:20):

Right? They should be able to use that. And then, also, of course, all of its amazing beneficials for teachers. I had to completely rewrite a unit of my curriculum. I knew what I wanted to do. I had some ideas of things I wanted to put in there. And I resorted to, I went to EducationCopilot.com and typed in my stuff that I had: You know, what standards I wanted to cover, what outcomes I was hoping for mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it generated an eight-week unit for me. And I actually told it then to go back and do it as a 12-week unit so that I’d have more stuff in there to go and cherry-pick to decide what I really wanted to do. But it gave me ideas. It gave me places to start. It saved me an hour of just brainstorming. And I don’t think that was cheating. I still got to go in and decide which ideas were valid. And I still got to … you know, I mean, I’m a teacher. Can I get accused of cheating? I don’t think that’s a thing. It’s—

Eric Cross (00:22:18):

That’s collaborating! It’s collaborating!

Donnie Piercey (00:22:20):

Collaborating! It’s a feature! It’s a feature.

Jennifer Roberts (00:22:22):

It’s Tony Stark talking to Jarvis. You know, they’re figuring it out together.

Donnie Piercey (00:22:26):

Oh, when you use the AI, Jennifer, do you call yours Jarvis? In my class we call him Jeeves. ‘Cause remember Ask Jeeves?

Jennifer Roberts (00:22:33):

I think Eric calls it Jarvis.

Eric Cross (00:22:35):

Yeah. Jarvis is gonna be the AI’s name when, when I can get that fully functioning. There are some things that you had said, I just wanna circle back on. Donnie, Jen — so what I heard was like, best intentions. The part you said about integrity and students wanting to cheat … even the mindset that we go in assuming our students, what they would want to do and assuming best intentions, really kind of frames how you look at this kind of technology. And then Jen, you kind of brought up why students cheat, and realizing that either they don’t feel equipped, or maybe it’s time management, or something else. But most people — and I believe this as an educator — most students want to learn, and they want to be able to perform and achieve. And when they cheat, it’s because they didn’t feel like they could, for whatever reason. Whether it’s it’s outside factors, whether it’s something internal, motivation, whatever it is.

Jennifer Roberts (00:23:24):

Or they were very disconnected and just didn’t care.

Eric Cross (00:23:27):

Sure.

Jennifer Roberts (00:23:27):

This is just busy work the teacher’s giving me, so I’m gonna give it very little of my time and energy. But I think, yeah, it can be that. But if the kid cares about it, if they wanna learn, they wanna learn, you know?

Eric Cross (00:23:40):

Right.

Jennifer Roberts (00:23:40):

This is the day of the internet. Any kid can learn anything they really want to learn. And we see that all the time in our classes. The kid who has zero interest in what I’m teaching in English, but he is an expert coder, and that’s what he wants to spend his time learning. He’s like, “Can I read this C++ book as my independent reading book?” And I’m like, “You know, actually, you can. Go ahead.” <Laugh>

Eric Cross (00:24:01):

Yeah. And for both of you, saying that this makes content more accessible … and I think Donnie, or Jen, you said something about IEPs. I actually put in having it write an IEP to see what would happen. I gave it a prompt for a student’s ability level and I asked it to create a plan. And then I asked it to create a rationale. And it did! And it was good! I went through and vetted it. And right now … you know, a lot of it is funny, ’cause the conversation I’m having with different teachers is kind of like the Wikipedia one. Remember when Wikipedia first got out and everyone was like trying to discourage everybody from using it, because, well, it could be changed by anybody? And now everyone’s like, “Oh, check Wikipedia, and then steal the sources, ’cause they’re already done for you.” Like, the mindset has shifted since then. And I was talking to someone and they said, “Well. …” And I said, “We can use AI, it could be a tutor, these other things. …” And they said, “Yeah, but what happens?” And then insert apocalyptic scenario. Like, what happens if you don’t have access to wifi? And it reminded me of, for some reason, cooking classes. So in the 1700s you probably had to be able to farm to be able to generate your food. Right? Like, you had to get it from somewhere. But if you take a culinary class now, you just go to the grocery store. And someone might say, “Well, but you should know how to farm, ’cause what if there was this worldwide apocalypse and nobody could go to the grocery stores?” <Laugh> And you’re like, “Well, balance of probability though.” You know, it’s like we’ve been really been living in these iterations of life, and I think this next step for some folks … like, we don’t even realize, even like something like bank statements, right? So many folks are paperless. And there’s always a what-if scenario. What if you need it and the internet goes down. But we get so used to to to technology advancing and making our lives different. This kind of seems like that next iteration. And I wanna ask you this question: Are we looking at like the next calculator? The next internet, with this tech? Or do you think it’s too early to say?

Donnie Piercey (00:26:01):

Well, I’ve seen a lot of people compare ChatGPT to a calculator. I’ve seen that pop up on social media. There’s, “Oh well, no, this is like when the calculator was invented. Everyone was up in arms about how ‘that’s not what math students should do.’ Math should be pencil and paper, math should be this.’” However, you can give a kid a calculator and you can give ’em a word problem and they can punch in all the numbers, but they could do the wrong operation or they could put the decimal point in the wrong place, ’cause the student is still the one who’s controlling what’s on the calculator. Where with AI, all you gotta do is just copy it and then paste it into the bot and it’ll spit out whatever the question asked it for. Whether it was, you know, a 500-word rationale or proof for something in geometry, or if it’s analyzing data on a chart, it’ll do all that.

Jennifer Roberts (00:27:00):

Yes. But it’s not that magical. It’s back to what Eric did with the IEP. He put in a prompt and then he knew enough to ask for a rationale and then he knew enough about IEPs to critically read the results he got and make sure they actually worked for what he needed. He had to know all that. He was an expert using it to do an expert thing. My husband’s a computer scientist; he got ChatGPT to help him write an app, and it was a new programming language to him, and he could put in the data and he could ask for things that I would’ve never thought to ask for. But because he knows the language of computer science, he knew what to ask for. And when it gave him results that were bad, he could see that, and he could say, “Yes, but do it again, but without this,” or “make this part more efficient.” He, again, knew what to ask for. So I think the generative AI is, as a partner with humans, a powerful thing. But if the human doesn’t know what they’re doing, yeah. You’re still not gonna get great results.

Donnie Piercey (00:28:03):

<laugh> And I think that’s why I’m coming at this from the elementary school perspective, right? Because in K–5 students are still learning, like, “Hey, where does the decimal point go?” They’re still learning, you know, if you’re dividing by a two-digit number, where does the first digit go, if you go in the old long-division algorithm? And so they’re still acquiring that base-level knowledge that … I don’t know, maybe this is similar to in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum says, “It didn’t take any knowledge to attain,” you know, “they stood on the shoulders of geniuses,” that whole thing. Like they had to acquire the knowledge for themselves, was his whole point. And so that’s why I don’t think it’s exactly the same as the calculator. It is definitely going to change things, in a similar way that the calculator did. But to me it’s just a whole new animal. And I don’t know if it’s going to be like the next internet, Eric — if you’re gonna get little devices that have AI built into it, like a Star Wars kind of thing, like a droid or something that follows you around — all that would be kind of cool, not gonna lie. But whether it’s something that you’ll access through the internet, something that’s built into your TV, that part I don’t know. But I do know that there’s a reason why all of these apps and all these companies are investing so much — not just energy, but time and money into it. Because they’re recognizing. “OK, this really has the potential to change things.” But if used well, and used safely, to change people’s lives for the better.

