Zach Diamond  0:03  
Welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast. Each week we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self paced and mastery based learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other, so this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the modern classrooms project podcast.

Toni Rose Deanon  0:28  
Hello and welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast. My name is Toni Rose Deanon, they them pronouns, a designated hype person here at MCP, and I am joined today by Joseph Chavez Lombardi, a secondary mathematics teacher and adjunct professor of mathematics.

Toni Rose Deanon  0:43  
Welcome Joey. 

Joey Lombardi  0:44  
Thank you. TR, it's so great to be here with you.

Toni Rose Deanon  0:47  
It is so exciting to be in this space with you. And thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast. I know that you and I had worked, or at least collaborated on a couple of things already, and then I quickly realized I was like, whoa. I haven't had Joey on the podcast, so let's have Joey on the podcast to share his experiences and expertise with our listeners. And so again, thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast, and before we get started, tell us more about who you are and how you started your MCP journey.

Joey Lombardi  1:13  
Yeah, thank you for asking me that question. So I kind of started using components of the MCP model in my undergraduate studies, I attended a local state college here in Connecticut, southern Connecticut State University, and I had a very innovative professor who actually signed out An iPad to every student in our teaching secondary math in K 12 schools course, and we learned about using the explain everything application, and actually recorded a lesson using the iPad. And it was a really wonderful experience. Our professor actually brought us all coffee for the day, and we got to sit there and watch our videos and our lessons and provide each other feedback in a very safe and collaborative environment. And so I graduated the following spring, and that was the 2020 to 2021 school year I was in a hybrid slash remote. School year, we were remote at first, and then we later transitioned to a hybrid learning setting. And so I used instructional videos at that point, but I didn't see strong engagement. The videos were a bit too long. There were good ways to check for student learning throughout the process and not good structures in place, and so slowly, I started using other methods of teaching that really just did not work well for me. Personally, I really appreciate those dynamic methods that my professor shared with me, and I really wanted to find a way to make them impactful in a K 12 and potentially higher education classroom, so that following summer, the summer 2022 was when the modern classrooms Project partnered with the state of Connecticut and offered certain school districts the scholarship opportunity to enroll in the virtual mentorship program. So I completed it. This we're going into actually upcoming year will be four years, so it's been quite a bit that I've learned about the model now and incorporated it. So after that summer, I piloted the model in my pre calculus classroom. I saw immediate benefits to the model, but it wasn't perfect, I will say I had to refine things more and more, and I found that it was quite impactful once I really figured out how to best tailor the model to my classroom, and since then, I've just been exploring more ways that to apply the model in different K 12 settings as well as higher education settings, and also looking into the benefits that it has for my students and my school overall. 

Toni Rose Deanon  4:20  
I really love that, Joey, and thank you so much for bringing it back, like way back when it, you know, hybrid and the remote teaching during 2020 2021, school year, and also just bringing back explain everything. I know that that was what I started using when I created instructional videos. And I thought that that was such a learning curve for me as well, but it was so cool once I finally figured out how to use it. So thank you for bringing it back for me. And I was like, whoo. It has been a hot minute four years implementation and having to refine it and trying, trying to figure out, like, how can I better serve my students of all ages, right? Because you do have multiple roles here. And so again, just thank you for being a part of this community and jumping right into it and figuring out what could work better for you. And your students, that's really, really exciting stuff. I also know that you being a math teacher, you're pretty well versed in building thinking classrooms, and I am not. I'm trying to be and so having lots of conversations with math teachers, especially about building thinking classrooms, because a lot of teachers are implementing this type of classrooms as well, and then molding it with modern classrooms, right with the self paced blended learning and mastery based learning. And so this episode is really all about building thinking classrooms and some of your hot takes. But before we even go to that hot take, let's explain what is building thinking classrooms for listeners who may not have any idea what it is

Joey Lombardi  5:41  
so building thinking classrooms, which often is referred to as BTC, is a framework that was developed by Dr Peter Peter Lila doll, a mathematics educator who is whose interest was in how we can promote active learning in our students through providing them with well structured thinking tasks. And the concept of it is that students are not learning from a typical I show you try methodology, and instead they either they're given a sequence of tasks that either help them discover a concept or might break up a concept into smaller parts that slowly gets more and more difficult, often referred to as thin slice tasks. And it allows students to really investigate the concepts on their own before formally learning it. And it allows them to construct their own understanding of the mathematics in what I like to think of as kind of messy thinking. So this messy thinking I'm referring to occurs where students are, first of all, in visibly random groups, which helps them get comfortable collaborating with their peers. It helps them build classroom community, and it provides them with those essential collegiality and career skills that they need in college and high school. And so they're working in visible thinking groups, invisibly read groups, visibly randomized groups. And they're working on these tasks at vertical, non permanent surfaces, like white boards. I sometimes have windows. I actually have, like tape that I put on the wall, and it acts as a non permanent surface that students can write on. And what it what they do is they use a marker, and they have one marker per group, and so kind of adding to the visible, randomized grouping, they organically collaborate very well, because they only have one marker. So they have to talk to each other, they have to share ideas, and they pretty much just work together through the task. And they're able to show their thinking in real time, so I'm able to see how well they're understanding the content, how well they're able to use the models and also hear their thinking aloud, and it shifts from them listening to me and just trying to absorb everything, to really taking a more personalized approach to say, Okay, I really understand this concept. Well, let me explain this concept to my group members. Okay, we're moving on. Okay. We're a bit stuck here. What do we do? And so they're working again, in these visible, random groups, they have other groups that are working around the room. They're able to turn and take ideas from other groups. And again, it's a very messy process. They're really like investigating the concepts for themselves, and what, in turn, happens is it can in the real time, it can even lead to some misconceptions on their own that naturally happens in any person who's investigating a concept on their own, and to help foster this thinking as the educator, instead of just clarifying to Students or confirming that they did a problem correctly. Instead, what you use are keep thinking questions during this thinking process. So it's a there's a lot of moving parts here. What I'm really trying to get at is that you know, they are working through these tasks that help them really construct their own understanding of concepts. And then they said they and while they're doing these tasks, they're in random groups, and they're working at the vertical, non permanent surfaces. And then after, you know, the 1520 minutes of thinking occurred. For students, there's the consolidation component. And the consolidation component is really the last phase of a building thinking classrooms activity where students, as a as a class, really goes through a note guide that they construct, pretty much from their own understanding of concepts. It's very It looks different in every class. Dr lillidal does a really nice job of providing templates in his book about the different uses of notes in a thinking classroom. But what's quite different about these is that instead of telling students to focus on this concept, focus on this idea, you give them more of an open ended note guide to follow, and they're able to add in what they would like to choose, and then that gets added to the entire Classroom. And now all of what I just described is, I'd say a good idea of a way a task might look in real time. But there's truly 14 principles of a thinking classroom that Dr lilidal emphasizes in his book, building thinking classrooms, building thinking classrooms in mathematics, and those are also different protocols and procedures to fully realize the potential of the thinking classroom.

Toni Rose Deanon  11:36  
Yeah, and you're giving me a lot to think about, too. Joey, you know, in my English, because I'm humanities. I'm like, Okay, what are the similarities? What are the differences? And I'm like, wow, the biggest thing that's popping up for me is very similar to project based learning, right? We give the project students, they figure this out. And I think a lot of the times, math teachers are really excited about BTC, because it is done by a mathematician. It is specifically for math as well. So it's quite exciting to hear that there's, you know, there's this, like, messy thinking that is invited and welcomed and encouraged in the math classroom. There's this collaborative aspect as well, too, where students can share those ideas. And it's not really like we are looking for the quote, unquote, right answers, but there's also more to asking questions, making sure that we're sharing ideas, and again, like the skills that we need outside of the four walls in the classroom, right? And something that students could continue to utilize the skills in their real lives. And so this keep thinking questions, too. You talked about the instant gratification, the keep thinking questions, right? Like that. I know I've heard multiple times students in math classes would be like, did I get the right answer is this right, right? But ultimately, what, what I'm hearing with the building thinking classroom is that you really are building your thinking with your peers, which I absolutely love, and the fact that you said that they focus also on active, active learners versus passive learners. This is something that we also say and at MCP as well, right? Like, hey, we want to create active learners. We want our students to really take ownership and be self directed learners in the classroom, because that those skills will be really good for outside of the classroom. So thank you for giving us a little bit about a little bit of background of BTC, right? Because I think again, I've seen some really dope implementation of BTC, or at least folks having really great conversations about, how can we get students excited about math? Because I know that that's one of the biggest priorities right now, is like, how do we take away this fear from math, and how do we create joy and excitement towards it? Because it is something that we utilize every single day. So now, keeping in mind, too, Joey, I I'm humanities, right? I teach English. I know that BTC is for math, and I know our listeners will be like, okay, but can I use BTC in my classroom? And I can, I can already create different examples of how other teachers who don't teach math could implement BTC. But what are your thoughts?

Joey Lombardi  14:00  
Yeah, so I think one of the things that I wish I had brought up, by the way, before, when I was talking about the vertical, non permanent surfaces, is that in math, especially, students are very afraid to take risks. They they freeze, and especially in that church, in a in a teaching in a I show, then you try approach to a lesson. Students are fine with the you tries. They're comfortable because they just watch their teacher do it on their own. But the moment you put a new problem in front of them. They're completely, they're completely like, No, and it's in it's simply because math is great. In a very narrow way, they're very used to, you know, kind of receiving negative feedback for showing their thinking. And in a way, they're afraid to show their thinking. And what the power of the vertical, non permanent surface does. Us is they show their thinking with a marker very quickly, and then it's erased. If they don't like an idea, they can take it away immediately. So it takes away that fear of taking risks. And I think that's essential in mathematics, and I think that's essential in every course I've seen folks work at vertical, non permanent services in other courses, and I think again, that idea of helping students think through a task rather than passively intake information, inevitably leads to a stronger conceptual understanding on part of the students. Now, Dr lillidah is also aware that the book is named building thinking classrooms for mathematics and then, like a K 12, I need the title in front of me, but what they did was actually created a book that is focused on how a thinking classroom can be used in other disciplines. So on top of the building thinking classrooms book, there's actually a supplemental resource on how this model can be tailored to different disciplines. And on top of that kind of like modern classroom, there's Facebook groups, there's community circles that folks can join. And I think it, again, really centers around having that desire and interest to provide your students with the best opportunity possible to achieve the level of understanding that we're hoping to accomplish. I think specifically, one of the biggest reasons I use the model is because I find that the modeling standards in the Common Core State Standards are somewhat challenging to address. There's a lot of modeling tasks that are built into K 12 curricular materials across the country, and specifically illustrative mathematics is a very good job of providing those discovery based exercises and really emphasizing those modeling standards. But other curricular materials don't they tend to use other principles that have that kind of mirror what I might have seen in my own secondary career. And so I think again, it's really that interest and desire that stems from teachers to then not only try methods on their own, but then seek out these additional supplemental resources that have been curated over time to help adapt this thinking classroom into other classes. Yeah.

Toni Rose Deanon  17:43  
And now you got me thinking too, Joey, about the modeling piece, right? You said, like we have to let, we have not even let, we have to invite our students to struggle, to have that messy thinking, have it on something that they can see, right? And then they can quickly erase if it doesn't work out, but I think you're making me change my mind about the importance of modeling, because I'm always like, model, model, model, model, model first before you release your students, and you're saying, no, no, release your students so that there's more messy thinking happening, there's more active thinking happening. And it's not just that, oh, my teacher did it this way, so I have to do it that way, right? And then that piece is like a compliance piece. Now not necessarily them expanding their brain by thinking about the different ways that they could figure out the task, right? Oh, okay, I feel like that in itself, is a hot take that I'm like, Oh, I got to sit with that. I got a process with that. Because, as an English teacher, I'm always like, we're going to model. We're going to model. So now let's talk about your hot take. What is your hot take about the framework, about just math education in general?

Joey Lombardi  18:48  
Thank you. Um, so a lot of K 12 classrooms that on paper are considered engaging, and when you observe them, you would deem as engaging. Students are taking notes. They are practicing on their own. They understand the systems and procedures of a classroom. I would agree that it is engaging in the present moment, but it's not allowing students to think on their own, and even in the most polished classroom, if students don't learn to problem solve, to look at a question that they've never seen before and generate some sort of solution that They can determine whether it's viable or not. They're not going to be able, later on, to operate at the level that they can, especially as they go into their later mathematics. And any course in any career, one of the one of, I don't have this. Specific name off the top of my head, but one of the major principles I always learned about students operating in a mathematics classroom was that they were doing mathematics. And I don't believe doing mathematics is just copying a process. I consider doing mathematics as exploring the concept, building the concept from scratch, creating your own understanding of it that you can train. And you know, taking these skills that you know it's okay to not get the correct answer every time. That's part of the process of learning. And all of those skills transfer into all other disciplines and any any position you ever take, and especially in a math class on an exam, because a lot of exams, you don't know what the questions are going to be, and you have to just be ready for anything, and You have to be comfortable with that uncertainty, and I think that's an extremely important mindset to have, especially with all of the ever changing things that are occurring with AI and advancements in general. So my hot take is really that if we don't give the students that opportunity to really explore the content on their own, they're not going to learn it in a way that years later they're going to be able to recall it and share it with others. I think I once heard this from it was honestly a reel. I was like, I love educational reels. They always pop up on my phone. And it talked about how some of the most successful students are students that aren't afraid to teach others concepts and a lot of that goes hand in hand with building thinking classrooms, because you're you're engaging those students who are bored in the traditional lesson, they are. They're going, I understand in not the traditional but you know the I try, you try model, and they understand the method, but they're bored. And then you have students who are just fine, okay, we're going with it. And then you have some students who really need support and the thinking model, in a way, similar to the modern classroom model, benefits all of those students, because the students who are bored are explaining the content to other students, helping them see their understanding, and that, in Turn, benefits their thinking the students who needed the support are able to explore the content in real time and receive the support, either from their peers or from their teachers in real time. And then the students who were kind of, they were okay in the traditional model, not traditional the I try, you try method, they're able to appreciate what it really means to do mathematics for yourself. And that's what I think is really impactful about the model.

