Zach Diamond 0:00 Hey there, listeners. This is Zach and I've got a big announcement for you all, you may have noticed that we're getting close to our 200th episode of the modern classrooms project podcast, which first of all, wow, we're so thankful for each and every one of you who listen every week, because we love making this podcast. And without our listeners, we'd have no reason to. So thank you for coming with us on this journey to 200 and beyond. We already have plans for season six, we have lots of great episodes coming. So that'll be exciting. But somehow we lucked into having episode 200 Be the first episode of our sixth season. So we're planning something really big. For our 200th episode, we'll be recording a Live episode on Zoom, and we would love for you to join us. Toni Rose and I will be joined by several guests. And we'll also be taking audience questions. The live show will take place on Tuesday, July 30 at 7pm. Eastern, and there's registration info in the show notes for this short cast. If you can't make it, the audio from the live show will be published as usual, as our Sunday episode for number 200. But we really would love to have you join us on the 30th it will be so much fun. Again. You can find the registration link in the show notes for this episode. And we hope to see you there. But now let's get into this short cast on early learners. Zach Diamond 1:22 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 1:47 Hello and welcome to episode 187 classrooms project podcast. My name is Toni Rose Deanon they them pronouns a designated hype person here at MCP and I am joined by two first grade teachers from Washington State, Kendra Jergovich and Nick Ledoux. Welcome Kendra and Nick. Kendra Jergovic 2:04 Thank you for having us. Nick Ledoux 2:06 Thank you. Kendra Jergovic 2:10 Um, one fun thing that I started this year because I love traveling. So on all of my new locations, I have had a lot of fun making handwriting videos. Like we were in Texas and I made handwriting videos for our dive down letters for like the letter P and Q in a river in the water. And next year I'll have my sensory bin bins with gravel and sand and water so that kids can watch my video from Texas with the sand and gravel that I took from that river into my bin and then we were with the Longhorn cows and I did my magic see letters with the Longhorn cows and I have some hide that I brought back so they can practice just to have like multi sensory learning. Nick Ledoux 3:03 Our job as teachers is to have them grow up to be successful human beings. And, you know, coming from a UDL perspective, like my goal I want them to be, you know, how did they become expert learners. And so early learning is setting them on that path to become expert let learners so that as they go through their educational career, they already have the the framework of what's it like to be successful, so that as they're going through school there, they just keep that ball rolling. They don't, they don't have to learn the skills later on because they're already working on them now. Kendra Jergovic 3:50 They are not using it yet to learn knowledge. So that's been a big shift where they're actually like taking notes as they're listening to your video. We practice whole group with other videos and taking notes. But then when they're one on one I can see with some kids, it's kind of a struggle to realize like, oh, the videos moving I need to be writing stuff down or I'm not going to know what to what to do when I get to my assessment. Oh, you gotta tell me more Kendra. Like, what does that even look like in first grade? Taking notes? Yeah, what is I can't wrap my head around it. It's a wide diverse scale, just like everything in first grade. Some kids are awesome. So on some of my videos, they'll have a sheet of paper that they go and get in. They're supposed to be doing like some of the phonemic skills that we're covering. They're supposed to be sliding their chips up with my video just like I would teach them in small groups, but they're actually just doing it through the video. And they're some kids are amazing at doing and others are really it's a very big struggle for them. They have to learn how to pause and And you know, start and stop the video so they can catch up if they fall behind, they have to have their materials. So what Nick mentioned earlier is like, we're really trying to lay the foundation in early learning for them to be ready in the upper grade levels for modern classrooms. Kendra Jergovic 5:20 I was sitting in a teaming one time, and I was watching one of my co teach my colleagues for trade teachers gets so excited about erasing stuff off of the to do list for our team. And I started thinking, I was like, Oh, I don't think kids would really like erasing their names off of my sleeves and moving themselves up to their next level. And having this way more concrete to where I have now like, each level of learning has a sleeve with the papers they need for that. And when they add a QR code for them to access the video, because the technology was not working for me to click on links, or organize it and Sisa, I have not found a great way to organize units in seesaw. So I just went with what I had. And we have plastic sleeves and first grade. And I have a virtual wall. And for the scale that we're working, like I started out with number writing. Because there's a big span of differences that kids can do with that, too. I have one kid that couldn't write to 10, and one that was well beyond 120, which was our standard. So I just broke our number writing up into levels, which my team was doing also. But instead of me delivering the instruction and saying the same thing over and over again, because you literally start from the top and work your way down every time for every letter in every way. I just made the videos for that. And they went and grabbed the papers, scanned the code, went back to their desk, worked on the video, then they got to erase their name and move it up a level. Kendra Jergovic 7:07 And then another area that I had a lot of fun with was using QR codes on my math game boxes. Because there's a lot of math games that I very much believe is very important for the kids to be playing. So when they would finish their math, they would get to move to math bins, which are games inside. But in previous years, I have had to spend a lot of time teaching those games. Instead of working with my kids on their skills, and I now sit at a small table with a small group and work in their math book and teach them amazing small group math lessons. While not one kid asked me how to play the game. And that that is magical. Honestly. Toni Rose Deanon 7:57 You were so excited about doing all the things you had all the plans to do other things. And then you realized as an educator as yourself, like, oh, wait a minute, this is a lot this is this is too much, actually. And it's a lot it is overwhelming, right? And I think sometimes that happens to or not even sometimes majority of the times it happens to a lot of educators just like oh, this