Eric Cross (00:29:41):

So I definitely hear that you both agree with the statement that if AI ChatGPT was used in the classroom, it could be a force for good. And literacy development. And I wanna shift gears a bit and then come back to the AI. So with that said — and we’re gonna get into some best practices in a minute — in Science Connections right now in this season, we’re making the case for how science can do more in classrooms and in schools. And so I’m I’m curious about what both of you think about the role in science fostering a better future when it comes to AI and education. And this season we’re really talking a lot about literacy. You know, in schools, so often it’s taught in a siloed way. And Donnie, you’re doing multi-subject. Jen, you’re single-subject: English. And we’ve really been trying to make this case for how science can actually support literacy, and these skills that students are trying to develop. So we’re going a little old-school, kind of diving into your content specialty, but maybe even pre-AI, or maybe AI has a component in this. But Don, maybe we’ll start with you. How has science been a way that has been helpful for your own literacy instruction? I know you do a lot of science, because I see your Google Earth stuff and the thing you did with the solar systems back in the day. And I think —.

Donnie Piercey (00:30:54):

Oh my gosh! You remember my <laugh> … wow.

Eric Cross (00:30:58):

That was amazing!

Donnie Piercey (00:31:00):

We haven’t done that since the pandemic. But I had my students go out, and using Google Earth, we built a scale model. Each of the students partnered up and they planned out on Google Earth a scale model of the solar system. They picked an object from around their house and we talked about like, “Don’t pick something bigger than a beach ball, or else, you know, your Neptune’s gonna end up like 10 miles away.” But you know, they just picked like a small ball, like a basketball, soccer ball, something like that. Or football, for international friends. And then we calculated the size of every other planet. And then on Google Earth, using their front lawn as where the sun was, then we went and we calculated where other planets would be, and then we actually drove to those locations and like held up the objects that would represent Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, and all that. But it was a lot of fun.

Eric Cross (00:31:59):

And is that still accessible? ‘Cause I know you have some websites that you put resources out there.

Donnie Piercey (00:32:03):

Yeah. Yeah, I can … I wanna say on my Resources page — Resources.MrPiercey.com — I’ve got a link on there to a couple of student examples that I can share. And if not, when we get off this call, I’m gonna go on and put them on there <laugh> so people can find it. I’ll even throw on there just the assignment itself. So if you wanted to copy that and do that with your students, you could.

Eric Cross (00:32:27):

Donnie, the reason why I brought that up is because I saw that you had posted that or shared it a long time ago, and I just thought it was the coolest thing that you could totally do with middle-school students or high-school students. Jen, when I became a teacher, you said, “We’re all teachers of literacy.”

Jennifer Roberts (00:32:43):

<laugh> Yeah. I think we forgot to tell them that I was one of your professors.

Eric Cross (00:32:47):

Yes. <Jennifer laughs> One of the people who’ve definitely influenced and shaped my teaching. And that statement has never left my mind: that we’re all teachers of literacy. And I want to ask you, at the high-school level, how can science educators, or how can science — how have you seen it, or how does it, support literacy, when it’s done right?

Jennifer Roberts (00:33:09):

Like I said, I think we’re all teachers of literacy, but I think literacy is bigger than just reading and writing. I don’t think someone is literate if they can’t talk somewhat knowledgeably about what’s happening with climate change. I don’t think someone’s literate if they don’t know what’s going on in the world. And I think so much of what’s going on in the world has to do with science. We’re doing that all the time. If I could teach English just by giving kids articles about science, things to read, that would make my day. Right? We would never read another piece of fiction again. It would all be, you know, what’s happening to the ice sheet in Greenland. My students thrive on reading non-fiction. And then whenever that non-fiction touches on science is even more interesting. And whenever I can get them writing about data, particularly their own data that they collected, I think that’s building those science literacy skills as well. So I think science and English blend together very, very well. I think the literacy aspects of that are fantastic. There are more subject-specific vocabulary words, advanced vocabulary words, in science than any other discipline. And I don’t see why those shouldn’t come up in English as well. You know, my seniors will do a unit at the end of the year on the new space race. Unless I replace it with a unit about generative AI, which I’m seriously considering doing, ’cause I think they really need to learn about bias in AI algorithms and things like that. And I would like to have them read a whole bunch about that stuff. And I wanna give them the open letter that all those CEOs signed that said that AI research should slow down, and make them part of that live conversation about what’s happening in that field. So science comes into that. You know, when we read Into the Wild, we start talking about a whole bunch of scientific concepts. And when it rains in Southern California, we pull up weather maps and look at radar and talk about that and how that works.

Donnie Piercey (00:34:59):

That’s like once every 10 years, Jen? <Laugh>

Jennifer Roberts (00:35:02):

Well, actually, this year it rained a lot. It rained a lot in San Diego. Which is actually very high-interest for them. ‘Cause they wanna know, is it gonna be raining at lunchtime?

Eric Cross (00:35:12):

Jen, you said something … you have your students writing about data?

Jennifer Roberts (00:35:16):

Oh yeah.

Eric Cross (00:35:17):

Can you tell me more about that?

Jennifer Roberts (00:35:19):

So, this is something we’ve done with the ninth grade team for a long time now, is writing about their own data. So it started with a unit about stereotypes and stereotype threat. And they would collect data individually and then they would enter that data into a Google form and then we would give them the spreadsheet of the aggregate data from the whole ninth grade. And then we morphed that unit into one about academic honesty, and they filled out a survey at the beginning of the unit about their feelings about academic honesty and about experiences with academic honesty and cheating and homework and things like that. And then we would do the unit. We’d do all the readings in the unit. And they’d have these “aha” moments about things that were happening at other schools. And then at the end of the unit, we would give them back their own aggregate data and ask them to write about whether or not academic honesty was an issue at our school. And then to support that answer with evidence from their own dataset. So they had that spreadsheet to comb through and figure out, you know, where am I gonna stand on this? We give them the multiple-choice questions we gave them as the graphs, in Google Slides, so that they could write about them and talk about them, too. So yeah, getting kids to write about data. And the the sentence frames we gave them were sentence frames out of, They Say, I Say, from the chapter on writing about science. And <laugh> as they write this stuff, they’re like, “I feel so smart writing this way.” And I’m like, “I know, ’cause you’re writing about big important topics!” Right? And writing about their own data come to think of it is another great way to make an assignment both very personal to them, but also make it ChatGPT-proof, you know, if you’re looking for something that kids can’t just hand to the robot, the robot doesn’t have that data set.

Eric Cross (00:37:08):

Absolutely. And Donnie, at the elementary level, do you, do you make connections between science and literacy? In your class? You talked about with math, definitely with the solar system, but now, I’m curious, what are your newer projects? What have you been working on lately?

Jennifer Roberts (00:37:23):

What’s up now, Donnie?

Eric Cross (00:37:24):

Yeah, what are you doing?

Donnie Piercey (00:37:25):

Oh, man. Well, let me think. I’m just trying to think of some fun projects that we’ve done this year. Science that we can tie in Literacy and also some student creation. Just recently we had a … so I’ve wanted to expose my students to famous scientists that weren’t just white dudes from Europe. So for this year, what I did — and I actually used AI for this — I went into ChatGPT and I asked for 64 famous scientists and it listed them all off. And then I asked it, like, how many of these were white? And I think it said like 61 of them. You know, it had like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and a couple of other … I didn’t know who they were. So I’m like, “All right, so we need to make this more diverse and make this more equitable.” ‘Cause you know, with the student population in my classroom, try to find equal representation to make sure they can see themselves in some of these scientists. So, eventually got it narrowed down to where I had about 64 scientists. Half are women, half are men from all continents except Antarctica. I assigned these scientists to my students. Some got two; some got three. And their assignment was to go and one, do some individual research on this person, find out what they were famous for, what they were most well-known for, turn it actually into a persuasive piece, where I said, “Hey, you’re gonna have one slide.” And I’ll tell you why I gave him one slide in a minute. On that one slide, you’ve gotta convince the person who sees it that this scientist is the most important scientist since the dawn of creation. I said, “You could use images, text — I don’t care if they were famous for something that you didn’t even understand what it was. It’s a persuasive piece. You’re 10. Go all out. Add gifs, do that whole thing.

