Caroline and I talk about the ongoing changes to our classes from the “Sage on the Stage” through Webinars then the early days on internet learning.

Well, I like to say, tongue in cheek, that we moved to online learning before it was cool. Although I know absolutely no one on earth would think of a pandemic as being cool. But in about 2015, we started pushing to transition from webinar into internet-based self-study. And in early 2016, we came across a learning management software product that was highly recommended, which we initially began with. Over time, you know, sometimes when you start something, you don't know what you don't know. Over time, we realized, okay, that isn't quite the answer. And we did end up moving to the learning management software we use now.

But one of the things we were trying to do was offer students the opportunity to pace in their own time, whether it happened to be at work in downtime or on a lunch break, or if they chose at home in their own personal time, pace their own studies to develop or enhance their skills, their professional development, in order to continue to have growth in their job position. In research always tells us that that's one of the ways you alleviate stagnation, you alleviate boredom. And how many people, especially with millennials in the workforce now, it's a common complaint. They seem to get bored. We like to have the path. But the initial phase of moving to Internet-based learning wasn't what I would consider like a real school. And as an accredited provider of continuing education now, we are, in fact, a real school. With that, our classes look very different than the first rough transitions to internet-based.

Now, we have courses that are segmented into smaller chunks, learning chunks, maybe 15 to 20 minutes in a segment. Because research has demonstrated that. Students need a pause. They need a break to refresh themselves after about 15 minutes of learning, depending on how weighty the subject is. It actually can be less. So we segmented classes into those learning chunks. But because the classes are online, and as Dad was saying, you don't like the webinar format because you can't see your students. I felt the same way about Zoom, just a bunch of... black windows on my screen, not showing me anything. We needed to find a way to mimic the interaction, the pause for feedback that you would have in a classroom experience. And what we came up with was just a quick check for understanding. Formally, most people would call it a quiz.

I have what's called a reverse designed classroom. Which is? I am the most silent person in the room. I'll present something for a moment. I will clarify directions or where we're going. And with my classroom, it's... It's an English language arts classroom. I am not actually, in my opinion, teaching something really scary like calculus. So I give them their objective. That's a learning goal, just like what our classes have at the lower levels, K through 12. Another way we phrase it is the students will be able to. That's your objective. They'll be able to do this thing. Well, then the students start picking it apart. What does that mean? What's it going to look like? My question is, what do you think it looks like? What should it be? I'm a facilitator, not a lecturer. Now, the first couple of weeks of the school year before they know who I am, I'm sort of a lecturer because half of them come in.

I still have kids who come in crying on the first day. They're afraid. And as someone who had butterflies like turkey vultures in my stomach on the first day of school every year, despite loving school. I get it. You don't know if somebody's going to be cruel, unkind, if a teacher is going to be really intimidating. But the students lead the classroom. And I find that with some of the gaps from COVID, it works more effectively in not only catching students up on what they've missed and plugging those gaps, but getting them back towards mastery.

Well, and a lot of it is. especially at the grade levels I'm working in, they need to be able to analyze what they read in order to formulate an argument. And nowhere in there does it say that the argument has to be X, Y, or Z. So half the time we'll be picking something apart. Why did they say it this way? Why did she use these words? And well, what do you think, miss? No, well, maybe it's this. Why would I? What does it sound like if we read it out loud there? What does it sound like this way? So I can get them going. And I obviously have to redirect, but I found that I'll call it 99 times out of 100. I make a lot more progress with redirecting by saying, oh, I love the way you're doing that. As opposed to saying. You need to stop making weird noises with your mouth now. Right. And I chose that specifically because, man, I heard a few today that I thought, is it a wild animal call? What is the improvement? But I do.

And as the year goes by, data proves that that method, the Socratic method works. It shows on the dreaded testing too.

I know where we need to go in general. I have data from early assessments right at the start of the year to tell me what might be challenging, but I always throw my own checks in there to balance it out because a test won't tell me everything. A student might just literally hate testing or get completely panicky when there's a test in front of them. So all of a sudden we're going to do a fun game, a popcorn read. But most of them come to me in middle school thinking school is what you have to do. It's not what you want to do. So in a way, it's a little bit like a magic show. How do I? turn around their preconceived ideas so that they go, oh, wait a minute. And when they learn that, hey, we're reading, for instance, right now we're reading a memoir. When they learn that they can say, this person is crazy and no one tells them they're wrong for saying that, but instead they're met with, okay, why? What do you think?

What do you see there that makes you think that's completely nuts to do? She walked to the North Pole. No snowmobile, no sled dogs. One woman, all her gear, one dog walked. Oh, and skied sometimes when they were up to it. So to me, a student going through this, reading it and saying, this lady is off the wall, crazy. And then how excited he was when nobody just looked at him and said. That's dumb. You need to sound more like a student. No, you're analyzing, you're reading it, you're responding to it. That's communication. And they direct the brakes. They know when they need a joke, drink water, shake it off.

Knowing that they needed smaller chunks, I tried to design so that... the objectives would be met in each chunk. So for each 15 minutes, there is some detail, something that a student should be able to write. Students will be able to do by the end. And then the check for understanding afterwards to make sure that they can, in fact, do what they should be able to do at the end. Also with the segmentation. going to that shorter breaks, shorter sections for focus, for memory, for retention. The classes all along were set so a student could pause and exit at any time. And it would take them back to exactly where they left off. But we learned very quickly that when you hand them a class and it has one unbroken video chunk. I don't know if it's a sense of competition or a sense of obligation, but they seem to think they need to go through it in one sitting.

Now it's automatically designed so that they can say, now's a good point to walk away to do something else.

No, you can't. And if you read survey data at the end of each class. I like to put it in the before category and the now category. Before, when we had the one big video chunk, when so many students would try to go through it all in one sitting. Many, many, many surveys commented on the fact that your voice is very relaxing. And when they listen to it for many minutes on end, they start to feel a little sleepy. And no one says that anymore.

No, actually, Matthew McConaughey is not the one. There was someone years before. I don't even know the podcaster's name, but nothing much happens. And you put this podcast on and he says, oh, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends beyond the binary. Welcome to another evening of a story where nothing much happens. And man, it's like a sedative.

Yes. And we also have the event that kicks off the class. Just as in every other school, there's a reading list. There are prerequisites for college courses you take, whether it's you need to have read this book or studied this or taken this class. There is something you should do before you start. And also the early pretest, the assessment that comes at the beginning, because one of the important things in education is you have to tap into prior knowledge. Well, with Internet based classes. I'm not there saying, hello, where are you? What do you already have? Do you remember this? Instead, a student is looking at that pretest and going, oh, oh, I haven't thought about that in a while. But they are able to look at what they already know, what they can already do. And it gets the mind going. That and the reading list together. And then, of course, we have the other update. It's the benefit of early adoption of any technology.

The other update we have is that now, in addition to being fully accredited, we are also fully ADA compliant because every film clip that is dropped into a class where it's actually you talking just as you would in a live classroom now has closed captioning available for all students. And even in the event a student doesn't need that, right? They're perfectly capable of hearing every word you say without needing to read it. There are so many neural pathways in the brain that are stimulated by seeing what you're saying, hearing what you're saying. You're hitting two separate types of learning styles at the same time. And it builds that neural pathway for greater recall later.

And that also puts us beyond the pale to interject in a good way, because online professional development mandated by the state for state employees here in California, and I'm sure we're no different in that aspect than any other state. There are no audio tracks on the reading.

You have to copy the text, paste it into a new window, preferably on a Mac, and then just push the little audio button and it will read it to you in the computerized voice that sometimes, depending on what your class is, it may not pronounce things correctly. It's not that it's an insurmountable task to do it that way, but most people, when you look at professional development, most people aren't signing themselves up right off the get-go, out of the gate. They're strongly encouraged to sign up because they want a new job, a new position in their current job, a promotion, a pay raise. They're going in for an evaluation. Or in the case of state employees, we have to do so many hours a year. So why would you give them an extra task? So now, Not only am I doing this class and maybe it wasn't my first choice, but now you want me to copy this, paste it over here, figure out how to make my computer play it so I can hear what I'm reading.

I mean, you'd be surprised. People don't have to be English language learners to benefit from having an audio track with their reading.

And also they know as well, because there's nothing that's going to motivate a person faster than their own awareness of where the gaps are for them.

