Ep 33. Educational leadership: Improving math and literacy
with Scott Hill 

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software.  It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.

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You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.

 

Ep 33. Educational leadership: Improving math and literacy with Scott Hill

 

[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host.

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You are listening to episode 33 of Chalk and Talk. My guest in this episode is Scott Hill, the superintendent of Evergreen School Division, which is a school district here in Manitoba, Canada. I'm excited to highlight Evergreen because they've made some really positive changes to improve educational outcomes.

 

And I think this will be of interest to listeners no matter where you live. For example, they adopted structured literacy programs shortly after learning about the outcomes of the Right to Read reports from other regions. This initiative recently earned them a national award from Dyslexia Canada. Now, as listeners know, I love discussing math and Evergreen has also taken steps to address low math scores, so stay tuned to hear all about that.

 

Scott and I also touch on broader pedagogical narratives, the role of schools in  society, and the importance of setting high expectations for students. We wrap up by discussing the significant progress Evergreen has made in early literacy instruction. A key takeaway from this episode is that strong leadership and a commitment to addressing weaknesses can significantly impact student learning.

 

I have great admiration for Scott and his staff, and I hope that the positive changes at Evergreen will inspire other school districts to consider similar approaches. I hope you enjoy this episode. Now, without further ado, let's get started.

 

I am excited to be joined by Scott Hill today, and he is joining me from here in my home province of Manitoba. He is the superintendent of Evergreen School Division. Prior to that, he was assistant superintendent. He has worked in many different roles in the public education system. He was coprincipal of a high school, an education consultant, a school guidance counselor, and he was also a high school teacher of English and social studies.

 

Now, Evergreen School Division is a very forward-thinking school division, and they recently won a national award from Dyslexia Canada for their work in teaching reading. So, I'm looking forward to hearing about some of the great work being done in Evergreen School Division today. So Scott, congratulations on your award and welcome to my podcast.

 

[00:02:46] Scott Hill: Well, thanks so much. I'm happy to be here. I should say it's not my award, but the school division’s award. Thanks to the hard work of our staff and our teachers, especially. So, thank you for that.

 

[00:02:58] Anna Stokke: Before we get started, just to give listeners some background. So how many schools make up Evergreen School Division?

 

[00:03:06] Scott Hill: Okay, well, I'll just start by saying Evergreen School Division’s on Treaty One and Treaty Two territory in the homeland of the Red River Métis. We have eight schools, three of which are high schools, the others are K-8 schools, of course. And, I like to actually say when people ask about our school division in terms of its size, that we're a very good size for a school division to actually achieve system change.

 

It's a place where you can actually feel like you can make a difference because we're not so big that it's like a really difficult thing to move. So yeah, really proud to be here in Evergreen.

 

[00:03:39] Anna Stokke: So it's small enough that you can make changes and do that sort of thing. So speaking of which, I understand that you've implemented quite a few changes in your division in recent years and I'd like to talk about some of those changes today. And you know I love math, so let's start with math.

 

My understanding is that a few years ago, you became concerned when the Grade 12 provincial math exam scores revealed that Evergreen School Division scored among the lowest in the province. And I understand that after that you interviewed students to find out what was going on in math class. So, can you tell us a bit about that?

 

Like, what did you ask, the students, and what did you find out?

 

[00:04:21] Scott Hill: I'll just start by saying that I was assistant superintendent at the time. So Roza Gray was our leader here as superintendent. it's true. I think on one of the provincial tests, we might've been the lowest in the province. So that's always concerning to see that.

 

Yeah, we talked to teachers, of course, and we also talked to students about that as well. I spent a lot of my career as a consultant doing work with Student Voice, and I have been in the habit of asking students about their learning experiences, so that this seemed like an obvious thing to do to me.

 

So we asked them basically to describe what their learning experience was like in math classes while we were seeing kind of these results that were concerning to us. And so, what they described for us were classrooms in which at times, maybe they or their classmates weren't really at their best as learners in terms of learning behaviours or meeting expectations.