Eric Cross (00:39:21):

This is awesome.

Jennifer Roberts (00:39:21):

I wanna do this project.

Donnie Piercey (00:39:23):

And if you picked up on the number 64, and I did this in March, so what we did was throughout the weeks of March Madness of the women’s and men’s NCAA tournament, whenever a game was going on, we had another round of voting. I just paired ’em up. I was gonna like seed them, like 1 to 64 — that’s just way too much work for me <laugh>. So I just kind of did random kind of thing. But all the students had to do — they just saw the slides side-by-side, and the only question they had was, “Based on what you see here, who is the most important scientist? This person or this person?” And it eventually came down to Carl Sagan going up against Marie Curie.

Eric Cross (00:40:04):

OK, that’s a good matchup.

Donnie Piercey (00:40:06):

Yeah, well, the Marie Curie slide, they just liked the radium piece. So they added like some green glowing gifs. And I said, “Guys, it doesn’t always grow glow green.” But whatever. Anyway, eventually Carl Sagan, in case you wanted to know, according to the 10-year-olds in my classroom, is the most important scientist in the history of the world. So I don’t know if I agree with that per se — I think maybe Newton or somebody else might have had something else to say about it — but fun assignment. It was a unique way to expose my students to a bunch of ideas. I remember the student that I assigned Newton, the only thing that that she knew about Isaac Newton was “Didn’t he get hit in the head with an apple?” And I said, “Well, not exactly, I think you might have read or maybe seen too many like old-school cartoons or whatever.” But she ended up doing some research. She’s like, “Oh, I’ve heard of that before! That equal and opposite reaction thing.” Didn’t know what it meant. I had another student that just got really … you know, if you’ve ever been on one of those YouTube kicks where it’s just, you go like nine levels deep onto like, “What does this theorem mean?” Student sits in back of my classroom, I walked by one day and he’s just watching something on like the fifth dimension and what it might be. And I said, “Oh, your scientist got you started on that.” So definitely was a lot of fun. Unique way to combine reading, writing, but also expose my students to some ideas. And we’re definitely gonna do it again. I’ve actually done this assignment before. I picked 64 random elements on the periodic table. But their only slide that they have to make is “What’s your element? What is it used for? And then, why is this the most important element since the dawn of creation?” <Laugh> And, you know, there’s always that student that gets hydrogen. They’re just like “Sweet!” Right? They get excited about that one. <laugh>

Eric Cross (00:41:59):

Explosions.

Donnie Piercey (00:42:00):

Yeah. But then, for that kid who likes a challenge, or that student with the “gifted” label, you give them, like, einsteinium or palladium. Some of the more challenging ones. And they go all out with this. I didn’t use AI for that one, but it was kind of fun, and I figured it’d be neat to share an idea that another teacher could try.

Eric Cross (00:42:20):

Well you probably have at least two teachers right now that are gonna go and try that. And we’re both looking at you. So.

Donnie Piercey (00:42:24):

Go for it.

Eric Cross (00:42:25):

Thanks for that idea. I’m imagining my students coming in with jerseys with “neon.”

Donnie Piercey (00:42:29):

Oh yeah. <laugh>

Eric Cross (00:42:30):

“Neon” on it. Just all ’80s out.

Donnie Piercey (00:42:33):

The game behind it, too, is you tell kids — again, this is just so the 10-year-olds in my class don’t get their feelings hurt — but I say, “Hey, and if your element gets knocked out, you just have to start cheering for whoever beats you in the tournament.” So by the end, you kind of got half the class cheering for one and half the class cheering for whatever.

Jennifer Roberts (00:42:53):

So the only thing I got outta that whole story that I’ve got for you is, as a child I met Carl Sagan. That’s all I got.

Donnie Piercey (00:43:02):

For real?

Jennifer Roberts (00:43:02):

For real.

Donnie Piercey (00:43:03):

So did he talk with that cadence and tone?

Jennifer Roberts (00:43:06):

Yes.

Donnie Piercey (00:43:06):

Like in real life? Wow.

Jennifer Roberts (00:43:07):

Yes. My father was one of the cinematographers on the original Cosmos. And I got to go to the set a few times.

Donnie Piercey (00:43:14):

That’s incredible!

Jennifer Roberts (00:43:15):

I did not appreciate what I was seeing as a child. But as an adult, I’m like, “That was cool. I was there.”

Donnie Piercey (00:43:20):

“You can see my shadow off in the distance.”

Jennifer Roberts (00:43:23):

I mean, maybe that’s part of why I’ve always had an interest in science. I’ve always had fantastic science teachers. Every science teacher I ever had was amazing.

Donnie Piercey (00:43:31):

I credit mine to Mr. Wizard. I don’t know if you ever watched Mr. Wizard and Beakman’s World?

Eric Cross (00:43:35):

I remember Mr. Wizard. Yep. Yep. I definitely remember Mr. Wizard, Beakman’s World, all those. That was on Nickelodeon back in the day. I had to get up early to watch that one. But there’s a YouTube video—

Donnie Piercey (00:43:44):

Six am!

Eric Cross (00:43:44):

<laugh> It was! It was super-early! But there was one, Don, I don’t know if you’ve seen this on YouTube, but it said “Mr. Wizard Is Mean,” and it’s just clips of when he’s—

Donnie Piercey (00:43:56):

Yelling at kids!

Eric Cross (00:43:56):

Chastising. Or being really direct. It’s just one after another.

Donnie Piercey (00:44:02):

He always asked ’em a question and if the kid, you know, didn’t answer it right, he’d be like, “Well, you’re not right, but you’re wrong.” You know, whatever. <Laugh>

Eric Cross (00:44:14):

I have to make sure I’m not subconsciously saying Mr. Wizard quotes when I’m talking in the classroom, when things are happening. But yeah, that video’s hilarious. So I just want to bring us back to AI, and ask this question: Do you think science has a special role to play when it comes to teaching kids about AI responsibly? Does science have a special role in that?

Jennifer Roberts (00:44:36):

I think the responsible piece of AI I wanna teach my students about is the part about the bias in the algorithms and the bias in the training. And I want them to understand how it works, well enough to make informed decisions about how it impacts their lives.

Donnie Piercey (00:44:56):

Hmm.

Jennifer Roberts (00:44:57):

Because I do have concerns about a tool that was trained on the internet. And the answers it gives you is the average of the internet. And do we trust the internet? And the answer from kids is always, “Well sorta, no.” <Laugh> So I want them to understand the social science behind that.

Donnie Piercey (00:45:18):

Yeah. And just along that same point, having the students recognize that just because, you know, you copy-and-paste a question in, the answer it spits out might not always be correct. So, teaching them that just like you would with a source that you find about a topic that you’re researching, you’ve gotta fact-check.

Jennifer Roberts (00:45:44):

It’s just like being a good scientist. A good scientist wouldn’t always accept a single result or the first result. You know, you would look at multiple angles. You would try things different ways. Last week I took the article my seniors were reading about victim compensation after 9-11, and in front of them, I gave ChatGPT, I said, “Are you familiar with this article by Amanda Ripley? And ChatGPT came back and said, “Oh yes, this was written in the Atlantic in 2020 and it’s about these things, blah, blah blah.” And my students looked at that and went, “That’s not the article we read.” And I said, “I know. It got it wrong. That’s amazing!” Yeah. And I was so happy that it got it wrong! ‘Cause I wanted them to see that happen.