Sometimes I think we get in a rut, though.

do the same thing over and over again and it becomes routine. It becomes habitual. And maybe you get, oh, automatic. You become an automaton about some things. So if you're not as focused, there has to be something to freshen it up for you. And the annual performance review being a way to show people the door, what does that imply for the people who didn't get shown the door? What are we doing for them then? Anything? Or are we just going, Well, I'm taking you for granted. No, we should be cultivating them, developing them. No one is going to be, I mean, if I've already learned everything I can possibly learn, that means I'm dead. Because as long as I'm living, I

And an annual performance review, look, teachers get evaluated all the time. And sometimes they get cranky about it. If I... I don't have it on me, but I have a 10-page document I have to fill out with specific objectives and criteria. Which ones are you following through in each category? And how are you doing it? And what will your evidence look like? And then an administrator comes in and observes and does feedback. Never, ever, ever do you have a flawless performance review. That's not the point of it. The point of it is, just like any learning opportunity, I love what you did here. Have you thought about doing this? There's always something that you can adjust, a direction you can try that you haven't tried before. It's part of the reason that when they ask who could teach this, even if it's something brand new to me, I say, I'm willing to learn how. Show me how.

Now I have 30 students in front of me every morning in second period saying, yay, you're our new yearbook teacher. I have never done that in my life. But we're all learning it together. And that's the point. There's no perfection. And if an employee doesn't know what they're doing, if their performance review indicates a lot of gaps, I think that says a lot less about the employee than it does the company. Because where's the onboard? Where's the training? And even in education. Nobody, you have to take classes, sure. But when you started a school, it's a totally different thing. No one tells you anything. You don't know. Yeah.

And at the rate technology shifts and adjusts and updates, I'm walking in tomorrow and I'm going to have software I've never encountered in my life. In fact, they can't even remember what software it is they're giving me, but I have one hidden advantage only. No one can teach me how to use it, but I happen to be married to a graphic designer. So I know if all else fails,

you're in your forties, you go, okay, well, publisher looked like this. So the next iteration is going to have some elements there, something from Photoshop, something from, and you have to keep learning. If we know that about ourselves as employers, as employees, as teachers, as students, shouldn't everybody be on that page?

does. And it's one of the things that I know with the lack of budget in most high schools for technical programs, I know with the differences state to state in how high school is managed, how everything's managed, that we lack a lot of, we don't have a federal education system. I mean, we do have a federal Department of Education, but when I say a federal education system, there's no set fixed standard in every state so the there's still a high school um pop skipping a jump away up in lake arrowhead we have a high school called rim of the world high school it still has auto shop and it still has wood shop and they still teach them they're the only high school within two hours that has that there's a continuation school somewhere out on the fringes of LA, I believe, that has a similar program.

But then you have other states like Washington, where a high school student can also enroll in a junior college certificate program and do a combined program. I know my students aren't coming out that way. I know my students in my classroom, because of where we are, they won't have that access. However, if I get them through graduation, whatever their next step is, If it's college, if it's technical college, if it's going straight to work, because many of them are planning to do so. If they have the critical thinking skills and the ability to know where to start looking for the answers, that's the skill they need graduating high school. Yes, they have to be able to read. Yes, they have to be able to do mathematics. I'm not saying those things don't matter, but they have to have the skill development. to analyze, assess, make decisions, read a room, interact with customers. All of these are elements of critical thinking skills.

And even the most introverted person knows that at some point you have to deal with people when you walk out your door. So a lot of times I hear all of the things that are lacking when a young person gets onto the job market. It's true. You also have to look at where they're coming from, which state, which part of which state. A kid coming up in Lake Arrowhead up the mountain is going to have an advantage that a child in Coachella doesn't. But a child in Coachella might have a different advantage. For instance, an ag program in a high school that they don't have at the others. So if we come into it knowing our employees. trusting that our employees have those critical thinking skills when they walk in the door. The rest is a vessel you can fill. And as an employer, you really should be.

you. Well, ISET definitely helped, but also taking courses in an online format helped as well. In hybrid models with National University, where I would check in and have a professor who would be there in a meeting and we'd be doing the Zoom meeting together, having the passive blackboard structure class modules to do, tasks to accomplish. We're a school.

Well. If I could impart words of wisdom, I would say, please don't make your annual performance review. A very scary, monstrous horror movie scene where somebody knows going in with sweat trickling down their backs that they're possibly about to lose their job. But I would also say, teach your employees, show your employees that you see that their success is your success. That builds loyalty. They don't take that and go somewhere else. They take that and it gives them that feeling that they're seen, they matter, and that you're there to make sure they're succeeding with you.

And next up, I will start trying to persuade you, dad, to do ASMR videos.

It's the helping people fall asleep and relax stuff.