 

You know, there was lots of commentary about the distraction of cell phones, for example, and the impact on students' ability to attend to what's happening in the lesson. So it was basically a feeling that I had, a picture that I think was being painted for us that was really, teachers are working hard to prepare lessons, but some students were really kind of treating it like it was, kind of optional.

 

So that was pretty distressing and something that we wanted to support our teachers and principals in correcting.

 

[00:05:43] Anna Stokke: Okay, so the students were describing math classes where there was a lot of stuff going on that was distracting them from actually learning math. And they were sometimes even viewing math as, participating in the math class as optional. Is that, does that sum it up?

 

[00:06:00] Scott Hill: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to overstate it and make too big a deal about it, but that was something that stood out for me was the idea that, oh my goodness, our classrooms maybe have become places where some kids just feel like they can kind of take it or leave it, you know. And if they're distracted by their phone, watching videos on their cell phone or whatever that's obviously not conducive, right?

 

I'm stating the obvious, but it's not conducive to actually learning and being successful in math. And I mean, I just feel like we have an obligation to those students and to their classmates to make sure that we're preparing them as best we can for a test that - we know this from the time kids enter school and kindergarten that in Grade 12, there are provincial tests and for whatever people feel about them, we have time to prepare kids to make sure that they experience some degree of success on those.

 

So we needed to do some work to make sure our math classrooms were conducive for kids to do well.

 

[00:06:59] Anna Stokke: And just to sort of put this into context, we're talking about a Grade 12 provincial exam, which is generally taken near the end of the class, right? So at that point, there's really not a lot you can do about that particular group of students, but you can kind of think forward to what you do for the next group of students. Is that right?

 

[00:07:20] Scott Hill: That's right, that's absolutely right. yeah, because that's, I think this is sometimes a common complaint about the provincial tests that happen at the end of Grade 12 is people have an affiliation with sort of what they might describe as more formative assessment. They don't like that like, “Well, what's the point of doing it at the end because then you can't correct it.”

 

But of course, you can actually make system corrections based on what you learn, from these end of Grade 12 tests. and that's what we wanted to do. So one of the things, I mean, this was forefront for me, was to try to put in place a correction around this kind of behaviour piece, certainly, and just make sure that math classrooms were places where teachers' hard work in preparing lessons was valued and respected, and that we really were putting kids in the best stead to do well on those tests by making sure they knew the math, right?

 

I mean, sometimes people talk about the anxiety that kids have around tests, et cetera, et cetera. I think more and more we're learning that success is a really good antidote to that kind of anxiety. And, you know, of course, people are going to feel anxious about a test if they don't actually have the learning that's going to put them in a good place to succeed.

 

So that's our obligation, I think, to make sure that kids are in a good place to succeed and they can be confident, their parents can be confident, our teachers can be confident that kids are going to do well.

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[00:08:43] Anna Stokke: And we'll talk more about what you did in your school division to improve what was going on in math class. but before that, I did want to ask. So, you know, the students, so they have this provincial exam score, and then they have a score that they've achieved in the class. So were there disparities between scores that students achieved on the provincial exam and scores they'd achieved in math class?

 

[00:09:09] Scott Hill: Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that was concerning and the province still requires you report those scores or grades separately. And so, I mean, while you wouldn't, you wouldn't always expect the grades to be identical, right? There's some variation there, of course. But we were just finding that it was happening more often than we were comfortable with.

 

And parents also, of course, reasonably were beginning to raise questions about that disparity between the provincial test result and what the report card score had been or was. And we didn't feel that it was reasonable to expect parents or students to frequently see these kind of big gaps in those scores and not have a feeling like, you know, “Something isn't quite making sense here.”

 

Yeah, I mean, if a parent sees like “I've seen report card grades for my student, for my child, that say 82%, and then I see a provincial test score that says 36%. What's going on here? Does my kid know the math or don't they?” And I just think that's a reasonable response you can expect, I think, parents to feel, and students as well, right?

