The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Challenging Stagnation, Location, and Dilation: A Conversation on Education with Gary Miller
Ever feel like you're stuck in a cycle of stagnation when it comes to teaching? Join us as we share an insightful conversation with Gary Miller, an Associate Vice President of Content and Implementation, known for his garden-variety ideas and captivating storytelling. Gary blows our minds with his unique perspectives on problems in education today, including stagnation, location, and dilation. Buckle up as we discuss the stagnation in education, ponder upon the profound impact of a student's location on their academic journey, and delve into the deepening academic gaps.
We unpack Gary's thought-provoking theories, like how the repeated changes and initiatives in our educational system over the years haven't necessarily translated into improved student performance. Imagine that – decades worth of changes, yet progress remains a distant mirage! Gary also pulls back the curtain about how a student's zip code plays a monumental role in their educational trajectory. Wait, there's more! We explore the widening academic gaps post-pandemic and why we need to act pronto to address them. If you're eager to challenge the status quo and pioneer changes for a brighter educational future, this episode is your treasure trove. Listen in and get ready to be inspired!
Read Gary's Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/catalyst-for-classroom-engagement
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Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates presents the Extraordinary Educators podcast with host Danielle Sullivan and Sarah LaBeurus your tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. It's Danielle, welcome to the Extraordinary Educator podcast, and today we are joined by one of my colleagues, gary Miller, who's an Associate Vice President of Content Implementation and a really just brilliant storyteller, and he has a great way of just riding his lawn mower and coming up with the most interesting innovative ideas around education. So in today's podcast he's sharing some of the things that he's going to be out and about on the road, sharing with leaders, but just teachers thinking about different ways to think, about what's happening in the world of education and some action steps that you can take.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're curious if the three things that Gary is thinking about resonate with you, so be sure to share. Email us, follow us on social, please subscribe, and let us know your thoughts. So here's our conversation with Gary.
Speaker 2:Hey, gary, welcome to the podcast. We're so excited for you to be here.
Speaker 3:I am excited to be here. It's my first podcast ever in 33 years of education. I'm so excited.
Speaker 2:Well, we're so excited too. Yay, well, we know that you have so much expertise and experience in education, so what are you thinking about right now? It's front of mind for you.
Speaker 3:So, front of mind for me, I thank people on my team and people in my home. They all laugh at me because I love to ride my lawnmower. That's my thinking time and I've really been thinking, coming out of the post pandemic era, kind of what I see is some underlining areas we can address moving forward, and I've all put a TIO in on all of them. So one of them is, I think that we have a little bit of a stagnation problem and we can talk a little bit more about that. I just think that we've kind of kept on and kept on and kept on for a really long time and we just have some stagnant things going on in education.
Speaker 3:I think we have a location problem, meaning that a lot of times how our students are performing, unfortunately, is tied more to the zip code in which they live in rather than things that we are doing in the classroom. I'd love to talk about addressing that. And third, I think we have a dilation problem. You know, I often think of going to the you know your eye doctor and putting drops in your eyes so your irises get nice and big so they can see in there, and I think that we have a widening of academic gaps. We've always talked about academic gaps, but post pandemic, I think our underserved children are experiencing a dilation problem. We're going to have more gaps that we have to be able to address, and we need to address it very quickly.
Speaker 2:Yes to all the things. So let's dig into your first point. So tell us a little bit more about what you're thinking around stagnation and why you think that's a huge growing problem.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, nate, data has been around a long time and state accountability measures have been around for over 30 years. And if you do a little bit of historical study and just look at our highest academic achievers, you know students who might be considered in the 90th percentile. I have a special needs son who is consistently performing in third, fifth, 10th percentile in America. You have students who are considered level two, level three students, and so we have, unfortunately, these categories of children. But if you look at their test performances, their accountability performances for the last 30 years, what you would see is that if you only looked at your highest flying students, there's been very little dips, there's been very little elevation. It's remained pretty much a straight line of performance. And you do the same thing with students like my son, kai. Their test scores are pretty much remained very stagnant, and so have all the students in between.
Speaker 3:And what I find interesting about that is we've always been very reactive as a country. We've been very reactive as an education system, meaning we see things and we say, ok, let's change our academic standards, or we see something and we change our accountability measures, or we see something and we buy a new textbook, or we buy new programs or new resources and I just find it interesting that we've done all of those things repeatedly for 30 years and yet our growth is very stagnant. And I just think we have to think, maybe outside of the box a little, on how we can overcome some of those stagnant performances.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think the frustrating part about all of that is that there are places where kids are achieving more year after year, or students like Kai are doing better as they go along their academic journey, and, rather than continuing to reinvent the wheel, I think it's also worth exploring what's working and where it's working and how others can replicate that, which kind of brings us to our next or your next point, gary, about how zip code unfortunately does determine the trajectory of a student's, not just their academics but, I guess, their life right in our country, which is actually the reason why I originally went into teaching, because I wanted to work to change that and then, I guess, expand my impact over time. So I'm curious like do you find that that's still true and, if so, what can our listeners who are teachers do now to help kind of change the course?
