Zach Diamond  0:03  
Welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast with Kareem Farah, Toni Rose Deanon, Kate Gaskill and me Zach Diamond. 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  0:33  
Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode 53 How exciting. My name is Toni Rose Deanon. And I am a program manager for modern classroom, a former middle school English teacher. So I was I implemented the model and an instructional coach. So I am joined today by Emily Dia so funnily enough, Emily was one of my mentees, and I just absolutely loved working with her. And so it was such a nice surprise to be able to work with her full time with modern classroom. So, Hi, Emily, how are you?

Emily Dia  1:03  
Hi, Toni Rose, I'm good. Thanks for having me on.

Toni Rose Deanon  1:10  
And so our unit zero actually lasted four weeks. Wow, that's amazing, yeah. And so a lot of people are like, Oh my gosh, it's so long. What did you do for four weeks? Right? So, like, the first week was literally just like getting to know you, and we did all of that using the model, and so getting to know you activities. And then the second week, we talked about the four Box Notes that we were going to be using throughout the school year. We read a non fiction text, we read a a fictional text. And so it's just kind of a way for students to just start seeing how English was going to work out, and it, you know, worked out really well with all of the interruptions that we had. And so by the time the four weeks was done, students were ready with the model. They kind of understand how it was going to go. They knew the pacing tracker. It was great for their families to see what they were doing. All the questions were unanswered. And then for unit one to get started, they were ready, you know, they're like, Oh, I know that if I didn't get if I didn't master the first time, that's okay, like, I can have the time to redo it again. So just shifting that mindset and also telling my students, you know, like, as far as grades are concerned, like, I really want you to focus on growth. I want you to focus on revising, and I want you to focus on how you've grown as a learner, as opposed to asking you, Misty, what's my grade for this one? And so that was a hard shift for students in the beginning of the school year. It was a hard shift for me as well. But I really, really, really wanted us to practice, practice, practice, before we jumped into unit one. When teachers are you know, thinking about this, your unit one could literally just be one to two lessons. I've talked to some teachers who only did one to two lessons, and that's okay, and that's just a way for them to introduce the model, and then they just like, jump right into it. Our students are so adaptable, right? Like, they're able to just like, adapt to whatever change we throw at them. And so you could literally have just two lessons, introducing the model and introducing your class, and then go on to your content, which is fine, or you could do four weeks like we did, yeah, draw it out, right? But also making sure that our tasks were meaningful. And it's not just like busy work, because it was the beginning of the school year, right? 

Emily Dia  3:18  
That makes much sense. What I love about that is it takes off like most kids, and I did as a student, dreaded the first weeks of school because it was just a lot of teachers talking at me, and I didn't hardly ever remember what they were telling me, like all those routines and procedures and expectations. And this way, it was a way that y'all framed it so that they were really engaging in that content and cocreating it. It sounds like in some ways, so it's really beautiful. I love that idea. It sounds like Toni Rose. Both you and Marissa are thinking about like the content of unit zero, as introducing not only the routines and the elements of the model, but also sort of the idea that doing a blended learning unit is going to give you a lot of feedback around your learning. So it's almost like an opportunity for students to unlearn that idea of grades as arbitrary and to relearn the idea of grades as communication, or feedback as communication. So since we are designing units that are mastery based or standards based, whatever you'd like to call it. This is a good way for them to get used to that shift before they get into content in the course,

Toni Rose Deanon  4:28  
most definitely, and I think it's just, you know, teachers are getting really creative with their unit zeros as well. It doesn't just be like a certain way. And so, you know, something to that I think you and I think you and I have been talking about, too, is like unit zero is a great way to start communicating with families, right? Being able to just kind of share this model, because, again, this model is so new that it's kind of scary for a lot of people, right? There's going to be a lot of questions as to how it's supposed to look like, or how it's supposed to sound like.

Emily Dia  5:00  
Um, when I implemented the model, I actually just did one lesson as my unit zero. I didn't even think of it as unit zero, but it was an overview video, sort of of a walk through of our Google Classroom and notes about our classroom space. And I uploaded that to EdPuzzle, and the students did that as sort of their introduction to this new way of learning. And I also emphasized in that video that that this switch to blended learning was primarily meant to free me up to be a better teacher for them, so that, you know, I'm not replacing myself with the computer. I'm actually like enhancing myself because of the computer and the lessons that they would be experiencing online, which would just create more space for us to be together, learning together throughout the year, and being able to get them what they needed. We also talked about that feeling that we've all had, and a lot of us have talked about this, like when you're in a class and it's going too slow, or you're in a class and it's going way too fast, and you just sort of stop because it's too much and you can't keep up. Just about like this choice, this is a choice we're making of how we're going to learn together, so that we can honor the unique pace that we all learn at and all find success in that in that way. I mean, I really just tried to anchor the units and the decision in skills. So I helped them to think about, or hopefully to understand this idea that our blended learning units are really an opportunity for us to get really good information about our skills and language arts, reading or writing, whatever the unit was about, and that our goal was to just make progress on our efficiency or proficiency or mastery of those skills over time. So it wasn't like they were going for a grade in each of those skills. Our units were really about learning individual skills that would lead up to a summative experience. So in my classroom, our mastery checks at the end of each lesson were like formative assessments that were teaching them the skills that they would need to apply and synthesize for the summative assessment. So an example would be they had a unit on literary essay, and so every lesson was a tiny, little, tiny, tiny skill that would allow them to write an effective literary essay in the very end. So one, you know, they would submit a lead, and they would have to, they would study what the effective qualities of a lead are, and then they would do some practice around that. And then they would submit a draft of a lead that they would get feedback on from me. And then they would know, okay, I got to revise this lead that I just got feedback on for my final essay, or this is good to go, and I can just tuck that away until I'm ready to do my final piece. So that was, like, one way that we thought about the purpose of the unit and how the lessons were like leading into this final summative experience.