 

I mean, they get to the end of a semester and maybe have come to believe that they're doing all right and then they get this kind of shock at the end. So it did raise some questions for us. And that was a was a concern for sure.

 

[00:10:30] Anna Stokke: Yeah, for sure. And as a parent myself, I wanted to see report cards that actually reflected what my child knew. I think parents are an important voice they can help advocate for their child. They can also talk to their child about trying to do better at school, but if they don't know that their child isn't succeeding, what can they really do?

 

[00:10:51] Scott Hill: Yeah, I mean I think we always want to try to be as accurate and forthcoming as we can about where we know kids are at with their parents or caregivers, and we also know that some parents have a greater ability due to any number of factors to provide additional support outside of school and so on.

 

But I know as a parent, I feel the same way. It's like, I really want to get a good sense of where my son is at. Of course, parents expect that. And we have an obligation to communicate in as much depth as we can to help parents know how their children are doing.

 

[00:11:24] Anna Stokke: Absolutely. So, what are some of the changes that you implemented in your school division?

 

[00:11:30] Scott Hill: Well, we did a few things around math. We spent quite a while, a few years really, where math was pretty high priority for us in terms of school improvement planning and divisional education planning. And that included adding time to our math classes. So particularly around pre-calculus math, we made sure there was more time in the timetable for that.

 

We also enrolled in the Manitoba Rural Learning Consortium. They have a numeracy achievement program, and while it isn't expressly about teaching practice or pedagogy, it is about putting in place some structures to help schools and teachers provide targeted interventions to help assess where kids are at and then provide targeted interventions.

 

It also features what they call reach-back quizzes kind of like making sure that you're revisiting curricular outcomes through the support of a pacing guide throughout the school year. So that learning doesn't just happen and then go away until the end. So there were some structural pieces like that that were really helpful.

 

For us, through the Numeracy Achievement Program with the MRLC, and we also provided PD for teachers, for a few years we basically just said yes to everything. If you want to learn about how to teach math better, if these are supports that you think are going to help you teach math better, we wanted to try to provide support to that, but for me, most importantly it was working on changing that culture of teaching and learning in our high school classrooms around learning behaviours and expectations.

 

And I think I always think that teachers need to know that the leaders at their school and that also the leaders at the division have their backs, so to speak if they begin to implement higher expectations for learning behaviours. And so our math classrooms now are set up in pretty consistent ways. That's another feature, I think, consistency and predictability about what you expect of kids and what you're going to support kids with.

 

So we start classes with bell work or bell ringers sometimes they're called. It's basically retrieval practice at the beginning of classes and learning tasks that really require students to engage and some more structure around the need for students to be present and engaged and the kind of timely and routine quizzes that make sure you're checking for understanding all those features that I think we've known for a long time are good features of effective instructional practice.

 

And I think that's really changed the culture in some cases around what teaching and learning looks like in math. We got feedback from students actually, also after we made some implementation, kids were really positive about it. I mean, they really actually articulated their appreciation for being held to a standard around their learning and their engagement and participation in class.

 

So, all those things were really helpful, think the cultural piece is more than anything. I mean, it's really hard to tease out the causality of these things, right? I know that some people would say, “Well, of course you got better, you put a bunch more time into it.” But my observations from being in classrooms and observing classroom instruction are that really, I think some of those cultural pieces we did made a big difference.

 

[00:14:42] Anna Stokke: Okay, so you mentioned a few things there. So you mentioned some really great instructional practices that have been shown to work. So for instance, I think you mentioned retrieval practice at the beginning of class, which is usually a successful way of keeping students engaged and making sure that, you know, we make the things that they've learned kind of stay with them because we want things to stay with them, not just to be learned one day and then forgot the next.

 

And that takes a lot of work, right? So that's completely awesome. And you talked about holding students to higher expectations. So maybe we can talk a bit about that, I mean, do you think that in general, we could have higher expectations of students? Do we actually underestimate students?

 

[00:15:32] Scott Hill: I do tend to think so. I think, maybe I'm feeling this more and more. As we move forward with some, changes, and I think as I learn more also, like the language of retrieval practice, etc. Some of this is language that I'm learning now to paste onto practices, I think, that we've kind of known about for a while.

 

But I do think we can have higher expectations for students. I think sometimes there's some rhetoric that I hear about you know, what's “developmentally appropriate” for students and I'm never exactly sure what people mean by that, and I think maybe different people mean different things by it.

 

But I think sometimes it means we don't think students can do something, and then when we actually try and we provide the supports and we do things in a good way, we find that kids are actually really capable of doing things that might initially seem to us to be difficult.

 

So I think there has been maybe some rhetoric about what kids are capable of, or when they're “developmentally ready” for something. I don't know, that maybe has sold kids short a little bit in terms of what they're capable of. I have some colleagues that would be good at reminding me that it's like kids don't just come to be able to do something because you “expect it,” right?

 

Of course, that's not the case, but it's like you can expect it and then provide the appropriate scaffolding and support and good instruction and you know get them on a winning streak by making sure they experience successes, feel good about themselves as learners, all those things are part of that equation, but they all do start with or they go back to having, I think, high expectations for students.

 

It's true in, I think, curricular areas as well as behaviour.

 

[00:17:19] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I agree. So we'll come back to the behaviour piece because I get that there were maybe behaviour problems in some math classes and that students are now being held to a higher standard in that category as well. And I think it's something worth talking about. But first, have math scores actually improved since you implemented these changes?

 

[00:17:43] Scott Hill: Oh yeah, of course, this year we did quite well. I think our pre-cal scores were quite a bit higher than we've seen in the past and higher than provincial average or recent provincial averages. So it's been true now for a few years that we've met or exceeded provincial averages. I mean, for whatever that's worth, right? And so that's encouraging.

 

We also kept, doing actual, I guess they weren't provincial tests because the province wasn't implementing them, but through the pandemic, you know, and the department suspended the provincial tests. We actually had them anyway. I mean, we made some modifications based on the frequency of absences that our kids experienced and things like that, but we kept the habit up.

 

And actually we were also fortunate, another feature of our size, I think our kids attended school every day. The size of our school is allowed for that. I know in other jurisdictions kids were kind of attending school every other day and things like that, but we were able to have every kid come every day, you know, except for that one stretch there early on where there was a closure that lasted you know, several weeks, I guess.

 

But aside from intermittent school closures, we were able to have kids come every day, so we kept those assessments up, and yeah we're in a much better place with those math results than we were at that time, and really have to give credit for some of this to our former superintendent Roza Gray for really putting a lot of emphasis on this and the priorities of our school division.

 

And yeah, I mean, I think we still have work to do. We're just now returning to think a little bit more about math instruction and how we support teachers with math instruction. So, we've got some middle schools that are going to pilot the uh, Jump Math resource, the John Mighton stuff I know you've spoken to him before and talked about that program. There's always more learning to do, always room for improvement, and always more support you can provide, I think, to teachers and kids.

 

[00:19:34] Anna Stokke: This is really good to hear. You saw that maybe things weren't going as well as they could. You started holding everyone to a higher standard and now students are improving, and students are even grateful. That's fantastic.

 

[00:19:48] Scott Hill: Well, I think kids want to experience success, right? My way of thinking anyway, that's where lots of well-being comes from. Seeing yourself as a learner, feeling good about yourself, getting on a winning streak, right? Success breeds that. And so, when kids are doing well, they feel good.

 

[00:20:05] Anna Stokke: I want to ask you a general question on education, a very big-picture question.

 

[00:20:12] Scott Hill: Oh, I love these.

 

[00:20:13] Anna Stokke: Okay, great. I mean, you've worked in public education for a really long time. I mean, you've talked to a lot of people, you've worked with a lot of teachers, you've worked in a number of different roles.

 

So I imagine you've had a lot of time to reflect on this question, but what is the role of schools in society?

 

[00:20:32] Scott Hill: Oh my goodness. I've been perseverating on this question, and obsessed with it for the better part of 30 years, probably. I think Neil Postman said that “Public education isn't called public education because it serves a public, but because it creates one.”