Toni Rose Deanon  23:14  
Okay, so, Joey, I am processing all of this, and I am, I'm feeling a lot of discomfort on my end, because I am now asking myself, Oh, my goodness, right? Like, I'm always telling people compliance is not learning, but then how do I how have I created compliance unintentionally with the learning experiences that I've created for folks, right? So it's like, okay, you're absolutely right. Like, I'm modeling all of these things. I'm thinking that because people are taking notes, that they're, you know, answering questions, that that's fully in, that that is engagement. What? But what I'm hearing from you is saying that, no, there's got to be struggle involved in that. Like, it doesn't have to be pretty. Our students can make all the wrong mistakes, have all the misconceptions that is part of learning. And I love that. I love that. And I think sometimes too, if teachers are are maybe nervous about time right like, Oh, but I don't have time for my students to make mistakes. They have to get this right here right now, because we have a test, or we have this thing that students need to do already. So what do you say about that? Like, the comments of like, time, right? Because that is real, like, we really don't have time, but we need to make time for our students to struggle. And I think in the math world too, one of the phrases, that's my favorite, is that productive struggle, right? We really, really, we meaning all all teachers, we are not great at providing spaces for students to productively struggle.

Joey Lombardi  24:48  
Yeah, I really appreciate that you brought that up, because actually the first time I ever heard the phrase productive struggle was when I learned about creating instructional videos. Is an undergraduate. And I always wanted to provide students with that productive struggle in real time and again, as I think, as you mentioned, the rooms you walk in, the students, it's quiet, they're talking. The classroom looks neat, but without that struggle, they're they're not generating their own understanding, and it inevitably will impact them negatively. Now as far as timing, I actually think building BTC does a really good job with timing, because what happens is that the concepts that students are comfortable with, they actually work really quickly through them. And in what I have found is a topic that might take me a 45 minute to an hour lesson to teach it. Teach using direct instruction, students are able to work very quickly through that part, because they might have already seen the concept. They might just it, might just click for them, a little bit easier. Might be the beginning of a lesson, and they might be more comfortable with it. And then what it allows is they're they're very confident when that happens, because they are going quick and they know there's not as much of a task left, but it gives them time when they do get to that cognitively demanding part of it, to slow down and say, I need a little bit more time to do this. And I always explain to them, yeah, I need some time too when I'm taking a class, you know, I'm the same way when i i I'm someone who's been actually in graduate school my entire teaching career, and I always explain to them that I cannot just wait till last minute to do things because it will not result in the best results that I can provide. And I think that's really the main emphasis I've been trying to drive home here, is that we're trying to help students realize their own potential here and realize that they are responsible for their learning, and they are responsible for saying, Okay, I understood the beginning of that task as we got further and further in, though I really needed some support. So when I do my homework, I'm going to focus on those homework problems that relate to that concept, whereas the ones earlier I might not need as much practice with. And that's actually one of the big what that's one of the concepts that Dr lilidall emphasizes in his book on how homework is meant to be a learning task for students, and inevitably, we're training students in this compliance piece that the thinking model helps move students away from.