Donnie Piercey (00:46:21):

And I guess one of the big science questions there, or one of the big science components there, is that idea of inquiry. Right? It’s almost like you have to teach students how to ask those deep questions about what AI spits out.

Eric Cross (00:46:35):

All of those tips are great. And it leads me to this last question I want to ask. New teachers that are out there — it actually doesn’t even matter; new teachers, experienced teachers, all of us are kind of new at different levels of this race. We’re all kind of starting it together. I mean, it hit mainstream. We’re all getting exposed to it. You all really dive into it. When tech comes out, I know you two really like, “OK, how can we use this to transform education and do awesome things for kids?”

Donnie Piercey (00:47:04):

Usually, when new tech comes out, “How can this make my life easier?” is usually the question. Yeah.

Jennifer Roberts (00:47:09):

“How can I save myself time with this?” Yes.

Donnie Piercey (00:47:11):

“How can this result in me watching more TV and you know, less grading,” sometimes.

Eric Cross (00:47:16):

And I start there like you, but then I end up more time that I fill with another project. And I need to learn how to stop doing that. I’m like, “Oh! I got more free time! … to go take on this other task.”

Jennifer Roberts (00:47:28):

Oh, all of my tech adoption is driven by “how can I work less?”

Eric Cross (00:47:32):

So you’re you’re talking to a new teacher, teacher’s getting exposed to this, they’re starting the school year or they’re just getting their feet wet with it. What advice would you give them about AI, incorporated into content or even just best practices? Where you’re at right now in your own journey, and someone’s asking you about it —what would you share with ’em? And Jen, I want to start with you.

Jennifer Roberts (00:47:53):

So, the first thing I did is I was in the middle of grading, you know, 62 essays from my seniors about Into the Wild, when ChatGPT became a thing last November. And I wanted to see what would happen. So the first thing I did was take the prompt that I had given my students and gave it to ChatGPT, ’cause I had just graded a whole bunch of those essays and my brain was very attuned to what my rubric was doing and what I was expecting as the outcome. So I could take what ChatGPT gave me as that quote unquote “essay” and evaluate it critically. And I was ready to do that. So my first advice is take something you’re already asking students to do and ask ChatGPT to do the same thing. So that as you look at the student results, you can compare that to what ChatGPTgives you. If what you’re finding is that ChatGPT can generate something that would earn a decent grade from you, you might need to change that assignment. And it doesn’t need to be a big change, but it might need a tweak or something, so that it, it does rely on the student voice, the students to do something more personal. I’m finding very helpful in my classroom is having my kids do projects where they are recording themselves on — I like Flip. So they’re writing a scene together and they’re having to record the scene together. And I’m emphasizing more of the speaking roles than the writing roles necessarily. So yes, first, take something you’re already doing, paste in to ChatGPT, see what the results are, see how that fits with what your students are doing, and then do that for every assignment you give and just sort of see what comes out of that, and see which assignments are failing and which assignments are working. ‘Cause that’s gonna give you a sense, when you do see one of those results from your students, you’ll be able to recognize it. But it’ll also help you tweak your assignments and decide, “How can I make this a little more original or a little bit more authentic for my students?” And if the robot, if the AI, can’t generate a response, what could the AI do that would be helpful to your students? Would be my next question. So can you use the AI to help them generate an outline? Can you use the AI to help them generate a list of steps to help them get started? And when you’re comfortable enough doing that by yourself, then don’t be afraid to open it in front of your class. If it’s not blocked at your school site, which I hope it’s not. Because I think the advantage goes to kids who have access to this in the long run, or at least see what it is and know what it is. Right? Because if a kid graduates from school without knowing that AI exists, they’re not gonna be prepared for what they face out in the world. So give them a chance to see you using it. Model effectively using it. I have a blog post about that. I just wrote it. LitAndTech.com. You can check that out. “Introducing 9th graders to ChatGPT.” How it went, right? There’s a chart there you can have. It’s my very first draft of this, but it seems to be very popular. So, you know, show students how it can be used as their mentor. If I can’t come read your paragraph because I have 36 kids in my classroom and I cannot stop and read everybody’s first paragraph, can you, if you want to, give your first paragraph to ChatGPT and ask for advice? And will that advice be helpful to you? So showing students how it can be used responsibly is, I think, something every teacher should be doing right now. And don’t hold back just because you’re afraid you’re gonna be teaching them what this is. They know what this is. Right?

Donnie Piercey (00:51:13):

They know what it is.

Jennifer Roberts (00:51:13):

Especially if you teach high school. They know what it is. I’ve had parents thank me for showing them how to use it responsibly. You know, this can actually be a really useful tool, but if you’re trying to make it do your work for you, it will probably fail you. If you’re trying to use it to help you do your work, it will probably be helpful. Sort of the way I’m breaking it down for them at this point. You want the great metaphor? The great metaphor is if you build a robot and send it to the top of a mountain, did you climb that mountain? No. If you build a robot and ask it to help you get to the top of the mountain, and you and the robot go together, did you climb that mountain? Yes.

Eric Cross (00:51:53):

I like that. I’m thinking through this. I’m processing that now.

Donnie Piercey (00:51:57):

Me too.

Eric Cross (00:51:59):

Yeah. I just imagine a robot holding my hand climbing Mount Everest and I’m like, “Yeah, I did it.”

Donnie Piercey (00:52:04):

If I got a robot though, like I would have to dress it like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. Like I would just have to.

Eric Cross (00:52:10):

Of course.

Donnie Piercey (00:52:10):

Of course.

Eric Cross (00:52:13):

Donnie, same question. Advice. Teachers getting immersed into it. Tips. What would you say?

Donnie Piercey (00:52:20):

So, I would definitely agree with everything that Jen said. Just, if anything else, to familiarize yourself with it. Almost like pretend like it’s a student in your classroom and it’s answering questions, just so that way you can see what it can do. And you’re kind of training yourself, like, “Oh, well, if I ever need examples, exemplars.” If you’re in a writing piece and you don’t wanna sit there and write out four different types of student responses — you know, advanced writer, beginning writer, whatever — great way to to do that is you just—

Jennifer Roberts (00:52:48):

Oh yeah. We did that.

Donnie Piercey (00:52:48):

—copy the prompt in and give a beautifully written piece that a fifth grader would be impressed with. Boom. It’ll do it for you. In my classroom, the way that I approach it is I kinda look at AI as almost like this butler that I don’t have to pay. That if I need it to do something for me, it’s just bookmarked. I can click it. And I mean, sometimes I just talk to it like it’s a person. And it’s almost like, in the chat window, I’m just rambling at it, what I’m trying to do. And it’s almost like I’m talking to a coworker, and I’m trying to hedge out some ideas for a lesson. Simple example: For a science lesson, if you’re trying to come up with … let’s say you’re a fifth-grade — or, sorry, I teach fifth grade. Say you’re a seventh-grade science teacher. And you’re trying to teach the students in your class about Newton’s third law of motion. You know, every action [has an ] equal and opposite reaction. Look around your room. See what you have. Maybe look around and you’re like, “All right, I got a whiteboard, microscope, I’ve got magnets, a cylinder. …” And you just copy all this stuff into ChatGPT. Say, like, “Hey, I have all of these items. Cotton balls, peanut butter, whatever.” And say, “I’m trying to teach students Newton’s third law of motion. Give me some ideas of some ways I could teach it using some of these materials.” And it’ll do it! It’ll give you like five to 10 ideas!