is this cool new thing that I really want to implement. I'm going to do all of it all at once. And then get so disappointed or humbled with like the fact that like, Oh no, we actually have to like slow things down and kind of revert back to being like, okay, let's chunk this. Let's really like scaffold it down, even for us as educators so that we have a better understanding of how to navigate the new spaces and the new learning environments that we're creating. And so I really appreciate you sharing that. Nick Ledoux 8:48 Kendra and I are both part of this cohort of teachers that went through the modern classrooms mentorship program. So shout out to the top tier that the group that runs that for us. And we weren't we they had actually two meetings a month one was on a Monday night one was on a Wednesday night and I think Kendra and I were both going through each meeting just like there's no other primary teachers. There's no primary grade teachers. And so like we're collaborating at this time in this cohort with middle school teachers, high school teachers, which they don't have the same perspective or challenges. They have their own perspective and challenges for their classrooms. But it was just I wasn't I didn't fulfill like I had anybody really where I was at. And then Kendra decided to switch what days that she was gonna go to the meetings. And then we were like, oh, yeah, this is so awesome. And we were just sharing what we were doing. You know, Kendra has got some. I think her ideas are great, and I've stolen some of her ideas. And then I think I've I'm more of like oh, have you tried this tech tool out? Nick Ledoux 10:00 This tech tool Yeah, and kind of been the troubleshooter on that side of things so and then it might, at school, that I still think there's a lot of hesitancy to incorporate blending learning in, especially the younger grades. And that's, I think that the pandemic put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. And, you know, it's, I kind of am trying to show that, yes, these little kids can definitely do this. And so it's just now it's just building awareness. So that's kind of where my collaboration is coming from. Hoping to that I can share out this conversation we're having right now, because I want to recruit more people for next year's group that's coming through the same mentorship that I went to. Kendra Jergovic 10:55 It just keeps reminding me that everything is changing. And there are so many opportunities to learn. My husband built a house off of YouTube, like literally watched YouTube videos and built our house. So when I try and argue that I should be standing in front of a classroom, regurgitating information, there's like literally no way you can win that argument anymore. It is an every one learns at a different pace with different strategies. Kendra Jergovic 11:27 And being able to like just place kids on different learning paths that work for them. But having all of this set there, I'm just like, multiplying myself into 20 different people. But little by little. Nick Ledoux 11:43 We didn't really have a good organized way of students finding lessons, because I hadn't figured out how to use teams yet with this framework. And I just kept stumbling. And I was like, Okay, I went into the year thinking, I know how to do it in math, I'm going to do it in reading. And so I tried to do like reading comprehension. Well, that that's really a difficult concept for first graders, it was definitely not concrete. And so I stopped and was like, Okay, what do I want them to be able to do as a first grade teacher? Nick Ledoux 12:26 So that's like, I've been a huge success is just seeing the growth from all these students that are really motivated. Now, there's some students that are not as motivated. And, you know, that's, it's good, that gives me more time to work with them and small group, because it's like, okay, that student was able to pass the mastery check on first try, you're on your third try what's going on? Why are we not passing this? And it said, let's sit down and just read and practice? And are you actually sounding out these words, let me hear you sound them out. And then it's like, Oh, I really do have to put in the effort. They can't just like, because I can just said this before, they just want to be done. And so that's a growth mindset of like, Oh, I'm gonna do it right and not just be done. And so that that's that's been a hurdle is building that culture of like, we're not just doing this to mark a checkbox, we're doing this to actually grow. Kendra Jergovic 13:25 I really value and appreciate what teachers have done in the past and where we've come from. But I also understand that the future is changing. And our schools were really designed for industrial jobs, where humans really just did like you were just trying to follow the system. And I think that the more access to technology that we have, the more rural just changes, it becomes way more global, we have a lot more opportunities to diversify, you know, even jobs, like nobody stays in a career anymore for you know, 35 years, it seems like maybe teachers because we wouldn't have the best job in the whole world. But I think that it's just so diverse now that and dynamic and like the kids are watching, you know, stuff at home that you maybe don't love, but there are TVs at home and I remember my dad telling stories about when he was growing up and it was like no TV, and then he had a black and white TV and it was slow how everything was, you know, your eyes were watching fairly slow movements on that. And now we've just gotten to like, overload of movement. And so our brains are really used to working faster, and they're needing kind of more food to survive on which is knowledge. And so I want to be able to give the kids the as much as as possible and just standing in front of them. Teaching whole group is very hard to do that with Toni Rose Deanon 15:01 listeners remember, you can always email us at podcast at modern classroom set. org and you can find the show notes for this episode at podcast at modern classroom set org slash 187. We'll have this episode's transcript uploaded by Friday so be sure to check back to access those. Also we are asking your listeners to leave a review of this podcast has been helpful in supporting you to create a human centered learning environment through a blended self paced and mastery based model. It does help other folks find it. Thank you all for listening. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday. Thank you Nick. And thank you Kendra. Thank you. Thank you. Zach Diamond 15:38 Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode. And remember, you can learn more about our work at WWW dot modern classrooms.org. And you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at Learn dot modern classrooms.org. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at modern class prize. That's p r o j we are so appreciative of all you do for students in schools. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the modern classrooms project podcast.