Toni Rose Deanon  27:54  
It's such a great reminder, too, Joey, right? That like sometimes as teachers, we just already assume, Oh, the kids are not going to get this. We don't have time for this. And then when we actually release it, and when we try it, it's like, oh, wait a minute, you got y'all got this down in 10 minutes. Oh, you proved me wrong, right? So this is such a great reminder that when we release our geniuses in the classroom, they can actually make magic out of the thing that we want we want them to get right. So thank you for that reminder too. Of you know what this lesson could take me 45 minutes, or it could take our students 1015 minutes to figure this out as a group, as a pair, individually, right? Because our students are really geniuses. Now, I do also want to remind our listeners too, that when it when we think about collaborative opportunities for students to make mistakes, to take risks together, we have to create that culture of learning, right? Like, we can't just say, like, Okay, now we're going to do all of these things. No, we have to create that trust between our students, between us and our students as well, so that students can work together in a way that they know they're not going to be made fun of if they make a mistake, right? So those are really, really important things to consider. So you know, you had mentioned already about how BTC and MCP, we love the acronyms in education kind of mesh well, really mesh well together. And so you actually wrote about this in one of our blogs. Can you tell us a little bit more about your article that we published? Because I think this is such a cool way to see too. Like, hey, building thinking classrooms, there is space for it if you're if and when you start implementing MCP.

Joey Lombardi  29:33  
Yeah, that article, I think I've been told it's kind of the it's very me. I've always been told that's a great way to give a good insight to the way that I teach and why I teach a certain way. And it really stems from my own experience as a secondary education student and realizing that I. I wish I was provided the opportunity to explore a topic on my own and then formalize it and then practice and then show it through application. And this was just ironically the theme of a webinar that was offered through the virtual mentorship program from modern classrooms, which was on inquiry based learning. So it's a constructivist framework, the 5e instructional model that was developed by the biological sciences curriculum studies under the leadership of Roger Bybee, and it's grounded in gene Piaget theory of cognitive development and vygotsky's social learning theory. And so I had learned actually through MCP University, which offers a course on inquiry based learning from the co founder of modern classrooms, Robert Barnett, that there have been modern classrooms that are implemented without an inquiry model, and they are deemed as not impactful. And because of that, I knew I needed to find a way to bring this inquiry to my classroom. And so modern classrooms offers offered this workshop and inquiry based learning, where we learned about the 5e model, and what it did so nicely was focused on the Engage and explore component of those five E's, and it talked about different ways we can engage students, using hooks, different problems we can pose at the beginning of a unit, it then segue into an exploration piece, which looks different. Of course, in every discipline might be an investigation. It might be providing students a set of questions to work through. What I found so nicely was that the Engage and explore piece were really emphasized in this workshop. And then I thought, well, we don't have a lot of time left in the workshop. You know, we still have the three remaining ones. And they said, No, actually, that's already there. You're so in the modern classroom, in a modern classroom, lesson, at the heart of it, the three components are the instructional video, individual practice and mastery check. If you do the workshop, you learn them backwards. But my point is, the EXPLAIN component is shared through the instructional video, the elaborate component is shared through the individual practice and the mastery check is shared through the evaluate component, and I found that a building thinking classroom task does a really good job of emphasizing the Engage and explore piece of every lesson or sequence of lessons, and it opened my eyes To ways that I could better prepare my students for a sequence of modern classroom lessons. Now those lessons are, of course, based on data on the students, on how they perform with content. Of course, there's some choice in there too for students to decide what concepts they want to study or if they want additional practice. But what I found a lot of times, especially my first year implementing the model, was that I did so much intervention with the mastery checks, students were going through the entire lesson, and thankfully, we have the mastery check component to check to really provide students the support they need early on in a unit, before we get to the end of a unit, but that is very time consuming. It's also disheartening for a student to fail a mastery check and have to complete the revisions process and over time, especially with a modern classroom where you are going to go through so many of those lessons, because they're bite sized, chunk lessons that focus on one concept, it can be a bit demoralizing. And so I said, Okay, let me see about adding a bit more of these BTC tasks between either sets of modern classroom lessons, if I could provide it at the beginning of a modern classroom lesson. And what I found from students actually investigating a concept, constructing their own understanding of it, and then as a class really going through and addressing those misconceptions through a strong consolidation when they went to do the modern classroom lesson, the exploration did not stop with the exploration piece they were expanding in the instructional video, saying, I already know this. We already did this. Oh, this is why we're doing this. Oh, this is a great way for me to prepare for the individual practice. This is the type of problems I need to see, do myself doing well to perform well on the end of unit assessment. That was the shift. Gift that students took, and especially in college math classes, high school math classes, the tests primarily are usually from your homework. Of course there, there's going to be concepts from your notes. But you know, students need to be comfortable with really understanding their homework at the strongest possible conceptual understanding that they can and what I inevitably found was that there was less of a need for the intervention component at the end. Students use the instructional data to expand their understanding. They refined it with the practice, and they just used the mastery check as one extra practice problem. It was no longer this. I have to take a mastery check. I want to avoid the mastery check. It was very like, Okay, I'm going to do one extra problem. We're moving on from this entire lesson. And that I found helped me save so much time because I didn't have to provide as much intervention along the way. It allowed students to appreciate the use of the BTC tasks, and it really allowed them to understand the process of learning a concept, especially in a mathematics class.