Jennifer Roberts (00:54:15):

And then tell it what your students are into. Like, my students are really into basketball. Can you work that into this lesson?

Donnie Piercey (00:54:21):

Yeah! They’re into the Avengers! Hey, find some way to tie Spider-Man into this. You know, that was a pun that didn’t go so well. But, you know <laugh> figure out some way that you could incorporate this and it’ll do it. And Eric, like you said, it won’t be perfect. Right? But if anything else, if you’re a starting teacher and you’re trying to brainstorm ideas — try it.

Eric Cross (00:54:44):

And Donnie, as you were saying that, I was thinking — first, I imagined Spider-Man shooting cotton balls with peanut butter all over them — and then my mind went to having students have these items, like you were saying. And then they create labs, working alongside AI. To do inquiry. To create a lab about something, and then going and performing and collecting data. OK, that’s — now I wanna go do that tomorrow!

Donnie Piercey (00:55:10):

Listen, it is so easy to do. If you have an extra computer in your classroom. … We were talking about Jarvis and Iron Man and Tony Stark earlier. Make a new chat in ChatGPT. Tell it, “I want you to pretend that you are Tony Stark. Only answer questions as if you are Tony Stark.” Or “Pretend you’re Jarvis.” Whatever. “Stay in character the whole time. I’m going to have sixth grade students come up to you and ask you questions about science or forces of nature, and only answer questions like you’re Iron Man.” And guess what? You keep that station in your classroom. Students are working on a project — you know, in elementary school, a lot of times we’ll have that, “ask three before me” — you’re supposed to ask three friends before you go and bug the teacher. Well, maybe one of those “three before me” can be that little computer station, where they go up and ask Tony Stark a question, and then it answers them as Jarvis or Iron Man. I mean, we’re really just scratching the surface with all this AI stuff. And as more and more companies and more and more creatives are gonna start to realize everything that it can do, we’re gonna start to see it more and more. And hopefully we as teachers can really figure out how to use this tool to, of course, help students, but also help them be creative and explore and learn on their own.

Eric Cross (00:56:35):

That’s amazing. And just both of you are just dropping gems right now. And I wanna wrap up by saying — and I’ve said this before on earlier podcasts I’ve done — but at this phase in my life, the people that I’m the biggest fans of are teachers. And it’s true. I don’t mean that in a cliche way. When I watch celebrities and things like that, when I watch professional sports, that doesn’t fill me the way it used to when I was a kid. At this point, as a professional, I get inspired by other educators who are just doing awesome things. And when I think about educators who are doing that, you two are on that list of people that make me better. And when I get better, I can do better things for my kids. And so, one, I want to thank you for staying in the classroom and continue to support students. They’re so lucky to have you both. The second thing I wanted to say is, Jen, I wanna start with you. Where can people — and I know we said at the beginning — but where can people find the stuff that you put out? You got blogs, your social, your book.

Jennifer Roberts (00:57:28):

I got lots of social. Twitter, I’m JenRoberts1 on Twitter. And then my blog is LitAndTech.com. And then I’m on lots of the new social too, the Mastodons, the Spoutables, the Posts — those kinds of things — as just Jen Roberts, because I got in early and I got my real name without a 1. And there was some other one I’m on recently that I’ve forgotten about. But there’s lots of ’em. They’re fun. And I’m Jen Roberts. You can find me there.

Donnie Piercey (00:57:56):

And I’m SergeantPepperD on AOL, if anyone’s interested.

Eric Cross (00:58:00):

If you wanna hit Donnie up on AIM. <Laugh>

Donnie Piercey (00:58:03):

SergeantPepperD.

Jennifer Roberts (00:58:04):

You know, speaking of rock stars and people who do amazing things, I did write a blog post about using ChatGPT in the classroom, but I hear Donnie wrote a whole book.

Eric Cross (00:58:13):

Oh yeah. So, Donnie! Donnie, that’s a great segue. Thanks Jen. Donnie, how do people find out more? And can you tell us about this book you wrote, that’s coming out in the summer?

Donnie Piercey (00:58:22):

Yeah, so the book I wrote is called 50 Strategies for Integrating AI Into the Classroom. It’s published by Teacher Created Materials. They reached out to me. They had seen some of the stuff that I was doing, not just with ChatGPT, but also some image-generating AI stuff. You know, I got featured on Good Morning America, which was kind of cool. And they saw that and they said, ‘Hey, that looks really neat.” Reached out to me and asked me to write a book. And the idea behind the book, that launches this summer, it’s just 50 ideas, 50 prompts, different things that, as a classroom teacher, that you can do. So, you know, I think there’s so many AI books that are out there now. A lot of them are big ideas, which I think are important. Definitely important discussions that need to be, have around, the ethics of AI. What’s the role that AI should play in the classroom. But I just wanted to write a book, kind of like the discussion that, that Jen and I were just having, which is like, “Can we just share a whole bunch of ideas, different things that we could try with our students?” So definitely check it out. And I appreciate you giving me a shout-out too. That was cool, Eric. Thank you.

Eric Cross (00:59:35):

Of course. Definitely. And Donnie, your Twitter is again. …

Donnie Piercey (00:59:39):

Oh, @MrPiercey, M R P I E R C E Y.

Eric Cross (00:59:44):

Follow Donnie. Follow Jen. Tons of stuff on there. Both of you, thank you so much. For your time, for talking about students and how we can take care of them, science, literacy, AI. I hope we can talk about this again. I feel like even if in just six months, we might be saying different things. In a year, the landscape might completely change. And that makes it really fun. But thank you both for being on the show.

Jennifer Roberts (01:00:04):

Thank you for having us, Eric.

Donnie Piercey (01:00:05):

Thank you so much, Eric. We appreciate it, bud.

Eric Cross (01:00:10):

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Jen Roberts and Donnie Piercey. Jen Roberts is a veteran English teacher at San Diego’s Point Loma High School and author of the book Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. You can keep up with her at LitAndTech.com. And Donnie Piercey is a fifth-grade teacher from Lexington, Kentucky. He hosts the podcast Teachers Passing Notes. Stay up-to-date with him at Resources.MrPiercey.com. And let us know what you think of this episode in our Facebook discussion group, Science Connections: The Community. Make sure you don’t miss any new episodes of Science Connections by subscribing to the show, wherever you get podcasts. And as always, we’d really appreciate it if you can leave us a review. It’ll help more people and AI robots find the show. You can find more information on all of Amplify’s shows on our podcast hub, Amplify.com/hub. Thanks again for listening.

Fabian Hofmann (00:00):

In Mr. Hofmann’s class, I get to earn points and I get to be a Jedi. I can suspend my disbelief and I’m learning history, but at the same time, I’m traveling through the galaxy.

Eric Cross (00:13):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross. My guest today is Fabian Hofmann. Fabian is a middle school IB educator, currently teaching seventh grade multimedia design and history at Albert Einstein Academy’s middle school here in San Diego, California. He also hosts the podcast Rebel Teacher Alliance, a podcast dedicated to encouraging and supporting teachers to rethink student engagement. Fabian’s one of the most innovative teachers that I’ve ever met. His use of technology and gamification makes learning fun and accessible for our students. And I have firsthand experience with these students because we teach on the same team and have worked alongside each other during my entire career as a teacher. In this episode, we discuss gamification of the classroom, how he approaches grading from an innovator’s mindset, and his newest STEM class, Immersive Design, where his students are working with former Disney Imagineers to completely renovate their classroom into an interactive Star Wars-themed learning environment. And now, please enjoy my conversation with my good friend and colleague, Fabian Hofmann. We’ve worked together for how many years now? How many years have you been at Einstein?