Speaker 3:That's a great comment and question. I taught in Eastern North Carolina, east of I-95, where we always say that students have their own unique needs and what I find is that there are unique needs all over the country. What tends to happen with us as teachers is we teach for our 10, 20, 30 years in that same area and we just kind of get used to teaching the same way. We have the same expectations over and over and we never really have a vision of what our zip code looks like as far as performance and how we're doing compared to other zip codes that have very similar demographics of students. So there's a study out in Stanford University it's called the Ed Opportunity Group and they have a beautiful website at opportunityorg and it just allows you to go in and look at the zip codes of school systems and to see how zip codes and the things that fall within a zip code. So things that might fall within a zip code that I would call headwinds would be percentage of students who come from single-parent homes. Where students come from, if there's a high poverty rate, is there a high unemployment rate? Do they come from a home where parents maybe have bachelor's degrees or master's degrees, and whether or not they have these headwinds or if they have tailwinds instead, just how does that affect academic performance? And it's amazing that there is a strong correlation between headwinds, tailwinds and academic performance.
Speaker 3:And this website basically allows you to see where you are in perspective of the real difficult question we have to ask ourselves, which is are we outperforming the expectations of our zip code?
Speaker 3:And for some of us, it's just to understand what those expectations are like. Just click your zip code, see where you are, see what society tells us that we should be doing with our students. But let's use that as a motivation to say but that doesn't have to be the rule. Your zip code doesn't have to be the rule of how your students perform. We can outgrow and outdo and outperform certain areas in our academic careers that go beyond the demographics of who our students are, and sometimes for us as teachers, we just need to have a little bit more motivation of understanding that we're not in it alone and that there are other districts who are doing more with the same students that I have and reaching out to those school systems, researching those school systems. What are they doing? What type of programs are they putting in place so that once again, my zip code doesn't become my expectation of my children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love what you said about high expectations and knowledge is power and awareness is the first step. So I wanna move us to your third point about the gap. So, in your experience and your travels, your 30 plus years of experience in education and all the things that you've seen, what are some ways, in your opinion, that teachers can start to think about how they close the gaps, knowing that they're teaching in zip code? They are. We haven't, there's not been a lot of progress. So what are some, maybe three, best practices that teachers could start thinking about or do this year to help with that?
Speaker 3:I really think that if you look at where your students are, we gain so much insight to our children by just being with them and teaching them. But there are things that the naked eye cannot see, and I think data and data practices that has to become more part of what we do every day. So it's not just gaining data and gathering data just to have it about your students, but it's really how do you use it. And a couple of things that I would say is number one I would love to see our teachers teach more. As a coach Now, I had a background as a coach. I have a daughter who's a singer, and so I think of vocal coaching. And then I have another daughter who works all the time very much into fitness and she has a performance coach right. And when I think about those three types of coaches, I try to get teachers to understand. If you look at a, for instance, an athletic trainer who sees you working out in a gym and they see you using a piece of equipment and they see that you're using the piece of equipment wrong. They don't just keep watching you, they'll actually walk right over to the machine, they'll stop you and they will correct you in the moment. They will take the data of what they see right now, in the moment, and they will address what needs to happen. Now, if you think about an athletic coach so I was a basketball coach at one time and if we played a game and the other team was pressuring us the entire game full court press we were struggling to get the ball in, we were struggling to get the ball across half court then my next practice, I'm still gonna do the same things that I've always done we're gonna run a little bit, we're gonna practice free throws, we're gonna run certain drills, but I'm gonna find time to address something that I saw that we need to go back and revisit. And then, if you think of my daughter, who was an opera singer, often when she gets a very difficult piece to sing, they will actually go through it beforehand, almost like a pre-teaching, if you would think about it. And so those three things that I just went through, those three scenarios, are three different ways that we, as teachers, can look at data as a coaching opportunity how do we coach before we teach, right? How do we coach as we're teaching? And how do we coach after we teach? And so all three of those things. Those aren't brand new strategies.
Speaker 3:I think it's just sometimes difficult for us to realize that if we don't do those three coaching opportunities, what will happen? As our underserved children will continue to fall further behind, there will be a dilation problem, and it's just a matter of us having a line in the sand where we're saying we're gonna resolve to finally do this. And for me, I often tell people I think there's three things that bring about change and unfortunately, those three things can be very, very difficult. So to me, when I think about change and change is never easy, but if we're gonna be true agents of change, there's three things that normally allow for that to happen.
Speaker 3:One is discomfort. So there's gonna be times when we teach, there's gonna be data that we see, there's gonna be things that I even mentioned today that might make us a little uncomfortable, and I think often discomfort will compel us to change. I think knowledge energizes us to change. So just gaining more insight into best practices, things that we know have produced wonderful fruit in the lives of students, I think that knowledge is a great way to energize us to change, and I think insight also inspires us to change. So going to the Ed Opportunity website, or just looking at your stagnation story. And where have you seen the peaks and the valleys? Just having that level of insight often will inspire us to do the things that we need to do to meet our children where they are.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing that and all of your insights and expertise, gary. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today, but really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 3:It is a pleasure. It is a pleasure, please. Let me come back in again. I have so many things that love to talk about.
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Speaker 4:The Extraordinary Educator podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by Atzity Hannan, guest booking by Ceri LaBearis, production by Hailey Browning. The podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.