Toni Rose Deanon  36:13  
Yeah, and I listeners, we're going to link the the article in the show notes, so you don't have to Google it or anything. So I'm just so ecstatic that you wrote this piece for us as well. Because I was like, Oh, it's just such a beautiful way to again, revamp, to reflect and to shift some of our practices to make it even better and more impactful for our students, right? Because, like, again, like you said, we want them to keep thinking. We want them to not be stressed. We don't want the learning to stop at the mastery check. We want it to keep going. So thank you again for writing that piece. We'll have it in the show notes. You don't have to worry about trying to figure out where Joey's article is. And so you know another thing to listeners. We're gonna also link another resource from Joey, and we're gonna not talk about it. We're actually just gonna get you to look at it. Productive struggle, right? Like not modeling. Take a look at it, see what it's about. And then, of course, we'll have Joey's information as well if you wanted to reach out and learn a little bit more. So I know that our time is coming to a close, Joey. And so real quick, what are some of your future goals? What are some things that you want to look that you're looking forward to in the future?

Joey Lombardi  37:18  
Thank you. Um, so I one thing I've been trying to do, and I think this is something that MCP focuses on too, is, you know, building sustainable structures for educators, modern classrooms partnered with Teach flows. I believe it was, we're almost a year and a half ago now. I'll always remember when you sent out that first email about the awesome partnership that they came out with, and it was so cool because it allowed educators to generate an entire modern classroom lesson on their own. And of course, it's not perfect. You have to go through it. You are the expert in your field, and you have to You're the expert in your school. And I inevitably wanted to kind of create a similar structure for myself. So when I was actually defending my thesis for my master's degree, I had to create a slide deck using what's called latex, which creates really beautiful math coding language. Everything is very professionally presented. I really appreciate it, and what I learned to do was actually created a really nice slide template that I actually use AI to refine for each question. And it's kind of in a way like Teach flows. It allows me to not have to do as much of the front loading on my own end, and that's what I really would like to see, kind of a shift in how we can provide educators with these resources to make the use of AI more efficient for constructing these tasks. Or how do we can ask AI on how we can revamp a question to be designed to be a thinking task. That was something I I'm not gonna lie. I really should share that and also like a little screencast with you on how to so I will do that, which we can pretend that we had it already, but that's gonna be something I'm gonna also share with you, just so educators can see, like, how you can use AI to create these tasks a bit more efficiently for yourself. It won't be it's not perfect, but it's a good starting place, 

Toni Rose Deanon  39:27  
yeah, and sometimes that starting place is like a really good, good spot for us, right? Because I know for me, I can't start with a blank page. I have to see some ideas to get even more ideas in my brain. And I also just really love the fact that we continue to have aI brought up, even though there's no question about it, it is something that we're all kind of looking at and prioritizing, but also a little bit like, Okay, how do we again, use this effectively, efficiently, intentionally, right? So, Joey, thank you for your time. I appreciate you sharing your experience. Choices and your expertise with us again. Thank you. Thank you for always saying yes to sharing all of those things with us. 

Joey Lombardi  40:05  
My pleasure.

Zach Diamond  40:11  
Thank you so much for listening. Listeners. Remember you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org, and you can find the links to topics and tools we discussed, as well as more info on this week's announcements and events in the show notes for this episode at podcast dot modern classrooms.org We'll have this episode's recap and transcript uploaded to the modern classrooms blog on Friday, so be sure to check there or check back in the show notes for this episode if you'd like to access those. And if you enjoy our podcast and it's been helpful in supporting you to create a blended, self paced, mastery based learning environment. We would love if you could leave a review that does help other folks find our podcast. And of course, you can always learn the essentials of our model if you want to go beyond the podcast through our free course at learn.modernclassrooms.org at Learn dot modern classrooms.org and you can follow us on social media at modern class proj, that's P, R, O, J, we are so appreciative of all the hard work you do for students and schools. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the modern classrooms project podcast, you.

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