Fabian Hofmann (01:23):

Well, I started when you started, like after you were student teaching, so 2014.

Eric Cross (01:28):

OK, so it’s been a while.

Fabian Hofmann (01:30):

Yeah. And then I took two years off and I went to Hawaii. I couldn’t handle the pressure. And then I came back. So we’ve worked together for six years but known each other for eight.

Eric Cross (01:39):

What’s your origin story? We’re gonna talk about your origin story. I told you.

Fabian Hofmann (01:42):

All right, cool. Right. So when I was a little boy…no. <Laugh>

Eric Cross (01:46):

This podcast is not that long!

Fabian Hofmann (01:49):

So no, I started out, teaching in 2009. I started student teaching in Germany and was teaching history and English. Did this two-year student-teaching program there. And then, when I was done, my wife and I, she’s American, we got married and we decided to move to the States. And then I started teaching at a German cultural center called the Goethe-Institut in San Francisco. We lived in the Bay Area. And from there, after a year we moved down to San Diego; I started subbing; I worked for a year at High Tech High. I taught humanities there. And then, after that year, I ended up at Einstein teaching German because that was what was available. I didn’t want to teach German. That wasn’t like, on the top of my list. But it made sense because I had taught German in San Francisco and it kind of was like, “Well, I can do that, I guess.” And then, yeah, and then I went back to—we went to Hawaii for a couple of years and then I came back here to start teaching history. So I’ve taught like a million things essentially.

Eric Cross (02:52):

And then during that time, what’s your evolution been like in the classroom? Kind of like your view of education? And how does that play out in your day-to-day with kids?

Fabian Hofmann (02:59):

So when I started teaching here in the States, I noticed that it’s very different. Technology was much further along here than it was in Germany. So when I got here and we had like an iPad cart; I helped setting up the iPad carts. And I worked with the Chromebooks and I was like, holy, holy crap, this is so cool. Like, kids can like actually do things with this technology. And then, I mean, I love technology. I’ve had an iPad when it came out and stuff like that. And so I was like, “Oh, so how about we use this in our classroom?” And so I always moved—I moved very quickly to having students create on the iPad. And at first it was like, “Oh, we use the Apple apps and stuff.” And then I went to an ed-tech teacher summit here in San Diego and my eyes were like opened to, “Oh my God, there’s so much more than just the Apple apps.” And ever since then I was like, “OK, we’re gonna use this; we’re gonna do that.” It’s just crazy stuff that I thought was cool and that students really seemed to enjoy, because it wasn’t like a typical language class; it was more like, “Well, what can we do to create, and how can we somehow still use the language but we are learning coding at the same time, or we are creating something in 3D at the same time?” Like, I was always trying to make it have two angles: the language angle, obviously, and then also the technology angle.

Eric Cross (04:25):

What was it that kept you kind of pushing? ‘Cause I remember the beginning in the Classcraft days to where you are now, I feel like you’re like light-years ahead of where you started.

Fabian Hofmann (04:37):

So you were actually the one who showed me Classcraft, which is like a gamification portal, kind of off-the-shelf thing that you can subscribe to. It has some free features and it’s like a gamification platform where students can create characters. And then these characters go on adventures. That’s like their avatar, and they get experience points in the classroom game and stuff happens. You can create, like, adventure paths for them. So if you have an assignment that you want students to do that has different steps, so, that could be an adventure path. That’s what I liked about Classcraft, is like this idea of like, “OK, we’re taking a game and applying it.” But it wasn’t enough for me. And so I started developing my own classroom game. I did some reading. I met online with John Meehan, worked with him. I read the book by Michael Matera, Explore Like a Pirate. And so it just broadened my whole world to, or just opened the world of gamification to me.

Eric Cross (05:38):

You present on gamification; you mentor other teachers on gamification. You host a podcast where you talk about it. But for those people who haven’t done it or gotten into it or maybe have a perception of it maybe that’s not quite accurate, can you talk a little bit about like what gamification is and what it’s not?

Fabian Hofmann (05:54):

1. So the biggest difference…we all know game-based learning, because we all do it. We use Quizlet; we use quizzes; we use Gimkit, Blookit, Jeopardy, anything like that. Those are game based. That’s game-based learning. So using a game to facilitate learning. Which is great. I love game-based learning too. But the difference is with gamification, in the pure definition of gamification, is that you’re using game mechanics and elements and apply them to a non-game setting. A couple of smart educators were like, “Why don’t we just do that in our classroom?” And so we borrow these elements, these mechanics, these game mechanics, like getting experience points, and applying them to the classroom. So anything that students do, they earn points. So they turn in an assignment, that gets you a hundred points. They go and do something extra for the class, they get 50 points. Whatever it is, whatever your value is. That’s one aspect, like a leaderboard, virtual money, stuff like that that just in reality is not necessary, but you’re putting it somewhere where it doesn’t exist. And all of a sudden students have this weird shift in their view where it’s like, “Well, school is school, but in Mr. Hofmann’s class, I get to earn points and I get to be a Jedi and I can suspend my disbelief and I’m learning history, but at the same time I’m like traveling through the galaxy.” And it’s just amazing how that shift happens just because we’re changing the language a little bit.

Eric Cross (07:29):

Yeah. You seem to have like tapped into something that is already kind of in that zeitgeist culture thing. We’re gaming and it appeals to—I know it appeals to our students regardless of how they feel about even the subject that’s being taught, the fact that they’re immersed into this environment where they’re taking on this character role and they’re part of this bigger narrative. And you’ve so dynamically constructed this whole storyline and these experiences, and they’re learning experiences, like, they’re learning, but they’re enjoying it in a different way. But I wanted to ask you about something that I really admire that you do, and it’s how you grade. And I remember the first time you said this, we were in a parent-teacher conference and we’re all talking on Zoom with these parents and we’re all sharing our spiel. And you go, I don’t grade kids. They grade themselves. Can you talk a little bit about your conferencing with students? The rubric you use like that that, I’ve really been paying close attention to lately.

Fabian Hofmann (08:24):

Yeah. So, when I was working in Hawaii, I noticed I was teaching English, and grading papers in English is really not fun. Like, that is like my least favorite thing. Some teachers are like, “Yeah, it’s grading! Awesome! I can read stuff!” For me, it’s like, yes, I like to read stuff, but I—and it was the same in German class. I gave them feedback. Sometimes I would use oral feedback, I would, like, record stuff for them, and they would listen to it, and then they would work on it. And so I noticed when I’m giving them feedback and its oral feedback, they’re more inclined to actually work on the stuff that I was critiquing, versus when I sat down and I wrote something. They would never read it. Or some would, and most of them would not. And so I was like, this sucks. <Laughs> And I encountered this book called Hacking Assessment, because it’s such a waste of time, right? You spend so much time, because you wanna do the due diligence. And for those few kids who actually do care, that benefits them. But I want this to benefit everybody. And so I read this book called Hacking Assessment, by Starr Sackstein. And she talks about how she put the onus of grading into the student hands, essentially. And so she did standard-based grading and essentially said, “You know what? Here’s the thing. I am not going to grade you anymore. You are going to get a rubric that we are going to dissect and explain and make sure that you understand. And then you sit down and you give yourself a grade based on this rubric.” And I was like, “Wow, what? That is….I can do that? And the cool thing about this book is that she covers all the roadblocks that we as teachers have. And she explains, like, she gives examples on what we can do to convince parents, to convince admin, to convince the community, convince other teachers why what we’re doing is much, much better for a student than the previous system is. If you think about it, when a student comes into school, they start at a hundred, they start the year at a hundred, and all they’re doing is just lose points. And they’re just trying to keep up. Right? And it kind of flips this on its head, because not only with the gamification, I’m changing the name of the game, literally, but I’m also now with ungrading, I’m giving them the responsibility and the accountability to really look at their stuff and really be critical about how they’re doing. And I taught like normal in my first year in Hawaii when I was teaching English, by me grading everything and turning it and giving it to them. And I used peer grade and I did all that kind of stuff. But in the end, I was always the one responsible for the grade. But then I started to do the ungrading move and I just started to conference with kids and started giving them feedback, with the help of gamification, because there’s like a bunch of rubrics you can use to make it more fun. But all of a sudden, kids that in the year before would’ve failed my class in English, because they were English learners; they were just not into it; they didn’t care as much…all of a sudden that flipped completely. I did the exact same content again. We had to write an essay and all of a sudden, the essays were all like, up there, because we sat down, we talked about it, we went through this review process, gave them feedback. In the end, they could say, “Hey, I want this grade. And then I still have the last say. I would say, say, “Yep, sounds good.” Or “If you wanna get an A on this, or whatever it was, a 4, then here are the things you still need to do.” And because I did that, all of a sudden, the students are like, “Oh, that’s all I need to do?” And then they did it and turned it in, and all of a sudden, they got a 4. It’s, it’s amazing how that the conferencing with students, how that shifted their attitude. And I got to know my students way better than I ever had.

Eric Cross (12:20):

Yeah. That’s, that’s one of the things that I’ve noticed. And I watch you get so much more facetime with students having conferences than I do. I find myself grading…and, you know, at our school, it’s mastery-based instruction, so students can retake assessments, but you’re absolutely right: I give a grade; they get a score; and some of ’em score lower, but in their minds it’s like, OK, I’m done with that. And even though they can retake it, such a small percentage actually do. But the information that I give them in the feedback is often not read. But you’re sitting down and having a conversation and really listening and there’s so much more of a connection that you have. I just think it’s so rich. But the question I have now is how do you make the time for those conversations with those kids in your class?

Fabian Hofmann (13:01):

Yeah, it’s definitely a learning curve. Like the first year I did it, it was horrible. Like <laugh>, it cost so much time. Because kids came, because when it was time to grading, because I had not figured it out yet, I had not streamlined it. And I’m still learning. I’m still trying to figure this out and do it even better. But the idea is that you do something, you check in with me really quick. That doesn’t have to be like a full-on conference. It’s—I walk around or I call them up and say, “Hey, I saw you working on this. How did, how are you doing there? How many—” Like, let’s say I use a rubric that gives them crystals for different parts. They write the introduction; they write a bibliography; whatever, so I can bring them up and say, “Hey, how is the bibliography looking?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m missing…like, I only have like one or two sources.” And then we say, “OK, so right now you would get two crystals out of three because you have something. When you come back, you get all the crystals.” And so that’s a gamified aspect again, right? They’re coming back to get more crystals, not because they wanna do better necessarily. But because they’re like, “Hey, I wanna get those crystals because it gives me points in the game.” They are very good about like grading themselves and kind of like, they’re really hard on themselves sometimes too. And I have students who are like—

Eric Cross (14:08):

Yeah, they are.

Fabian Hofmann (14:09):

“Well, how can you make sure that people don’t just give themselves an eight?” And I’m like, “Because there’s a system in place that that does not happen. Like, there is a rubric, and if they cannot back up what they want, then it’s not gonna happen. They can write an eight all day long. I’m still the person entering it into the grade book!” <Laugh>

Eric Cross (14:27):

And let me premise this for listeners who don’t teach at IB schools, which is probably like most people.

Fabian Hofmann (14:31):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (14:32):

So IB, we teach zero through eight on a rubric system. And seven-eight is kind of like the A, kind of, quote-unquote. I know IB people are probably cringing when I say that, but <laugh>, you know, when you transfer it to like a high school? Seven, eight would be the highest score, you know. Four, five, six. So when we say eight, we’re talking about the highest score.

Fabian Hofmann (14:49):

Yeah. And so it’s really interesting because I can call them out on stuff, and it’s a one-on-one conversation, right? And if, especially if they turn something in that is not great, and they give themselves like a—I don’t know, like a C, let’s say, or a four, or whatever it is—and they’re like, “And you’re happy with that?” And then they’re standing there and they’re like, like, “No…?” <Laugh> And all of a sudden there’s a conversation. Where it’s like, and then I can be very intentionally like, “Hey man, I know you can do better. I would not—I’m not gonna accept this. I’m gonna push you to turn this in again.” And most of them actually sit down and do more. It’s a process. It takes a while. It’s not pretty in the beginning. But the payout is, so it’s incredible. Just like the amount of time that I get to spend with students, like specifically talking to them about things that they still need to work on, celebrating stuff they do, it’s incredible. Like the relationships are just so different than what I had years ago.

Eric Cross (15:50):

And you’ve also created a system where we preach—and schools always talk about this Dweck growth mindset and not having a fixed mindset, but I wonder how many opportunities or how systems are set up that are actually fixed, where it’s like one and done, OK, you did this exam and then that’s it, but there’s no opportunities to grow until the next exam! Which is gonna be….or whatever the assessment is, which is a whole different area of content or different topic or whatever. But here, you’re actually able to facilitate this growth mindset and push back if a student says, like, “Well that’s—I just got a four,” and you can actually pour into them and talk to them. And do you ever hear more about a student’s story as to why they were where they’re at, as you’re having these conferences?

Fabian Hofmann (16:29):

Oh, absolutely. Like for some kids who, who are just like not getting the work done or whatever, there’s always something where it’s not because they’re not smart or because they’re lazy. It’s like, sometimes, literally they tell you, well, ’cause I ask them, “Hey, can you work on this at home?” Or “Can you come in during lunch, after school, whatever? I’m always here.” And then they drop some bombs on you, like, “Hey, my parents, like, divorced. My mom lives in Mexico.” ‘Cause we live in San Diego. So some students live in Mexico and come to school here in San Diego and they get stuck at the border or, even though they have internet at home, they have to share. It’s like kind of what we experienced during the pandemic, where it’s like, there’s like three kids at home and one computer. Stuff like that. Right? And it’s these stories where you’re like, first of all, it’s very humbling ’cause they’re going through stuff that I never had to go through. I mean, my childhood was not amazing, but compared to what they’re going through, it’s like, “Oh yeah, that exists.” And it kind of like puts you in your place a little bit. It’s also because of the system that I use. There’s no late, really, in my class. Some of the students are like, “I need to subtract points from my grade because I turned it in late.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. The fact that you’re doing it is quote-unquote punishment enough ’cause you have to do it outside of class, you have to do it at home; you have to do it during lunch. Like, that is, that is not comfortable. You’re still doing it. So why would I punish you by taking a grade away? That doesn’t make sense. You got the work done. That’s all that matters.” I try to be that person that like is understanding. It’s still pushing them to do their best and reminding them and harping on them. And with the spark that I threw in there and fanning that flame of them becoming a better student because I’m supporting them. You’re supporting them. We’re all—our seventh-grade team is incredibly supportive. And then some people might push back, like “That’s not preparing them for the real world.” This is the real world.