Toni Rose Deanon  7:56  
Yeah, it's a good way to just, like, chunk a much bigger assignment, right? It's easier for us as teachers to provide feedback when assignments are chunked that way.

Emily Dia  8:05  
Oh my gosh, totally.

Toni Rose Deanon  8:09  
Just to kind of wrap up right with unit zero, you can include basically an introduction to the model. You can include some skills that you're going to be covering in class, the anchor skills for that year. And then even just reviewing skills that they learned previous year would be a good one. You could include, like tech skills so navigating your LM s, you know, teach students how to navigate throughout the LMS and to be able to access and the different steps to how to access the lessons. And then, of course, you can have your video of creating your video of your classroom, and just like, you know, getting the students to be ready and prepared for your class using the model, yeah, 

Emily Dia  8:55  
one thing I would add to that just hit my brain is like some fun community building, like play some games, you know, play games that aren't related to your content area. Just play some games together, yeah, just, you know, just some community building, like silly fun things to get that vibe the way you would hope it to be in your classroom community, they would come in get right to reading. And not everybody was, like, super jazzed about reading, but they could read anything they wanted. They could bring in a newspaper, a magazine or a comic book or a novel, whatever. And of course, I would have text and other materials in the classroom they could pick from so everybody would get to reading, and while they were reading, I would pop around my clipboard and I would just get the page number that they were on about five years ago. I just decided I'm not going to do reading logs anymore. It feels very inauthentic to me, and it also felt like extra work for students that wasn't really helping them grow. I wasn't able to figure out a routine that was like making time for them to study that data, but like, made it worth their while to keep the data. So I just kept the data, and that became like a power standard in my on my report card, which was maintains an independent reading life. So I just kept. Track of that, and I would come around, get their page number, watch where they were, and sort of track that over time on my own. But also let me have a few minutes to check in with a few kids, like, just personally, like, Hey, how's it going? How are you doing today? Before the vibe of the class, like, got really going in terms of work time. And then also it would give me time to prep a kid, like, if I needed a kid to do something specific during unit work time that they were not expecting, I could use that 10 minutes to just give them a heads up before we started that. So that was my warm up. It's 10 minutes every day, such a such a good routine for us. So we had every day we had two shared experiences. Like every day we all read together, and every day we did something with writing together. So that took about 15 minutes, and then the rest of the class after warm ups, and that shared experience of writing was what we called unit work time. Is what I called it, and it was usually like 30 minutes. I taught eighth grade, and so, so most of them at the beginning of the year, I would say my goal was 20 minutes of like, really focused work time. By the end, they could do 45 like, they were just crushing, yeah, they were crushing it. I had there is amazing. But anyway, we would have unit work time. I think that one of the most sad things about being a teacher is that somehow along the way, we think and learn that you can't grade student work or respond to student work or give feedback to students during class, like somewhere in our brain, right? We learned like, Oh, you gotta do that at night, or you gotta do it over the weekend. And that's what for me, was like. So transformational about this model was that I had nights and weekends again, like I could look at their work in class. And we know that the research says the faster I can give them feedback on their work, the more likely they are going to revise and relearn and actually remember that. You know, they're going to use that feedback to change their brain. And so anyway, I was a win, win. So I would a lot. I would spend probably about half of the unit work time looking at student work.

Toni Rose Deanon  12:06  
And that was my thing when I first started implementing the model, was that I still wanted to talk, because it's what you know, it's what we're programmed to do. And then especially English teachers. I like, I have so many stories that I want to share with my students, and it's really interesting too, that you said that we were just programmed to give feedback and to grade things outside of the classroom, and I know that when I implemented this model, that was like my favorite piece, was that I was actually able to read what my students are writing and have those conversations to kind of gage their understanding. And I don't have to wait until the next day or the next week to like, have that conversation right their misconceptions and the challenges and it just the model itself, just like liberated me from being in front of the classroom the entire time and being like, this gatekeeper of knowledge, which I not should not have been. I mean, I really like what you said, right? If you you know, you're like, Okay, do a time limit. Even like, do it for a week. See what works, because you'll be able to tweak it every single day. I mean, that's definitely what I did with my practice with them, with implementing modern classroom, is like, Oh, this worked out really well. This didn't work out. And I know, when I first started out with the model, there was a lot of bottle necking, right? Like, of students just, like, raising hands and like, Oh, I'm done with the mastery check. And, like, it was a lot of interruptions, and I felt like I was running around, right? And I'm just like, what is happening? This is too much. But then the more that we did it, you know, the more changes you'll be able to implement. Then, of course, having that conversation with students too, because this is a because this is their learning environment, right? Like, I'm also learning from them, and I don't want to take that away. So they're part of that process of making the decisions of, like, oh, this didn't work out. And I think, like, you also talked about the strategy of the whiteboard, and sometimes we forget, right? We forget about that whiteboard. You could just have students check off where they are, or just, like, say, like, hey, I need a conference whenever you get a chance. And so they're not approaching you, they're not raising their hand, but you already have a list, and you see that list, and you can just go down that list. And so that was, I mean, I do want to say, and I always tell my mentees, this is that, like, when you first start out with a model, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work because you do really need to backwards plan, and you need to be able to have some lessons already prepared so that students continue to move forward. But again, we appreciate everything that you do. Thank you so much for being part of our family.

Emily Dia  14:42  
Thank you so much, and I am grateful for you 

Toni Rose Deanon  14:46  
All right. Thank you. 

Emily Dia  14:47  
Thanks for listening, everybody.

Zach Diamond  14:53  
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.modernclassrooms.org and you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at learn.modernclassrooms.org you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at modernclassproj, that's PROJ 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. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai