Ep. 89 - Looking into the Teacher's Mirror with Dr. Ross Laird

What if teaching was less about tradition and more about breaking the rules? What if teaching put less emphasis on predetermined learning outcomes and standardized tests and more emphasis on discovery and inquiry?

What you would have would be an educational system that inspires, that evokes meaning and puts the learner first, even over the dusty lesson plans that would have fit right in if they were delivered 20 years ago.

This is the mind of Dr. Ross Laird, a post-secondary educator, an educational consultant and a progressive thinker who forges ahead with the right kind of change, even in the face of resistance from the mainstream institution of school. A man after my own heart.

Ross was preaching to the choir in this conversation. And I hope you'll join us for the next chorus, because as I like to say, teaching really can be this way.

But let's let Ross explain. He speaks so well and his evidence-based points are so well made.

Please find more of his work at https://www.rosslaird.com where you will find his blogs, articles and his Tedx talk.

I'm also going to link to my book "Beyond the Classroom". We talk about the section of the book where I wrote about Ross after his visit to my school over 15 years ago.

You can get in touch with Ross and have him come to your school for a brilliant pro-d if you email him at [e-mail]

Be sure to check out more episodes of Science 360 such as my discussion with Dr. Marika Cullis-Suzuki where we discuss the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and how important it is to inspire our students with the wonder of nature. Or how about a discussion about AI with Dr. Tim Dasey. There are lots of conversations that will amplify what you do at school and in your science classroom.

Please rate and review and subscribe on your favourite podcasting platform.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
And so their responses are not arenot coming from a place of let's say,
evidence based practice. They're coming froma place of personal adaptation to the
system, and they've learned to navigatethe system in a way that allows them
to feel comfortable and confident in whatthey're doing. And what they're doing is

(00:22):
a very mainstream, traditional approach withwhich focuses on things like predetermined learning outcomes,
predetermined assignments, midterms, exams,grades, that kind of stuff.
It's what they know. They're comfortablewith it because there's no emphasis on self
awareness the personal development aspects that we'rediscussing here. It's possible to navigate that

(00:43):
system and never have anybody say toyou, have you thought about what you're
doing? Welcome back to another episodeof Science three sixty. This is Tim
Stevenson, your host, and onthis episode I have doctor Ross Laird,

(01:04):
and I hope you got your mirrorpolished, because if you're anything like me,
if you're going to be looking atit quite a bit. However,
I think if you take Ross's beautyadvice, your teaching process is going to
look awfully good and it won't bejust your shirts either. This podcast is

(01:26):
a proud member of the Teach Betterpodcast Network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow,
and the podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at www dot
Teach Better Podcastnetwork dot com. Nowlet's get onto the episode. In today's

(01:47):
episode, I sit down with doctorRoss Laird, a visionary educational consultant.
I was first exposed to Ross's educationalphilosophy when he presented at my school on
a pro D day about fifteen yearsago. That event had a lasting effect
on me. I've been meaning tocontact Ross for quite a while now because
I knew that what he had tosay about teaching and learning needed to be

(02:09):
shared here. I think Ross andI were cut from the same cloth.
I'm not going to say that ourapproach is to unteach, but in a
sense of the term, we bothapproach our classes with a heavy slant towards
student led discovery, student creativity andteacher creativity, with little to no sense

(02:31):
of obligation to run our classes theway institutional norms would expect. And as
Ross states in that opening clip,this conversation is going to challenge you,
the teacher to ask yourself what amI doing, why am I doing it?
And does it truly add value oris it just the comfortable approach that

(02:53):
makes me feel good in the classroomprocess. This is undoubtedly one of those
looking into the mirror moments, butall to make the learning matter, to
make the learning last, and tomake the learning worth remembering. So we're
going to try to unravel the threadsof his approach where he incorporates nature walks,

(03:13):
utilizes a holistic learning philosophy and creativelesson planning, where he looks at
his classes not as a class ofthirty, rather, as he states,
at each student as a class endof one. Take note throughout this discussion
that doctor Laird is inviting us intoa realm where education transcends traditional boundaries,

(03:35):
emphasizing internal motivation and cultivating a lovefor learning based not on predetermined outcomes,
but on the freedom to express knowledgein a personal way, which might mean
letting go of longstanding and conventional aspectsof curriculum. So join us now for
an inspiring exploration of a transformative journeyin teaching and learning with doctor Ross Laird.

(04:05):
So like for this for this podcast. What I do with Science three
sixty is it's generally aimed at scienceteachers, trying to offer them content.
It's an up to date, relevant, meaningful content that relates to the curriculum.
But his current curriculum is something that'sgoing to get students excited to be

(04:28):
there and to learn. Your themea little bit less of the science curriculum,
but so important from just the teacherpoint of view. I've been thinking
to myself for a long time,I want to have Ross Laird come on,
because I still remember your your presentationthat all this all these years ago.
Do you still present in high schools? No, not so much anymore.

(04:49):
I mean here and there. I'vedone some presentations around addictions and parenting
and mental health, mental health challengesbecause that's becomes such a huge thing,
especially since the pandemic, but lessso than before. Yeah. Mostly now,
A lot of my presentations are toeducational institutions, museums, cultural groups,

(05:14):
communities, that kind of thing.A lot of communities are thinking about
trauma inform practices, ways to addressmental health challenges for their communities, dealing
with the reality that people are notcounselors. Like most professionals are not counselors,
educators are not counselors. They're notgoing to be counselors. And yet
so much of what they're being askedto do, and so much of what

(05:36):
they're dealing with now falls into thatsphere of mental health and wellness, and
so it becomes part of the toolkitof educators and community developers now to think
about this kind of stuff. Yeah, which is exactly why I wanted to
have you come on, because thisis the we need to equip teachers with
strategies and how to cope with today'ssort of overtired, overstressed and just sometimes

(06:01):
nonverbal students. It's really quite astriking what's going on in the schools these
days. I remember when you're atour school, the theme around the online
presence thing. I remember one thingyou said was you can always tell a
gamer because gamers have a shortened hipflexer and they all walk and sing.

(06:25):
Well. I think you know nowthat gaming has become and just internet use
in general has become so pervasive andubiquitous for young people, it has changed
the physical development of young people forsure. I took a group of young
people indoor climbing a few weeks agointo a rock climbing and you know,

(06:51):
doing this, I've been doing thisfor quite a while, and you know,
ten years ago doing this kind ofthing, you'd have a number of
learners struggle, and a number oflearnings be very athletic and just kind of
take right to it, and awhole range in between. It was really
evident to me that the continuum hasshifted to the left a little bit toward

(07:14):
more and more learners struggling with thingsthat involve the whole body and whole body
movement. That's interesting. I don'tknow if it was just this cohort,
and I don't think you could kindof extrapolate to the society at large,
but for sure it's a factor thatyou know, the amount of the amount
of virtual time is an accumulation thattakes away from physical, real world exploration,

(07:36):
which is what we've evolved for.So we're doing something interesting. And
this is the first generation for whichthis has happened. So it'll be interesting
to see how all this plays out, you know, when they become parentsing,
you know, is this gonna bea genetic trade? You know?
Yeah, So before we get toomuch into some of these questions, I've

(07:58):
got lined up for you. Whoare these students? Where are you working
at? You taking students places thatkind of thing, what's your role.
So I as usual as my wholecareer. Really, I've typically done several
things at once, so I'm stilldoing that. I do quite a bit

(08:18):
of consulting for addiction's treatment centers.These are people who are dealing with residential
but also non residential settings where deeplyvulnerable and traumatized people are going for help.
And you know, one of thethings we know about addiction is that
it's not really about using. Imean, alcoholism is not really about drinking,
right, It's about what's underneath it, what's behind it. And typically

(08:41):
that's a mental health issue. Oftenit's a mental health issue plus trauma.
So it's complicated. And so Ido a lot of consulting for those kinds
of organizations. More and more,with the opioid overdose crisis that we're experiencing,
and with increasing stress and tention formany people, economic stuff of climate
change, all kinds of things,there are a lot of vulnerable people,

(09:03):
so that area of work has becomelarger and more complex. And in the
old days, people in addictions recoverywere mostly alcoholics, and they would go
to meetings, they would go tocross step meetings, and they were self
managing to some extent, and nowit's just not the case at all.

(09:24):
So people people have complex, multiplemultiply diagnosed situations going on, and so
a support staff person working in anenvironment like that really does need to have
some clinical skill. So that's kindof what I do. I provide clinical
consultation for staff who are not counselorsand therapists. Some of them are,
but most of them are not,and they're just trying to figure out,

(09:46):
like what do I do, howdo I deal with this person, how
do I how do I come upwith programming, and how do I support
people? So I do quite abit of that, and then I do
consulting for educational institutions that are explicitlyfocused on programs involving trauma. So these

(10:07):
days a lot of that work involvesmuseums. So in the museum world,
increasingly there is a great deal ofinterest in tackling themes like systemic racism,
colonialism, climate change, and museumshave objects in them that are often the
result of colonialism, for example,and so they see many museums see that

(10:31):
they have an important role to playin how we think about history and the
past and also its impact on thepresent, So many museums are starting to
put on exhibitions that involve trauma inone way or another. And they're not
explicitly trying to traumatize people, butthey're trying to, you know, be
part of the kind of conversation thatwe're having in our society about these complex

(10:52):
themes. So again, people whowork in museums are not therapists, and
they're inviting people into a space wherethey might be posed to material that visitors
might find to be traumatic. Theymight they might get deeply activated emotionally around
exposure to objects, objects of colonialism, or objects involving racism, or many

(11:13):
things can happen here. And soas the museums invite people to participate in
these kinds of exhibitions, they doincurr an ethical obligation to do something to
take care of people. And sincethey're not therapists and counselors and they haven't
really you know, they don't reallyhave the the ways to navigate this easily.
So that's what I do. Iwork with those kinds of organizations to

(11:39):
make that work. Currently, I'mdoing projects with the Canadian Museum of History
and the Canadian Museum of human rightslast year. The year before, I
did some stuff with the Canadian WarMuseum. A few years ago, some
colleagues and I wrote a book aboutthis. We did work with the Nine
to Eleven Museum in New York,the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, and

(12:00):
other places around the world where traumawas an explicit focus of museum exhibitions,
and we talked to visitors and cameup with some ideas about how you can
take care of people while encouraging themto be exposed to traumatic material. So
a lot of the consulting work isthat. And then I'm still teaching.
Oh yeah, and I'm teaching.Yeah, I'm I'm teaching. You know,

(12:26):
I stopped teaching counseling a few yearsago, and most of my work
since my area of counseling is creativity, great creative practice. For the last
few years, I've been teaching creativity, so that that includes creative writing,
expressive arts, those kinds of things. And and you know, I've been
doing that in an academic setting.And and it's weird because in an academic

(12:48):
setting, when you're teaching something likecreative writing, people automatically think of nuts
and bolts and grammar and usage andstructure and storytelling and and and all of
my courses are basically focused on selfawareness and creative expression and the deep disconnect
between how people are taught these skills, or how they're supposed to be taught
these skills in academia, and whatthe research shows about how people learn these

(13:11):
kinds of skills, which is kindof the opposite of what happens in academic
the opposite of nuts and bolts,much more kind of hellistic, ecological,
kind of dynamic approach. The coachmight be a little bit better than the
nuts and bolts. Well, youknow, it's interesting because there's there's so
much research about education and and alot of that research is done by educators

(13:35):
who have particular ideas about what theydo and and so yeah, it's it's
it's easy to find research that supportsthe idea of scaffolding and particularly the idea
of learning outcomes. But there's awhole other universe of research that deliberately contradicts
that stuff and shows particularly that youknow, we don't learn by nuts and

(14:01):
bolts, We don't learn by aB C D in a linear way.
Learning is nonlinear it's very dynamic,and it's large, large to ecological,
like our environment influences us so muchin terms of what we learn, and
so I use a lot of theecological approach or the constraints led approach in
my teaching. And am I consultingtoo, just encouraging people to, you

(14:24):
know, focus on internal motivation ratherthan external motivation, encouraging unique solutions rather
than templates or shared understandings. SoI'm really big unique solution, meaning like
a student would be allowed to expresstheir understanding the way they interpret it,
not based on the questions that you'veasked the whole class. Yeah, yeah,

(14:48):
the you know, it's natural foreducators to think about what is it
that I want students to learn inmy class? What at the end of
the class, what do I Iwant them to know? So I have
a learning outcome list for that andwe should all be on the same page
about the things we've learned. Andthat turns out not to be very consistent

(15:11):
with what educational research shows, whichis that you don't know what someone's going
to learn in a given learning environment. You can't predict it in advance.
Everybody will learn something a little bitdifferent, So there will be no shared
understanding at the end of this process, and the extent to which you encourage
exploration and discovery versus predetermined outcomes willlargely determine how much people learn. So

(15:39):
I've been a big fan of theecological approach for a while. There's a
tremendous amount of interest in this innon academic fields. It feels like coaching,
for example, sports coaching in particular. There's a lot of interest and
uptake in this. It's been veryslow to make its way into academy because
the culture is based on these kindof unspoken assumptions that we all share about

(16:03):
things like learning outcomes, and we'llall get to the same place at the
end and all will be reproducible andits standard and we can you know,
yeah, you know. It movesaway from the idea that you could you
can treat a class as a class, and moves toward an idea that you
have to treat each individual learner asas a unique experiment with n of one,

(16:27):
and also the idea that you know, I did a thing with my
my creativity students. A while ago. We had this class where I was
focusing explicitly on cultivating a deepening ofcreativity, because all of the evidence shows

(16:48):
that education tends to reduce our creativity. You know, the learners who have
the highest degrees of creativity tend tostruggle the most in school, and the
learners who have the high grades inschool often demonstrate lower levels of creativity.
So so there's there's a there's issuesthere around how how school tends to kind

(17:08):
of constrain people in a certain way. And some people are okay with that,
right, Most people just kind ofgo through and they do their thing.
But it can be a real issuefor deeply creative being put into the
boxes of academia. And it canbe a problem for highly intelligent learners who
just learn to gain the system ratherthan exploring and deepening their own creative practice.

(17:30):
So I was working with my learnersand in this class trying to talk
about these issues, and and Ispent about eight weeks of the semester talking
to them about how feedback from expertshas limited utility in skill development. Uh,
we have the idea that more feedbackwe give to learners, the better
they will do, but that doesn'tappear to be the case. The you

(17:52):
know, the more feedback we giveto learners without it being contextualized within the
process of comfort, station and discovery. The more they come to depend on
the instructor for getting feedback, andthe more they pay, the less attention
they pay to their own process andto their own pathways. And so I

(18:15):
was trying to convince the learners inthis class feedback for me about how to
improve your writing does not help youvery much, doesn't help you at all,
and it can in fact damage yourskill development as a writer. If
I just tell you how to writebetter. What you need to do instead
is you need to practice writing yourown writing to the point where you notice
the reliable places where you get stuck, the places where every time you write

(18:38):
something, this is the part whereyou're not good at. You need to
be able to notice that part first. Then you can go to the instructor
and you can say, this isthe part that I get stuck. Can
you help me get unstuck from thispart here? That's the point where my
feedback can be helpful. Before that, my feedback is not helpful. Before
that, it just encourages you tobe a passive student rather than an active

(19:00):
learner. So I was trying toconvince them of this, and I got
so much pushback from my students becausethey're used to the mainstream system where the
instructor just tells you what to doand gives you a reliable feedback of one
paragraph on every insignment that you doand that's the end of it. And
so we were at the climbing GMand I went around to the learners and
I said to them, Okay,here's how you climb. This is what

(19:23):
you do. Here are the fourthings you do. Keep your arms straight,
turn your body to the side,you look at your feet. You
climb from the ground up rather thanpulling from the top down or the top
up. And I gave them thefour basic rock climbing tips. And it
did not help at all in termsof their ability to climb that day,

(19:48):
their first day. It didn't helpone bit. They had to try it
on their own. Yeah, youhave to figure it out. You have
to figure out how your body worksand what you can do, how you
are or how to manage your anxiety, how to manage your the three dimensionality
of that movement, how to unlockthe puzzle of how can I get to
the next hold in the most efficientand productive and fun way. For my

(20:11):
body, and all of that hasto happen first quite a bit before the
question of here's how you do itcomes into play. And so I've been
a big fan of these kinds ofideas and I use them in my teaching
and consulting quite a bit. Itdoes run right up against the wall of
mainstream academic practice, though, whichis kind of the opposite of all this.

(20:34):
Yeah, because the teachers are goingto feel uncomfortable because they want to
get in there and teach, andthe students are like, well, aren't
you going to tell us what todo? Yeah? And if it's like
here's the topic, all right,you guys go for an hour. I'll
just wait over here and see howsee what you come up with, everyone's
going to feel uncomfortable on that atfirst. Yeah. And also it's it's

(20:56):
kind of a it's an unreasonable askfor mainstream educators because the students have had
years, maybe decades of in trainment, in culturation of the mainstream method.
This is what they know, thatthey expect certain things. They expect the
expert to know what they're supposed toknow and to sort of download it into

(21:18):
their brain and then that will thatwill be what constitutes learning is the accumulation
of some information. It's very it'svery practical in a way, but it's
not very process oriented. And andto shift it to shift just to get
what I find in my teaching isthat it takes learners, I don't know,
at least at least a couple ofclasses, full courses to even start

(21:42):
to get Oh yeah, I getit, now, I get it.
Why we're doing this At first,it's just a grind. It's just first,
it's just a lot of emails saying, professor, can you please just
tell me what to do? Thisis unfair. You know, your assignments
are vague, you know, likelike why are you doing it this way?
Right? So, so if thiswere to become a more broadly applied

(22:07):
approach in education in Canada, itwould require a very large cultural shift of
the whole enterprise. And and thatthat's a that's a big ask. So
what I find, you know,many of my colleagues who do this kind
of workout in the world, it'sit's unfortunate because there's just a lot of
burnout and exhaustion because they're they're they'rethey continue to push and push and push,

(22:29):
and often they don't get a lotof support from colleagues because because people
don't, you know, this isnot a thing that that everybody wants or
gets or wants to get, andso it becomes quite challenging. And so
educators who want to take on thiskind of thing they also encur an extra
burden, which is they're not onlythey're not only pushing back against the norms

(22:49):
of the culture which they're in,they're pushing back against their colleagues. So
I'll describe to you what I doin my astronomy class, because I think
it's along this line. At thebeginning of the course, I asked the
students to get one of those coilringed notebooks. I don't want any three
ring binders, and I'll tell themevery class that I teach you something about

(23:15):
space, I want you, atthe end of the class to record what
you learned. I want you toput one thing that you learned and describe
it with through picture, through words, through you can write a poem,
whatever you want to do, butone thing per page per class, and
at the end of the class you'llhave a sixty or seventy page book on
things you've learned about space. AndI go one step further, and I'd

(23:37):
like you to comment on it is. I'll say to them, I'm then
not going to mark you on whatI tell you that I want you to
learn. I'm going to mark youon what you tell me that you learned.
Yeah. Yeah, and that's whatI do. I do exactly the
same thing, beautiful, Yeah,Like, let's do it. Let's do
let's do something where we do aprocess where we talk about a subject,

(23:59):
where we enact or practice a subject, and then let's have a little time
for reflection and expression where you writedown or you paint or your drawer,
you write a poem, or youmix some music, or you do whatever
that reflects your experience of that,and then you gather those together and that
becomes your project. And I usuallyadd in something too about sort of self

(24:22):
reflection in terms of self awareness.What do you think, what do you
think you know at this point,What is the meaning of this process been
for you? Where do you thinkyou might take it next? Or I
have some sort of guiding questions forthose kinds of things. Yeah, I
do exactly the same thing, andI think it. You know, it's
a really simple shift. It's quitedoable within the mainstream system, but it

(24:48):
frees up the learners from this kindof structured sense of just getting the grade
and you know, doing the examor whatever it is, right because the
conversation the thing. The conversations stillcome up where a student will be getting
ninety five percent on a report cardin grade twelve AP chemistry, and they'll

(25:08):
say, what can I do toget a hundred? And you just want
to say that, why do youneed to be perfect? At what point
did anybody say to you that tobe successful you got to be perfect?
Yeah? And yet that's the theI just need to check off a few
more things then they'll be perfect.Yeah. And and that's another that's another
thing that I I don't want tosay I struggle with because I accept the

(25:33):
way things are. But the evidenceseems pretty clear to me that one of
the and maybe the largest hurdle interms of mainstream education is the entire grading
system. There there's no there's norationale for it in terms of educational practice,
in terms of like how what weknow about how people learn right,

(25:56):
we know that there's even a there'seven a name for this. It's something
law as soon as uh as soonas something when you want to measure something,
as soon as you establish a measure, it ceases to become a useful
measure, right, So grades arenot a useful measure of thing. Yeah,
it's like there's a there's a namefor it. But but it's it's

(26:19):
so clear. And I think mostpeople, most educators thesis kind of agree
that we've kind of worked ourselves intoa box here where where we have this
thing that is that is just completelyfoundational to every level of education, and
we can't get rid of it,even though we know that it's not very
helpful. In fact, it's harmfulfor so many people. Well, I

(26:41):
say, to get the same thingfrom my students, where they'll say,
I don't know what I have towhat am I supposed to write today?
I go, well, that's myMy point is, I don't want to
tell you what to write. Iwant you to tell me what to write.
Yeah, I have a whole Ihave a whole module on what should
I write about, a whole videoand a little description about what should I

(27:03):
I don't know. Yeah, Andthen they'll send to the email saying your
lessons are too vague, your yourassignments are too vigue. What do you
need me to do in order toget a mark from you? No,
that's not the point. But itisn't uncomfortable. You can see how hard
it is to push push back againstwhat students are used to. It's not
their fault. I mean, they'vebeen they've grown up since they were little

(27:23):
kids in this system, and theyget constant reinforcement of this system. And
if they want to go to universityor grad school or whatever, they got
to learn to gain this system.But you know, and and I don't
know, I've seen the research thatsuggests that, you know, like after

(27:44):
completing a degree, an undergraduate degree, students have not actually learned very much.
That's kind of discouraging. You'd thinkthat it would be a process.
We hope that it would be aprocess of deeply meaningful engagement with the subject
of passion for the person. Turnsout that that's less and less the case.

(28:06):
It's become more instrumental and more pragmatic. And I get that in terms
of people want to live in Vancouverand the Vancouver area and want to be
able to support their families here andlive comfortably here. Then you know,
you got to learn how to workthat system, and that's really unfortunate.
So all of this stuff about educationis wrapped up with the nature of the
world we live in and the competitiveaspects of how we get ahead. There's

(28:29):
a bit of an altruistic theme here, where we'd like to see the system
be a certain way. We knowit's better if it were this way.
Yet to get to that way,there's so many layers to this onion that
you'd have to peel back that dowe really want to peel it back.
But there's got to be along theway experiences that these students will get where
once in a while they're allowed tojust sort of freewheel and express themselves and

(28:53):
tell me what you've learned sort ofthing. It's got to be part of
the package somewhere. It should bepart of the package. And that's the
part of the package that I tryto provide. The teaching that I do.
All of the all of the otherclasses that students are taking are mainstream,
normal classes, right, and thenthey go rock climbing in my class
and or whatever they do right,you know, drumming, rock climbing,

(29:15):
painting, nature walks. I dothis class where we just do nature walks,
right, And I think that whatI hear, what I hear in
those classes is that, yes,we talk about the themes of the class,
and of course you can you cantalk about any subject you want out
in nature, right, I doyou know, you know, if you're

(29:37):
teaching astronomy, you can go stargazinganytime you want, right, And so
so any subject can be applicable tothese different environments and contexts. And what
I hear from learners is they're like, yeah, it's useful to do this
outside or at the museum or whatever. But the main bit of feedback I
hear is the mental health benefit.They're like, you know, I just

(30:00):
feel like I can settle down andrelax and actually focus on the content and
not just on my grade all thetime. Or can I have time to
reflect on my life and what Iwant and how the subject we're studying is
related to my life and what Iwant, and even work on some of
the stuff in my life that Idon't like, stuff that's broken or feels
fractured or vulnerable. I can workon that kind of stuff in this class,

(30:23):
because of course that stuff is relatedto my life, which is related
to the class, and there's aninfinite number of ways to weave all these
things together. You just need tohave the opportunity to explore and discover those
linkages. Is this a course thatthey know what they're getting into, So
when they get layered on their timetable, they know that they're going to be

(30:45):
taking this course outdoors? Some do, some do And there's a note that
says, note when you take thiscourse, this is what it's like.
But you know what it's Education hasbecome so instrumental, especially in post secondary,
that a lot of students they don'tread that stuff. They just that's
of course I can take I needthree credits. It's my timetable to click,

(31:06):
and they just and they show upon the first day and they're like,
what, no, really they're wearingwhite shoes. But but you know
a lot of I like that kindof happenstance aspect to it in a way
because a lot of those students theyI don't know, they come into this
thing in a way, they're reallysurprised. It's a shock, and but

(31:29):
they have really interesting experiences too,right, So there's a kind of synchronicity
at work there, I think,which is which is also helpful. So
I don't mind that part the actualcourse called like what is the content of
the course. All of my classesare like this. So so I teach
currently two subjects I think, yeah, I think so. One is creative

(31:52):
writing and the other is interdisciplinary expressof arts. So they're all, they're
both, they're all all around thesubjects of creativity. And of course people
say, you know, well youcan, you can. You know,
it's easy to teach creativity in thisway, but what if you're teaching math,
or what if you're teaching astronomy,And as we agree, I'm sure
that's not really a valid hurdle there, right, Like all subjects are subjects

(32:13):
of human inquiry, All subjects havecreativity in them, All subjects have the
self of the person involved in thestudy of whatever the subject is. Right,
So, if there's if there's aif there's challenges around adapting the content
to a more holistic and integrative andecological approach, that's for the instructor to

(32:34):
do. It's not that the limitsare not imposed by the subject. They're
imposed by the instructor and by theby the enculturation of the instructor in the
the norms of their subject as theirpeers do it. Yeah, the the
you know, take math for example, Like, I find it absolutely fascinating

(32:58):
that every single circle, whether whereveryou find this circle to be, the
ratio of this circumference to the diameteris always three point one four. Let's
go aside and find some circles andsee. Or or I find it fascinating
that the ratio of the spiral armsare in hurricane hurricane or a galaxy are

(33:20):
the same as what have you neverheard of the Fibonacci sequence? Let me
show you this is fascinating. Oror another one is how would we measure
the height of that tree? AllI've got is me and my shadow.
Yeah, we can figure that there'sno end of stiff. I like.
One of the ones I really likeis is this this story that I heard

(33:42):
in because I took some groups ofstudents of the Amazon a few years ago,
and one of the stories I heardthere was this mythology about that the
Cayman that is trying to swallow theuniverse and it's it's it's it has this
dark, sinewy shape that follows theMilky Way, and it's made up by

(34:04):
the clouds, right, the darknessin the clouds that we see, but
they don't call it that, right, They call it the body of the
cayman. And the cayman has amouth that opens, and it's trying always
to close the mouth and when itcloses at the universal end. But the
heroic gods and goddesses of the mythologyare always fighting the cayman to keep the
jaws open, and they do veryand all their epics are about this,

(34:25):
right. What's interesting to me isthat, so the spot in the milky
Way where those two shadows open upright in the middle of that is the
center of the galaxy, is SagittariusA. So somehow ancient people have this

(34:45):
correct interpretation of what's going on inthe galaxy, right that there's this giant
thing that's trying to devour the galaxyessentially by sucking it all into its jaws
and destroy everything. But the balanceof forces in the universe or in the
galaxy is keeping things from keeping backfrom happening. So they have a mythological

(35:07):
story that exactly matches the astronomy story. And so connecting those two disciplines across
that divide by looking at but thestars is super easy. Well, and
this, I mean that story Iwas all over your website is because there's
so many great articles. I'll haveto link to it. I will link
to it in the show notes forthis episode. But this story of the

(35:29):
of the Black Cayman was in thereand I read that. And the other
one that's similar to what you're talkingabout is this idea about just taking the
time to look at the stars,and and that could be stars, but
it also could be a stream flowingthrough a forest. Totally, anything that
sort of takes you to a momentof pause, and what happens to your

(35:49):
brain that moment? What are youactually learning in that moment? That's harder
when when I when I am Okay, So this is funny because the other
day I was I was going throughyour website. I watched your Ted talk.
I'll link to that as well.But there was this quote. I
read it to my son. Mostof us don't actively seek moments of wandering
these days. Instead, we constantlychoose the path of endless distraction and activity.

(36:14):
We don't slow down, we don'tpause to look around, and consequently,
we don't open ourselves up to theworld. And my son said,
was that Ferris Bueller. I gotto know it's Ross Laird. Yeah.
It was basically the theme of FerrisBueller's day off. We don't stop to

(36:36):
look around. Yeah, you know, I had that experience. This past
semester, I taught a class.Well that's the other thing. I also
teach a class in health health thescience and practice of wellness, so mental
health and wellness is not as asubject that I'm currently teaching in last semester.
In this class, one of thethings I did was every every outing

(37:00):
we went to, so we visitedvarious local parks, and we went climbing,
we did various things. But everytime we were at a local park,
I would try to carve off abouttwenty minutes or thirty minutes of time
for individual individual reflection, stillness,for people to just kind of go off
on their own but withinside of meand the group and just have a moment

(37:23):
sometime to themselves to just look around. And so we went, you know,
to the Gravity Bowl and the WatershipPark. We went to the big
Field in Dee's Island Park. Wewent to the big open field in Redwood
Park. In these parks that havethese kind of big meadow type spaces,
right, And it was interesting.In the first weeks of the semester,

(37:46):
I said to them, Okay,put your phone on the picnic table,
or if you can't, just putit in your pocket and go off by
yourself and sit for I think Ithink the first one was ten minutes,
five or ten minutes. And Inoticed that there were a couple of learners
who were like, this is great. I'm going to take some time and
look at the trees and just relaxand lie in the grass. There were

(38:08):
a lot of people who couldn't getfive minutes in before taking out their phones.
And I kept up in the number. I kept going higher and higher
and higher, and I kept explicitlyfocusing on feedback about that. I'm saying,
you know, last week I noticedthat there were a number of people

(38:28):
who had real trouble getting past fiveminutes here without their phones. Today,
we're going to do ten right.Here's what I want you to do if
you get stuck, if you getanxious and you feel like you want to
check your phone, here's what youcould do instead. Right. And we
spent a lot of times talking aboutthis, and by the tenth week of
the semester, we were up toyou know, twenty or thirty minutes without
phones, and most people were okaywith that, but there were people who

(38:53):
really had difficulty and were not ableto do it. And was that phusiologic?
I felt, yeah, I thinkit's a combination of a bunch of
things going on for them. AndI felt for them, and I didn't
want to force them. I neverliked to force people to do stuff in
my classes, but there was oneday where I did. We were at

(39:15):
a Boundary Bay Regional Park, youknow, Centennial Beach on the east shore
of Tawassan, right and the tidewas in and we were on the beach
and I physically placed people about tenfeet apart facing the ocean at the high
tide mark, so they were nearthe water but not close enough they would

(39:36):
get splashed by waves. And theywere spread out in a long line facing
eastward, just facing the ocean.And I said to people, Okay,
what I want you to do isI want you to close your eyes and
listen to the ocean, so youcouldn't take out your phone in this moment.
And I sort of patrolled around behindpeople just as this kind of you

(40:00):
know, presence that I'm here watchingyou. You know, that was the
only time I did that. Severalstudents said to me after, they said,
you know this, this was thebest one for me because you kind
of forced us to do it,and I've been having trouble doing it,
and that's okay. But I neverI never liked to do that, and

(40:21):
I thought it was interesting as anindicator just how much struggle there is now
for so many young people to justput the phone away. Well, what
was the strategy you gave them ifthey struggled, You said, you gave
them a strategy if they struggled afterfive minutes, Well, that time I
just said to them, bring Iused some stuff from the World of Mindfulness,

(40:45):
you know, I said, don'tworry about it. If you have
a thought that kind of comes inyour mind and says I should check my
phone or I want to check myphone, don't try to suppress it or
to deny it. Just let itkind of float through you and then gently
draw your attention back to the soundof the ocean, that's all, and
just breathe. You could also noticeyour breathing and notice the sound of the

(41:07):
sand as it gets tossed by theincoming turbulence of the wave, you could
do stuff like that. So Igive them, you know, two or
three options there. We also wenta bit shorter that time. We only
did I think, I think fiveminutes just sitting listening to the ocean.
But yeah, it's it's a constantit's a constant struggle. And I totally

(41:27):
understand by educators. Many educators wouldlike to just ban phones from the classroom.
I get that. I also getthat that's like, that's not really
a thing in the modern age,especially given the tremendous utility of the technologies
we have and their use in educationin so many ways. It is like

(41:51):
when going back to the museum ideaand museums. I never thought of it
before. It could be a triggerpoint for some people. But what about
schools. Are schools doing the samething, just like our schools at trigger
point? Are there points of traumathat students are experiencing when they come into
the building. I think a lotof students are. Yeah, if you
look at the rates of mental illnessin Canada, the you know, that's

(42:15):
something like at the moment, somethinglike twenty five percent of adults in Canada
struggled with depression and something like anothertwenty five percent struggle with persistent anxiety as
adults found. Yeah, well that'sand that's that's the general population. Among
students, the rates are much higher. So the rates are north of fifty

(42:38):
for all educational demographics. And andthere's a lot of that that I think
is is amplified by the environment thatstudents are in. Educational trauma is the
thing, right, so many,so many young people are have been traumatized

(42:59):
by the system. You know,we know that it takes it takes one
of one one traumatic moment, onemoment of inattention even or or not not
to mention sort of abuse or aggressionfrom an educator, But it takes one
bad moment from an educator toward astudent to create educational trauma. Right,

(43:22):
and in one moment of being calledout in front of a class, or
one moment of doing very poorly andnot having a context of emotional safety to
process that and work it through withan instructor, all kinds of things can
happen here, right failing, there'sso many, so many touch points here
that are potentially traumatic, and there'sno context for working through that trauma.

(43:44):
So a lot of young people dohave educational trauma that's just unaddressed, and
the system continues to re traumatize them. So if you have if you have
the experience of doing poorly on anexam, say, and having a little
bit of trauma from that experience.I mean, we're not about the same
kind of trauma that people have experiencedthrough systemic racism or intergenerational trauma, or

(44:07):
the trauma of war and violence,those kinds of things. But it's still
a kind of trauma in the sensethat your capacity to manage it, your
capacity to self regulate, is exceededby the moment, and the evolutionary responses
of trauma kick in. You dissociate, or you freeze, or you get
hyper vigilant and super anxious, youhave a panic attack, or you get

(44:28):
aggressive and angry, and you kindof spiral off in that direction. These
evolutionary responses are baked in and theytake over in these moments of deep stress,
and they tend to repeat because whenwe're exposed to the same scenario again,
we tend to do the same thing. So if you think about learners
who say that they have real hardtime with exams, well, exams have

(44:52):
been traumatic for them, in thepast and getting over that and navigating that
through is extraordinarily challenging. And I'msure you hear from your students that you
don't get past it, right.You get better at managing the symptoms of
it, maybe, but you don'tget past it. Students who students who
have panic during exams will always panicin exams. What will change is that

(45:13):
they'll get better at kind of harnessingthe panic and settling it down a little
bit so they can get through.And the problem is they're harnessing that panic
to get through what to get throughkind of an arbitrary event, a moment
in time that we call a testthat really is not part of the day
to day experience. No, Idon't stay with them. Yeah, it
has no lasting benefit or you know, all the researches I'm sure you know

(45:36):
shows that when students study for exams, they the decay in their retention of
learning is significant and something like ninetypercent of the material for exam based classes
is lost within a couple of monthsfollowing the course. Yet when we talk
about that in a high school,we say, yeah, we acknowledge this

(45:57):
is all true. We yes,we've read the research, but you know,
the problem is the university. Theuniversities won't change. But that's not
true, though, is it.There's some change in the universities, and
there is there is some Yeah.I think the universities are experiencing a moment
here where there are two cultures happening. One is one is this culture of

(46:20):
renewal and and I don't want tocall it transformation, but evolution. Let's
say evidence based practice, the thethe the the attempt to apply what has
been known for a long time asevidence based practice in teaching and learning.
That is happening. More educators aredoing that, especially more younger educators in
the post secondary space. There's alsoa large, a large amount of inertia

(46:46):
though that comes from the fact thisthis is my personal perspective, and if
you were to ask a more traditionallyminded post secondary education educator about this,
I think you'd get a radically differentanswer. But my perspect about this is
that many of these kind of veryvery mainstream, very traditional educators have quite

(47:09):
a bit of educational trauma in theirbackground, and they have this is there.
They have learned to be a certainway and to navigate the system in
a certain way that helps them tofeel emotionally safe and comfortable doing what they're
doing, and so their responses arenot are not coming from a place of

(47:30):
let's say, evidence based practice,They're coming from a place of personal adaptation
to the system, and they've learnedto navigate the system in a way that
allows them to feel comfortable and confidentin what they're doing. And what they're
doing is a very mainstream, traditionalapproach with which focuses on things like predetermined

(47:52):
learning outcomes, predetermined assignments, midterms, exams, grades, that kind
of stuff. It's what they know, they're comfortable with it, and it's
not it's not I don't mean tosort of demean it. I just can
see that it's an adaptation and andand many people. Because there's no emphasis
on self awareness in the post secondaryenvironment, there's no emphasis on the personal

(48:16):
development aspects that we're discussing here,it's possible to navigate that system and never
have anybody say to you, haveyou thought about what you're doing? Have
you thought about how your practices youknow, might be improved, or you
know or have how some of yourpractices might be harmful for learners. Have

(48:37):
you talked to learners about their experiencesin your classroom. None of that stuff
ever, well, none of thatstuff commonly happens in academia, and and
so there is just a large inertiaof established practice that is is hard to
shift. There are, at thesame time, growing growing numbers of people
saying that we do need to getrid of grades, we do need to

(49:01):
move things out of a classroom basedspace, we need to get rid of
exams, and and personally, asan educator for the last well for my
whole teaching career, I mean originallyI taught in the US, in the
in the alternative system down there wherethey don't have grades, and all this
stuff that we're talking about is alreadyestablished. But here in Canada, which
is a kind of colone, we'rewe're really a colonial system here right based

(49:23):
on the British system, and wereally cleave to that in many ways.
And so so we're not exactly youknow, innovative forward thinkers here in Canada.
I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just, you know,
we we we tend to look towhat others have done and and and kind
of adapt the practices that we thinkwill be acceptable to others. In the

(49:44):
wider sphere, and it's an interestingkind of thing that we do. And
I think, you know, theresearch shows that Canada is like that in
general. You know, Canada asa society tends to be a you know,
we can be very innovative, butwe're also very cautious and and we
we tend not to want to,you know, break things open too much
too fast. So I think thatthere's you know, there's freedom in the

(50:09):
sense that people like me can dothe things that I'm doing and with some
friction here and there can persist.So that's good. That's encouraging. It
is encouraging, and I feel thatmy career path has mirrored yours. And
I'm not sure why it could bethen that based on what you're saying,

(50:30):
maybe I never did have that traumaexperience in my education, like when I
was in high school, for instance. I have a lot of positive memories
from But for some reason, Ifind myself now as a teacher recognizing that
if I'm going to move these studentsforward into a very fast changing world,

(50:51):
I have to be very adaptive andI have to be excited about what I
do, and I can't be lockedinto a box teaching the same thing in
the same way year after year.That kind of career. How could I
last for thirty one years if Idid that? I couldn't. How could
anybody. You've got to be constantlyevolving and excited to try something new.
So, for example, in myeven in my Grade twelve chemistry class,

(51:13):
end of the year, let's spenda couple of weeks. Let me tell
you what I taught you. Letme let me re teach you what I
taught you. I won't teach youyou, but we'll this talk about it
and how does this science relate tothe natural world around us? And then
we'll make a list of sometimes seventeeneighteen twenty things which one of those things
gets you really excited to learn moreabout? All right, I think that's

(51:35):
great for next week, that's whatyou're going to be working on. And
then and then when they where theygo, and everybody's excited to learn what
they want to learn about. AndI think back to twenty years ago when
I'd say, okay, next Tuesdayis the final exam? Is worth forty
percent of your time? Yeah?Yeah, what disservice that was? Well?
Yeah, I mean so, yeah, so we can see that things

(51:58):
are evolving and change thing and andI do anticipate that eventually, I mean
probably not in our career times,but eventually, you know, we are
going to get rid of grades.I mean, everybody's going to get rid
of grades. Eventually. They're allgoing to be all kinds of downstream effects
of that, which is great.And and and I think the pandemic has

(52:20):
accelerated some of that, actually,so and and artificial intelligence has accelerated that
as well. You know, thenow now that you can complete as a
student, most academic assignments that involveyou uh fulfilling specific predetermined learning outcomes,

(52:47):
you can. You can you canfake the whole system, right, you
can fake the whole program if youwant to now as a student. And
and and I think it's unfortunate thatmainstream educators there's a lot for them to
do now because you know, we'reat the pushbackstage. Now, we're at
the stage you can't use that stuff. That stuff is cheating and and that

(53:08):
that will shift and that will change. And because it's like pocket calculators,
right, eventually we'll just start usingthis stuff and everybody will use it.
Yeah, and and so so sothat this is going to encourage mainstream educators
to think about, well, whatwhat do I do now about assignments?
Like what what do I do thatcan't just be or I don't want to

(53:29):
be just kind of done by theby the AI system, Right So I
think that's good. I think it'sit's encouraging. I know that many educators
are super anxious about this now andangry about it even that, especially in
the post secondary system, right thatthat that catching and cheaters has become a
big deal now. And I getthat, but that kind of thing just

(53:52):
kind of reinforces how fossilize the systemreally has become. And uh, when
I think back to doctor Tim Daisy, he's from MIT and is an expert
on AI. He was on myepisode on my podcast, episode eighty two,
and he spoke about recently on anarticle he wrote. He posted it

(54:14):
on LinkedIn, when you accuse astudent of cheating when they didn't and the
trauma that that can bring up astudent worked hard to do their best work
and the first feedback they got was, oh, you must have cheated because
this is too good and it's ageof AI. It's so easy to do.
But what if they didn't cheat,and so you kind of the whole

(54:37):
expose on that theme. But theproblem is, then I've got a good
friend, Doug Allen. He's agreat professor over at Simon Fraser University.
He's been on my podcast as well, and he says, what's happening is
we're moving away from knowledge because we'resort of focusing on this holistic approach to
education and kids just don't know anythinganymore. You just or teaching them how

(55:00):
to find stuff out. And thenhe told me this story recently where in
one of his courses he's he caughtlegitimately seventeen people cheating and he failed everybody.
And he said to the class,I'm going to give you all a
zero because seventeen of you cheated.There's thirty four in the class. If
you didn't cheat, I'm totally okaywith that. Come and speak to me

(55:22):
separately, privately, And nobody came, so they all kind of self admitted
we all cheated. Yeah. Yeah, And I think this is a problem
and it speaks to the to thefact that the system is not oriented toward
learning. The system is oriented towardan externally motivated set of practices that will

(55:52):
will result in something that's predictable,and when you remove internal motivation from that,
then of course students aren't going tolearn anything. So so I think
this is this is this is acomplicated part of the issue. I agree
that that as you shift to amore holistic approach, there's a sacrifice to

(56:15):
be made there. Part of thesacrifice is that general, not generally accepted
common knowledge will be reduced, andthat that's potentially a problem depending on what
the goals of the system are.But the amount of knowledge that students will
glean from a system that is groundedin internally motivated practices is orders of magnitude

(56:40):
greater than what they will glean fromwhat we have. Now, it's a
question of how we how we directthat. So, if you ask students
what they know about subjects of theirinterest, television shows, anime, video
games, the Internet, subjects ofhobbies, whatever, their knowledge is encyclopedic,

(57:01):
vast impressive, because these fields they'vecome to from internally motivated feelings and
and so their knowledge is not necessarilyless in general, it's just less in
the things that we want them toknow about. Now, these might be
these might be things, these mightbe things that are important for them to
know about, like how the governmentworks right, or or how to how

(57:25):
to how to think about you know, taxes or how to any subject you
want right has of course important realworld implications. But but I think the
tendency is is we get into thiskind of polarized way of thinking about Oh,
there's a danger that we get intoa polarized way of thinking about it

(57:45):
where we say, like, I'veseen this with the math stuff, where
where you know, educators started toshift away how they taught math, and
then students got worse at math.And well, the research about this is
pretty clear. The difficulty with math, with math teaching in primary school has

(58:06):
to do with how the instructors feelabout math, and they telegraph this to
the kids. And kids grow upin an environment where math is hard,
Math is tough, Math is notfun, and that's how they learn math.
So if in that environment, ifyou change your style of teaching to
ward of a holistic style of teaching, kids will probably get worse at math.

(58:27):
They'll probably have more fun, butyeah, they'll probably get worse at
math. We have to back itup another level here and talk about how
we can make math a more engaginginternally motivated process where students have unique solutions.
You know, I saw a thinga while ago about I didn't really
know that there were different ways todo things like like multiplication and division by

(58:51):
hand. The way that I learnedis probably the same way that you learn.
You carry the two and you dothis thing fly. There's a whole
bunch of ways to do this right. And and I saw I saw a
video about about a student who hadfailed because they did it a different way.
They got the right answer, butthey just did it a different way.
And that's a good example. Ithink what happens here is we we

(59:15):
get caught up in how they doit versus do they do it well?
When we hear about test scores.You know, math, math scores are
lower than they have ever been.Okay, but I always think, but
what are we testing them on?You mean, there's fewer students today who
can sort of represent their knowledge ofTrigg identities. Okay, So yeah,

(59:43):
you know, like, are westill are we testing them on and measuring
their skill on things that are wesure that these are the things that matter?
Or are they? And and andI think you're what you know,
what you're getting at there is thatthese are these are these are complexities.
These themes are immensely complex, andthey do not involve simply the content of

(01:00:04):
the material or the subjects that we'reteaching. They also involve the complex dynamics
between the instructors and the learners andthe ecological environment that we're all in.
And and I think, I thinkwhen we get I think it's reasonable to
get anxious about, well, we'regoing to we could lose some stuff if
we shift away from what we've beendoing forever. Well, okay, maybe

(01:00:25):
it's okay to let go of someof that stuff, and maybe it's okay
to to look at, well,we're gaining something also here, right,
we're getting something that it's a littledifferent. Is it fair to use the
analogy of to say that, well, kids aren't taught how to hitch a
horse to a wagon anymore? Yeah? Does that matter? Yeah? Yeah,
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, now, I don't know.