 

And then my signature line on my emails is a quote from a guy named William McIntyre, who was the principal of I think it was called the Manitoba Normal School. You know, like the school where they used to teach teachers to become teachers?

 

Yeah so in the thirties he said “The only hope for curing the ills of the world is that young people will picture a better one and strive to create it, and to frame this picture and to cultivate that ambition is the greatest duty of the school.” So, the purpose I think is about democratic renewal trying to live up to some ideals that I think are democratic ideals about equality, about, you know, fairness, about being good to one another.

 

I mean, we want a public that is characterized by those things, right? I mean. you might say in short that we don't ever want the holocaust or similar human rights catastrophes to ever happen again. And that we want to, you know, safeguard our planet from the ecological crisis. Those are all parts of it.

 

And maybe, maybe in a less lofty way, because I know those are really, you know, those are really big picture goals, but I do think they're relevant. And I do think we have a responsibility to try to connect our everyday practice with some really big picture aims like that.

 

But anyway, I think we want to make sure that we're creating a public, our graduates are becoming people who are going to be, you know, good neighbors and good colleagues, good parents, good family people, and that those people also are able to ask questions and investigate, you know, why poverty? Why ecological crisis? Why are these things happening?

 

And that's, to me, that's democratic renewal. That's the democratic conversation. How do we get better and better at living with one another? You know, reconciliation and our responsibilities to that. Those are all part of the big picture of where our schools need to be, need to be doing. Yeah, there you go. I could go on and on, but we would burn the whole interview on that.

 

[00:22:58] Anna Stokke: So this is a great answer. I'm just going to relate sort of an anecdote. I remember around 10 years ago or maybe a little bit more than that, we met with one of the former deputy ministers of education, that was Gerald Farthing at the time and we kind of talked about some of these things like the mission statement of Manitoba Education.

 

And so there were a lot of things like exactly what you said. And of course, of course, these are ideals that we want to live up to and we want these things for our students. But my colleague and I kind of said, well, what about math and literacy, like what about numeracy and literacy?

 

Why aren't those two things part of your mission statement? So I'd like to ask about this. So, you know, in your experience, like what has the pedagogical narrative been like over the last 10 years or so? I mean, how are teachers being advised to accomplish goals such as what you talked about?

 

And is it working?

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[00:23:57] Scott Hill: I mean, I would say a few things. First, I mean, you mentioned literacy, and I just think, and you know, with respect to your affinity for math, reading is absolutely the foundation of math. Being able to engage. Literacy is the foundation of being able to engage in the democratic conversation, so absolutely foundational is our effort to make sure that every child learns to read and every child is literate.

 

And our, I mean, our literacy rates even nationally are not what they need to be. And you think about what kids get left out of if they don't have a high level of literacy in terms of making sense of some of the, you know, narratives that get out there politically, et cetera.

 

And so, yeah, absolutely foundational. And I think that I can do my best to sell it with math too, which is that you know that without some foundational math skills and without kids having the capacity to move forward with numeracy skills, they're left out of all kinds of opportunity.

 

And that's part of the picture as well, right? We need, it's like schools are not all about employability, of course, but there is some element of that, right? Kids need to find their way in the world, and we want as many options to stay open for kids for as long as possible, so that they can find, you know, their passion and their calling and their interest or even just their practical usefulness to society in, you know, in as many different options as possible. So I think literacy and numeracy, of course, have to be part of that.

 

I think it was Ursula Franklin that said “What parents ultimately want out of their child's school experience is for them to be personally happy and publicly useful.” That's putting it in really simple terms, but we want a society where people feel like they're contributing and are contributing, but also able to ask really difficult questions and stand up for things that really matter related to those ideals.

 

[00:26:02] Anna Stokke: Okay, so about things like being able to ask questions and be inquisitive and being a contributing member of society and that sort of thing, on that pedagogy piece, are these goals accomplished through - must they be accomplished through inquiry-based instructions say. Which is, I would say, and I keep a very close eye on these things, I've watched the pendulum swing back and forth, but I would say that teacher PD in the province, probably across Canada, tends to be dominated by inquiry-based approaches. So, is this really working?

 

 

[00:26:36] Scott Hill: First of all, I think we've got a narrative going right now that makes it seem like it's one, I don't know if I can use the word extreme or the other, where inquiry ends up being defined as these big grand odysseys that are just student-designed and not necessarily connected to curriculum or anything like that, and I think at its best inquiry stance is not like that.

 

And then we have a notion about direct instruction, which is something I'm getting more and more interested in, and we're getting more interested in a school division, which some people try to characterize, caricature-ize, if that's a word as just lecturing, right? And of course, neither of these extremes are desirable, or I don't think what anyone is really ever advocating for.

 

So, but I mean, I think if I take a small piece of what maybe you're getting at around, like, what has the pedagogical narrative been for the last 10 or 15 years, I think about it as it's represented by the kind of things that people have said about, like, “Well, content doesn't matter, they can just Google it.”

 

You know, “You can just look that up. Being able to do your math facts doesn't matter, you've got a calculator,” etc., etc. And it starts to feel like the message is, “Content no longer matters.” And yet, I mean, we know that it's not true. I just heard this morning, something I read this morning something about the new curriculum piece that the department is going to put together around the Holocaust, Holocaust education.

 

So it's like, how important is it to make sure we have that content in our curriculum? The same is true for residential schools. How important is it that we have that content in our curriculum? So content matters, folks. We know that. Like, let's, come on, let's get over that because it does matter. Now, being thoughtful about which content matters most, yeah, there's room for us to think about that, and then the ways to get kids to learn that content.

 

But I would say that insofar as 15 years has, I think, rested on a bit of a premise that is like, kids will figure it out for themselves, I don't think that's worked out the way we hoped it would. I just don't know that it's delivered on that, the promise that that would yield for us a public if you, you know, to go back to the postman quote, that is really well-equipped to know things about our history, and so on.

 

To make good democratic decisions, to stand up for the things that really need to be standing up for, to be, I think, engaged in something maybe more deep than surface-level social media memes and rants, and so on, right? So, yeah, I mean, I think that, You're right if you're making a suggestion that maybe we've, we've gotten a little bit off course I mean, I tend to agree.

 

And that we've left something out, which is that kids need foundational understandings. Some of what we need kids to learn is about component parts that help to make up a whole. This is true in what we're learning about effective reading instruction. It's bound to be true about what we're learning about effective math instruction.

 

We need to get at some of those component parts. And we need to get at content. And some of that needs to happen through explicit and direct instruction as opposed to models that have kids, to some degree, and I don't mean to make too much of a caricature out of this, but like, leave kids to kind of fend for themselves.

 

Which I think, I mean actually exacerbates equity problems instead of correcting them, which I think is kind, was kind of the pitch, if you like. And so, yeah, that's where I'm at in my thinking anyway. I mean, you never want to feel like you've come to a final come to like some kind of decision on these things forever, but that's where I'm at currently.

 

[00:30:45] Anna Stokke: And I did hear you mention the caricatures on both sides, right? So there's the caricature of inquiry-based instruction as being completely fend for yourself, and then there's, there's the caricature on the other side of, direct instruction is being lecture based and neither should be true.

 

My opinion is that we haven't focused enough on that foundation and therefore students can't engage in inquiry-based lessons very effectively. I'm going to stress that the thing that I'm thinking about a lot now is the instructional hierarchy, which I talked about in a previous episode, and I think that's a good thing to keep in mind when we're thinking about when to engage students in inquiry-based learning.

 

It's better to make sure that they have a foundation first, and then they're more likely to be successful.

 

[00:31:33] Scott Hill: I think that's what lots of research is telling us now, right? It's like for novice learners, you need a direct and explicit approach. And as kids become more equipped with foundational knowledge and skills then they can start to do stuff with it, right? We talked about student voice earlier in the, in our conversation.

 

And I can remember hosting a forum, I don't know, this must've been 15 or 20 years ago probably, and I remember the high school students actually advocating for this model of education where they said like, “It's so important for kids when they're young to learn all these foundational skills and foundational knowledge. So that when they're in high school, they can start to do the things that are more creative, more application-focused, more problem-solving-focused,” et cetera, right?

 

So they, it's funny, like students were saying this 20 years ago as the shift was happening, and maybe they could feel they could feel some of the sand shifting underneath them around that when they thought of themselves and their classmates, I'm not sure.

 

[00:32:34] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I know this too. For example, in, our after school program, they'll often say, “Thank you so much for making us memorize our times tables, giving us those foundations because now I'm doing really well in school.”

 

So, they recognize that it's that sort of thing that really helped them to move along faster and keep up with their peers.

 

[00:32:54] Scott Hill: And I think there's more and more research, cognitive science research and so on, that's coming out and that kind of talks about the time when it's best to put energy into those kind of activities where kids can commit to memory basic math facts, times tables, et cetera. And it's pretty early, I think it's pretty early in students' trajectory that they can actually take some of that on.

 

And, you know, this goes back to the expectations part of the conversation that we had, which I think is that maybe we've sold kids a bit short in what their, what their ability can be early in their trajectory from K-12. I mean, you see some of this probably if you do a survey of how things work in different countries or just different jurisdictions, right?

 

There's, I guess there are always trade-offs to that. I just feel like if I thought that we gained something really amazing that was really knocking my socks off, from shifting away from direct and explicit instruction maybe I'd feel differently, but I don't, I don't really see it to be honest.

 

[00:34:01] Anna Stokke: I mean, when I asked you, what should the role of schools and society be? You mentioned all these things that I think most progressive educators would list as well, right? So you listed things like being a good citizen, being able to contribute to democratic society, and so you're saying that some of these pedagogical narratives really aren't living up to that expectation you know.

 

We've maybe even sold a story as Emily Hanford might say, but it's just not really working out as it should.

 

[00:34:32] Scott Hill: Maybe it's a romantic idea that you could teach those kind of big-picture competencies that are I mean, I guess they're fashionable now here, even though I think they actually were in fashion in other places in other countries, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years ago even, and maybe they're fashionable here now, and there's a romantic notion that you can get straight at them by just teaching that somehow, or facilitating, uncovering it, you know, whatever the language is that people like.

 

But I just don't know if you can get to that level without some foundational knowledge and some foundational understandings. There's some pretty high-stakes content, I think we want to make sure kids learn before they leave school about not just literacy and numeracy, but certainly about our history you know, and so on.

 

Like, I think there's a, maybe a rebalancing that's bound to happen. And, you know, hopefully it's not like the really extreme pendulum swings that we've seen at some times in the past where it's just zealotry traded for a new zealotry or whatever, right?

 

Although I am hesitant to use the word balance knowing where we've been with I don't know balance literacy, etc. And sometimes that's a cover, right? It's like someone's trying to sell you something and they cover something with a particular kind of language that is appealing to those of us that think that we are open-minded or want to be moderate or whatever it is.

 

And then it turns out to be just something else in disguise. I'll just share this anecdote. I like sharing this anecdote because I think it's funny, but also because I think it's telling. I interview brand new teachers every year and have been doing so for, whatever, over a dozen years. And inevitably, students, I think they're coached to say this, student teachers hoping to enter the profession, is they say things like, “Well, I don't really think of myself as a teacher. I think of myself more as a guide on the side, or a facilitator of learning.”

 

I've started to get a bit cheeky and I say but I posted an ad for a teacher. I don't know, I think it says something actually about like, “We've actually turned teacher into a bad word.” Come on, like, it's okay that teachers who are adults with, I don't know, what is it 19 years of formal education behind them might actually know some things to teach directly and explicitly to young people. I think that's okay.

 

The word teacher is alright, like, that maybe typifies some of what you're describing.