Eric Cross (18:20):

There’s a lot of life skills that they’re gonna need…but like, they’re 12 right now! Or 11 or six, you know, whatever it is! Let’s—we can hold off on taxes and the crushing weight of adult reality later on. You got it done! Well-done! I do wanna talk about this thing that is your baby lately, this embryonic thing that you’ve been growing and I’ve been fortunate to be able to watch it since its inception. But you have this class that you created from scratch that’s essentially a STEM class. Two questions: Why did you create the class? And you’ve done some uncommon things. I’m gonna leave it wide open just for you to talk about it because it’s your baby and I’ve been fortunate to be able to watch it from the start. So can you talk about that?

Fabian Hofmann (19:01):

So yeah, so I’m obsessed with Star Wars. I think that’s putting it mildly. I love Star Wars. Always have. My classroom game is called Jedi Academy. And I’ve been playing around with this idea of creating a room that is more immersive. So I put a space, like a window to space, on my wall. I have the Millennium Falcon in my room. I have like a bunch of Resistance stuff or whatever. Anything Star Wars, you can find in my classroom. It’s not like overloaded, but I was very intentional in the things that I put in there, because I want my students to come in and feel like they are playing the game. And one of those things that I used was like smells; I used sounds to try to immerse them more. And then so one day I was like, wouldn’t it be cool to create a classroom that looks literally like a Star Wars set? Like you walked onto a set. Onto a spaceship, onto a rebel base, onto whatever it is. And how can I, how can I make that happen? And then we talked about it and you were like, “Yeah, how about you let the kids do it?” And that’s kind of how the course was born. And now I have students in my classroom who are in the process of designing a classroom based on Star Wars. And they’re gonna build everything. And we’re all learning at the same time. I’ve never done anything like this. I do like STEM, but I’ve never like actually made it a class. And so I contacted a bunch of people on LinkedIn ’cause I was like, it would be cool to talk to an Imagineer and to get like my foot in the door at Disney and then have an Imagineer come in and tell us about what they did. I have this book called The Art of Galaxy’s Edge, which is like the Star Wars land in Disneyland. And I just looked at the list and was like, “Who could be a good person to contact here?” And it said one of them was Eric Baker, and it said, “Executive Creative Director.” And I googled him or I looked for him on LinkedIn and I found him and I was like, “I’m just gonna send him a message. I’m just gonna tell him what I do in my class in history, gamification and all that, and they’re Jedi, and blah, blah, blah.” And he wrote back! Like, he was the only person that wrote back. I wrote a bunch of people and he was like, “Yeah, I’d be super-interested. I don’t know what you want me to do, but I’m down.” And so it created this relationship between me and Eric Baker who used to work for Imagineering, who are like the people at Disney who create the rides in the park and all that. And I talked to him and he gave me some feedback on the room. And then he was like, “Oh, so if you ever want me to talk to students, I’m down.” I was like, “Uh, yes!” And so we had him Zoom in. He talked about his life and how he became one of the people to look for when it comes to theme park design and to create immersive experiences. And I contacted other people on YouTube, like somebody who is like a Star Wars room builder. He’s willing to chat with us about this project. And then, I discovered that there is this thing called Imagination Campus at Disneyland, which they offer workshops on immersive storytelling. And I was like, “Oh, that’s what I want! I want my students to tell a story with my room!” And so I wrote up a proposal. Took a long time, but they signed—our admin signed it off. We kind of financed it. And then, about two weeks ago, you came along, another teacher, and we took 30something students to Disneyland and they did this workshop where they learned all about like how the Imagineers design story elements and put them in the parks. And then we took all of the kids to Galaxy’s Edge. And we took a bunch of photos. We went on the rides together. We had this collective experience. And it was life-changing for a lot of students. Because, I mean, we’re a Title One school; there’s like, we have about 60% free or reduced lunch. And a lot of them had never been to Disneyland. About half of them had never been. Some of them went when they were little. And so just watching their faces, going to Disneyland, watching them walk into Galaxy’s Edge, experiencing all these things, it was just, my mind was just blown. And I like literally, I don’t know if you noticed, but I was just smiling. Literally.

Eric Cross (23:19):

You were loving it.

Fabian Hofmann (23:20):

Yeah. Then we come back and we have these amazing conversations about design and what they noticed and how they created this immersive experience in their world. And we talk about how we can bring this back to our classroom. And parents are sending emails saying, “Oh my God, we’re so happy that you did this for our kids and you’re the coolest teacher.”

Eric Cross (23:39):

You touched on something that I wanted to ask you about. So you stay connected to people that inspire you, I feel like, or you have a pretty broad network of educators and professionals. Like, how much does that play into what you do in the classroom and the ideas that you have, as your network or your community of people?

Fabian Hofmann (23:57):

So the one network that helped me the most is Twitter. And I know people have opinions about Twitter, for good reason. But when I started to gamify, I just started to follow specific hashtags for areas that interested me. And that was gamification; eXPdup, which is like Explore like a Pirate—it’s an acronym. And it just opened up all these people, all these people, all these educators who are out there just like doing cool stuff and sharing it on Twitter. And I started connecting with them. And one of them is on my podcast. We met through Twitter; we started sharing stuff. We started talking about the things that we do. We both happened to have a gamified classroom. And so we connected over this thing Twitter, and now we’re like friends and we’re presenting together at Q and all those places. Teacher Twitter is incredibly supportive and people want to show you the stuff that they work on, just like I do. Like when I have stuff that I worked out, I shared it on there. And it’s so fun to hear back from teachers saying, “Hey, this looks awesome.” It’s just, it makes you feel good and it makes you feel like, “Oh, what I’m doing is not a total waste of time.” <Laugh>

Eric Cross (25:10):

<laugh> Those thoughts do creep in, right? Like, even though you’re doing something awesome and you might think so, we become our own worst critic sometimes, or we always see the things that we can improve and we overlook the things that we’re doing well. Fabian, where can people hear more about you, about gamification, about what you’re doing in the classroom, about how you’re innovating? I know you talk about this stuff with some—and you talk about it with some pretty legit people in the education industry. So can you tell some folks where they can hear more about it?

Fabian Hofmann (25:37):

So you can find me on Twitter at Hofmann edu—one F, two Ns—edu, and then I also host a podcast called Rebel Teacher Alliance. There’s three of us, where we talk all things gamification. But we also talk to teachers who don’t gamify at all. And we just, we just invite people who are interesting, who have stuff to share, who do cool stuff. You can find the podcast on the internet at Rebel Teacher Alliance dot com. Follow us there. If you wanna be a guest, just send a message and we’ll get you on.

Eric Cross (26:10):

Fabian, I’m gonna gush on you right now, but when you came back to Einstein, I was so happy because I knew that you sharpened me; you make me a better science teacher. Your innovation, your passion for kids, your sense of humor, your outside-the-box thinking, all of that. And when you got onto the seventh-grade team and you were here, I just knew that it was going to be awesome. And it has been. And so as a teaching colleague, as a friend, dude, you just rock, man. I’m super proud of you. And thank you for making me better.

Fabian Hofmann (26:40):

Aw, now I’m starting to cry. It’s like, don’t…

Eric Cross (26:43):

<laugh>. All true, dude. All true, my brother.

Fabian Hofmann (26:46):

Thank you.

Eric Cross (26:46):

All true. And thank you for letting me be part of the journey and I will definitely be walking down the hall asking you questions as I try to implement some of these great ideas that you’re doing with kids. Thanks so much for listening. And now we wanna hear more about you. Do you know any inspiring educators? Nominate them as a future guest on Science Connections by emailing STEM at amplifycom.wpengine.com. That’s S T E M at amplifycom.wpengine.com. Make sure to click subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and join our Facebook group, Science Connections: The Community. Until next time.