(01:00:47):
But that's a good example. Imean, if you if you teach kids
how to do that, if youexpose kids to then environment where where the
task is to hitch the horse tothe wagon, you'll get a lot of
interesting, unique responses to that right, a couple of learners will be like,
I've just discovered the thing that Iwant to spend the rest of my

(01:01:08):
life on. Maybe right, horsesand carriages and that whole questrian world.
You get a couple of learners whowill be you know, will have terrible
experiences. We feel like this isthe worst thing I ever did. I'm
terrified of the horse, right,And you'll have a bunch of people in
the middle, and I think youcan't. I think it's it's anesthetical to

(01:01:30):
the to the evidence on learning thatwe know to say that, well,
if we put everybody in that horseand carriage situation, we should be able
to have some predictable and consistently reproducibleoutcomes at the end of that. And
that's just not that's not how learningworks. Yeah. I think back to

(01:01:52):
earlier years when I taught, say, for example, in the junior science
class, I would spend two weeksmaybe teaching all the different stages of mitosis,
how cells divide and chromosomes are passedon, and there's different levels,
and we're going to memorize what happensin each stage. And then these days,

(01:02:12):
with the advances in genetic engineering andtechnologies, and then the ability to
understand the human the whole geno.We know it and we can actually manipulate
it, and we can fix geneticproblems, and there's so many cool things
happening. So these days I'll bringup mitosis as sort of a oh yeah,

(01:02:34):
let's throw this in because you're probablywondering how you started as one cell
and now you're a trillion cells?How did that happen? Well, let
me just explain to you. Takeme fifteen minutes. There used to be
a two week lesson. Now it'sa fifteen minute lesson. So the shift
is so it's still there, butI'm emphasizing things that kind of are happening
now. And honestly, I don'tcare. Like if I said to you,

(01:02:55):
tell me the four stages of themitosis, what happens at each stage,
you probably can't do it and doesit matter? Doesn't matter? Well,
No, that's the thing. Andwhat you're teaching is the ability to
learn rather than measuring what people know, right, And I think that's a
really important distinction. We're used tobeing focused on in education what people know,

(01:03:19):
and I think that's the wrong focus. We need to focus on helping
learners learn the skills that will allowthem to continue to learn in the future,
right as they go along, becausethey're gonna go out in the world
and their whole life is going tobe learning new things, and they're going
to forget everything they learn in highschool pretty much, right, everything they

(01:03:39):
learn in university pretty much, andthey're gonna learn a whole bunch of new
things. And Okay, that's theability to learn is much more important than
what you know. You can pickup anything you want, provided you know
how to learn, provided you're internallymotivated, provided you have some exposure to

(01:04:00):
your your particular ways of engaging withmaterial, Right. I think that's what
education should be about. And that'sthat's why you know, in my my
creative writing classes, I don't teachpeople how to write. In my my
health and wellness class, I don'tteach people how to be healthy. Right.
I think we have to cultivate alearning environment where where we create a

(01:04:23):
space where people can explore and developtheir capacity to engage with the topic.
And it seems appropriate at this momentthat I'm going to share something with you
because you're actually in my book.Oh wow, and it and it fits

(01:04:43):
exactly with what we're talking about rightnow. So I wrote this book as
a bit of a I first wrotea very lengthy, lengthy teaching manifesto in
the mid nineties when I first startedteaching. This is how I see teaching.
This is what I think it couldbe. And then during COVID,
with all the lockdowns, I gottime, I said, I'm going to
pull that out and I'm going torework it, and I turned it into

(01:05:06):
this. Okay, thank you.So here I was. I did a
chapter called learning. The point iswhere can we as teachers learn? And
one section was about learning at professionaldevelopment days and let's see, Yes,

(01:05:27):
this is the party, says Ithink of one other session that I attended.
It was done by a local collegeprofessor who had become a bit of
an expert on social media and teachersonline presence. Now, don't get offendive.
This is this is a complimentary thing. This is complimentary. Fine,
he says, I wrote, oddly, I remember I really liked the shirt
he was wearing. It was abutton shirt that he wore untucked. It

(01:05:48):
was a slim cut, and ifI recall correctly, he did speak about
his running habits, and I couldtell he was in good shape. No,
Dad bought on this guy and hewore his shirt wealth. In fact,
i've shirt since then, specifically thinkingit was the kind of it was
the kuy that that guy would probablywear. Now, sorry, what was
his seminar about? Oh? Yes, something about teacher's presence online presence?

(01:06:10):
You see it isn't isn't it interestinghow we struggle and toil about our presentations
and the content and the tests,when really, what do we actually remember?
Were they passionate and enthusiastic? I'llremember that, Were they kind of
funny and relatable? Yeah? Didthe guy did? Did they dress?
Well? These are the things thatstick with us over the years, and

(01:06:31):
we may want to keep that inmind as we pour our mental and emotional
energy into our planning. Keep itreal, keep it honest, and don't
die on the wrong hill. Ohthat's great, that's lovely. Thank you
so much for that. And honestly, I referred to you as the media
guy. I knew what your namewas, I knew you're I knew exactly
what your name was, but Ijust I know it's fine. For three

(01:06:54):
or four examples in here, Ididn't name any of them. But I
appreciate that feedback. I I puta lot of attention into which shirts I
wear for the presentations. It's reallyimportant, really important. Well I remember
you dressed. Well, yeah,that's great. Well, congratulations on the

(01:07:16):
book. Thanks. Yeah, it'sit's it's really just a book about teaching,
is my experience, and it's it'sjust giving teachers something to think about
a little bit differently, kind ofthe The catch phrase is motivating teachers and
rethinking education. Teaching really can bethis way. So I picked on all

(01:07:38):
the little nuances. See, Ialways think that you don't like I may
have. I don't know if Isaid this earlier or not, but you
don't have to wait for the bigmoments in life to have it radically changed
the course of your of your career, or whatever your routs. You're on.
The little things matter almost more thanthe big things, and you're my
experience with you. It was itwas a moment in time. It was

(01:08:00):
a little thing, but it affectedthe way I present. And I've used
the example of the gamers and they'reshortened hit flexers. I've used the idea
of an online presence many times overthe years. I picked that up from
you fifteen or eighteen years ago.Well, I think the little I think
the little moments matter a lot ina positive way. I think that's you

(01:08:24):
know, that's consistent with what theevidence shows about minimal feedback from experts,
right, that we shouldn't just bekind of avalanching feedback onto students all the
time, right, The feedback hasto be well timed, has to be
minimal, It has to be scaffoldedby the student's own experience and emerging readiness
to have a discussion that involves thisfeedback. And and I think positive mentorship

(01:08:47):
based feedback is like that, right, It's very it's very nuanced and acknowledges
the relationship and the dynamic and allkinds of factors that are at play there.
But also in a negative way.So many traumatic moments for students are
also small moments, little moments whereinstructors just are inattentive or uncaring or you

(01:09:09):
know, a little bit insensitive,and it just you know, it's sense.
It's you know, especially for developingadolescents, right, the risk for
them to be harmed because they havetheir own reactions which can be quite strong,
you know, in these moments ofyou know, adolescent vulnerability, you
know, because so much and alot of ED kids don't even notice.

(01:09:29):
They don't even notice that, youknow, they just traumatize the students,
right and they just kind of goon, you know, blissfully unaware.
I'm sure I'm guilty. I knowI'm guilty. You know, over thirty
years of teaching, I try,I've tried my best. But I can
think of times even this year,where kids pushing just a little bit too
hard, and yeah, you know, you push back, and sometimes it's
needed. Sometimes they need to bepushed a little bit because they think that
their behavior is acceptable. But it'spart of my job is to train them

(01:09:53):
about acceptable behavior. It's hard.But on the other hand, I've had
experiences with students. I've got oneboy right now who's taking my course for
the second time. He failed thelast year because he never showed up.
He's failing it this year because henever shows up. But once in a
while when he does show up,immediately I say, hey, buddy,
welcome here, glad to see youhere today, we're talking about this in

(01:10:15):
case you didn't know where we've beentalking about this. What do you have
to say about that? And healways has something interesting to say. He's
a very intelligent person. But Idon't harp on the fact that I probably
haven't seen him for four weeks andI probably won't see him the three.
I just say, welcome here,here's what we're doing. What do you
have to say about that? Ithink that's great, And I think that
the way that you summarize that,I think it would be easy to miss

(01:10:43):
the underlying introspection and self awareness workthat you did to get there right.
You had a bunch of steps therethat you thought about. You thought about,
Okay, how do I engage withthis person? How do I cultivate
their presence so that they can getsomething from the learning environment? How can
I be attentive to their vulnerability andnot shame them or traumatize them in a

(01:11:06):
situation where I don't know what's goingon for them, but but I feel
like if they can be here,I can at least, you know,
have something happen potentially. You thoughtabout, how can I communicate with them
when they do show up in sucha way that I'm not going to be
harmful or insensitive or anything like that. And then I how can I how

(01:11:28):
can I make up for the gapbecause they attend so infrequently. How can
I do that in such a wayso that I encourage them to kind of
jump right back in, but I'mnot also calling them out for being absent.
Right, So there's a whole seriesof considerations that you did there just
to engage with this one person,and that process, that self reflective practitioner
process, is I think the partthat's missing for so many educators who are

(01:11:50):
feeling quite stuck right now. Yeah, and they take it personally. I
think a lot of teachers take thosethings personally, and so they lash back
because obviously you're skipping my class becausethere's something about me you don't like,
and and that sort of thing.I think that's human nature, though.
But I'm just looking at my noteshere. I think the one I wrote

(01:12:14):
here, the gap between the potentialof education and the reality of education.
That's really what we've been talking about, isn't it. Yeah, Yeah,
that's good. Well, you know, like I said earlier, I poured
through your website. It's just aresource of very interesting articles and perspective articles.
Articles that makes the teacher think,yeah, you know, those are

(01:12:34):
the important things right there, thegetting outside and the allowing the student to
learn in their own way. Thisis the true nature of what we call
personalized learning, isn't it. Thisis personalized learning. It's finest. That's
great to hear that you've appreciated someof those resources. I never know.

(01:12:54):
The Internet's weird like that, right, You send this stuff out in the
world, and you know, it'sfunny for me. I never know whether
the website is something that people lookat or not, or the things that
the things that I feel most stronglyabout, or are these educational articles on
the site. And I also haveon the site a number of articles that

(01:13:15):
I wrote many years ago when Iwrote my first book, which is about
creativity and craft and working with yourhands and the rewards of working with your
hands. And after that book cameout, I was asked to write a
number of articles about working with wood, and so I did, and two
of those articles are on the site. One is about choosing wood for marine

(01:13:36):
applications, like if you're building aboat or repairing a boat, like what
what should you use? And theother is about finishing wood for the marine
environment, especially for an oceanic environment. And I wrote those articles twenty years
ago and they're still on the site, but I never pay attention to them,
and I don't think they are importantparts of the site in any meaningful

(01:13:57):
way. But every month, whenI get my littletistics about who's visited to
the site and what are the mostpopular pages, those two pages are the
most popular pages on my site.And I've always discouraged by that. I'm
like, come on, Like,I spent all this time creating this,
all these resources on education and selfawareness and all this stuff, and that
stuff doesn't even crack the top ten. So I appreciate you saying that you

(01:14:23):
found that stuff useful, because that'smy intention with creating those materials. Well,
we create content. I create thispodcast, several people listen. I
think every episode gets one hundred,one hundred and ten listens, And I
think, why, why is JoeRogan getting thirty million? Is it?

(01:14:44):
My guests, That's the extremist andproblem with media, right, Like ninety
seven percent of the revenue is generatedby three percent of the content creators,
and it's probably higher than that now. But yeah, this, this kind
of consolidation of attention is a realissue. And so many you know,
young people now who think about thefuture and want to think about career planning,

(01:15:10):
they think about being content creators,and they want to do it because
it's something that comes from an internalpassion, right, It's internally motivated,
which is great, which is whatwe want. The reality of that is
that you know, ninety seven percentof those people will not be successful financially
in doing that. So we haveto also help them think about, well,
what are you going to do inyour life here that that is going
to balance all this stuff out sothat you can have your your passion projects

(01:15:35):
and you can have your I paythe rent projects and those things can be
both feeding one another in a synergistickind of way. It's complicated. It's
probably more important than whether they learntriggering aometric functions right well. And the
reality is when it comes to podcasting, article writing, I've done a lot
of those things, you know thisbook. The person who's benefited consistently from

(01:15:58):
all of that has been me.My practice has been enriched so much by
the now eighty ninth guests I've hadon this podcast. I've learned so much
from each of them. I thinkothers have as well, but in a
way as selfishly, I don't care. I have and I've benefited from talking
with people like this, Otherwise I'dprobably have to pay to come see.

(01:16:23):
Well, I'm glad that you foundit meaningful because that's the important part,
right, And I think the moreof us that do this kind of thing
in a way that's not about clicksreviews, but it's just about because I
personally, I personally don't think thatinfluence and size is related to impact.
I don't, you know. Ithink about for me, I have this

(01:16:45):
thing that the one student rule.You know, every year I have at
least one learner who, oh,I feel that I've been able to engage
with in a way that's meaning forthem and they will have lasting impact with
them. And for those learners,I think about my role as largely being
about mentorship and I know that becausethey tell me, I know that I've

(01:17:13):
made an impact on them. Andfor some of those learners, I stay
in touch over the years, andthat is really rewarding to see. And
these are tiny, tiny, littleimpacts when we think about how we measure
impact today, which is how manyfollowers you have, right, These are
tiny, tiny impacts, But Ithink they're more impactful in a way because

(01:17:34):
because all of these you know,visitors and views and all these things we
watch and consultantcy on social media.This stuff has limited impact, vanishingly small
impact on people's daily lives. Right. What has impact on people's daily lives
and their development is people is relationshipswith other people, and that stuff is

(01:17:54):
what changes us and shapes us andmoves us forward. And so I feel
for me, as long as Ihave one student a year. It's usually
more than one, but it's stilla small numbers. It's always less than
ten, you know, I feellike that's that's enough of a deep purpose
to do this kind of work.Well, over thirty years, that's three

(01:18:15):
hundred people. And if every oneof us influenced positively, three hundred people,
Yeah, that's a lot of change. That's a lot of positive influence
in the world. Right. Yeah. Well, on that positive note,
I want to say thank you verymuch for coming on to this podcast today.
It was really really cool to talkto you. And I've been meaning
to do this for a long time, maybe for eighteen years. I've been
meaning to do this. I gotto talk to that Ross Laird guy again,

(01:18:39):
find out where he buys his shirts. I appreciate you reaching out my
wife buys all my shirts. Okay, with presentations in mind. Yeah,
I appreciate. I appreciate you reachingout. Can you send me a link?
Two links? Can you send mea link to the book, and
can you send me a link tothe podcast? Yeah? Absolutely, And

(01:19:01):
I'll get a link from you foranything that you would want to share with
people who listen to this as well. Yeah, that'd be good. Okay,
that would be great. I'll dothat. Okay, Well, thanks
so again, thanks again Ross forcoming on. Appreciate that. It's really
good. Okay, thank you,Tim. Like I said, I really
appreciate the reaching out and it's goodto connect again after all these years and

(01:19:24):
to hear your story and what's beengoing on for you, and it's great
great to hear. That's it fortoday. Thank you for listening. I
truly hope you enjoyed and found valueand the content of this episode with Ross
Laird. To learn more about today'sguest than items we discussed, check out
the show notes that include links toRoss's website and all of his writings that
I've found to be so valuable.But also find a link to my book

(01:19:47):
Beyond the Classroom, my own personalteaching manifesto that I took the time to
write based on my own experiences froma thirty plus year career as a teacher.
If you'd like to support the podcast, easiest and most impactful ways to
subscribe to the show on Apple Podcastsand Spotify and leave a review and or
a comment. Share the show withyour friends and on all your social platforms.

(01:20:11):
Until the next time, I appreciatethe love, love the support.
See you soon.