S4 EP2 Critical Thinking and Creativity: Rethinking the Drivers of Education

Barbara Smith
Author, Consultant

Quote of the Podcast:  

 "Show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value" Joe Biden, pre-VP 

Introduction of Guest BIO –  

Barbara Smith is a passionate educator who challenges the boundaries of "sameness" in schools. Smith's background includes over forty years in public, charter, independent and international schools. Barbara has started three schools and has been a teacher, principal, consultant, trustee, and teacher educator at OISE, McGill and the University of Saskatchewan teaching faculties and graduate schools. She has published many books through Rowman & Littlefield and Brill Publishers.

Interview 

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators 

●        30,000 Ft. View – Why do we, as a society invest in education? 

●       What drew you to education? 

●       students in responsible roles - 

●       and how such experiences can help shape positive school cultures

●       What are the biggest challenges to you? 

●       What would you like decision-makers to know? 

Podcast/book shoutouts

Urgent Care for Schools: Situating Responsibility as an Engaging Way to Transform School Culture by Barbara Smith

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Barbara Smith is a passionate educator who challenges the boundaries of sameness in schools. Smith's background includes over 40 years in public, charter, independent, and international schools.

Liza Holland [00:00:41]:
Barbara has started 3 schools and has been a teacher, principal, consultant, trustee, and teacher educator at OISE, McGill, and the University of Saskatchewan teaching faculties and graduate schools. She has published many books through Rowman and Littlefield and Brill Publishers. So, Barb Smith, welcome. We are so glad to have you on Education Perspectives.

Barbara Smith [00:01:08]:
Well, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to, our conversation.

Liza Holland [00:01:13]:
Fantastic. Well, I will kick you off with with a big one from a 30,000 foot view. Why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

Barbara Smith [00:01:24]:
Well, yeah, that's a big question for sure and and an important one that not many people make time to to think about. And so I think it's a, an incredible question, and I'll tell you why. I think it's for two reasons. The first is I think we need to invest in 2 key things that affect everything else in education. One is critical thinking, and it's very interesting because the title of your podcast is education perspectives. Intelligence has a lot to do with your capacity to understand different perspectives in order to make informed decisions about about what you do in school and and what schools do for for society. So from that big picture kind of question, you're asking about society. So we need critical thinkers, and we need critical thinkers because you can't be compassionate without having a critical understanding of of different perspectives.

Barbara Smith [00:02:21]:
I mean, that's pretty important. And the more people have fixed views about things, the more difficult it is to really be making to be an intelligent society. And so fixed views are not a a a healthy thing for a society. So if you're a critical thinker, you, you don't just stand by a fixed view. You have an understanding of alternate views. And I think that that's pretty important. And in this day and age, when peace is something that shouldn't just be a word, it should be something we're striving for, we really can't get there without having societies that can critically think. And the second part of that, my kind of world big, I guess, bird's eye view from 30,000 feet up is that we need creative thinkers and doers and makers.

Barbara Smith [00:03:06]:
And it's really important because the emphasis right now happens to be on testing and memorizing answers to the past, and we need creative thinkers so that we actually can handle the present and certainly work in the present industriously. But we need to be able to solve tomorrow's problems that aren't on page 37 in a textbook, or they're not a multiple choice option on a accountability test. So those two things are are the reasons we need to invest in education. However, I'm not sure that those are the areas that education is investing in, and and that is a a concern. Nevertheless, you need to invest in in things that you value, and we really can't afford not to have an educated society, if humanity is going to to be sustainable. I think that's pretty important.

Liza Holland [00:04:02]:
Oh, I couldn't agree with you more, and you gave me so much juicy information for follow-up questions. But I do wanna take just a little minute and kind of dive into your perspective and on education and then how you've arrived there. What what drew you to education? And tell us a little bit about your journey.

Barbara Smith [00:04:19]:
Well, I think at first, I I enjoyed helping people, and I know lots of us in education feel the same way. It does feel good to help someone else. And, again, I'm not sure we create enough of experiences like that in school for, you know, even young people to to have those opportunities. So, you know, it does draw me to service learning. So things I would do outside of school, I would try to say, how is this critical thinking and creative thinking in school to have service learning projects either at the school or at the, you know, the school level, the community level, or even globally if there's a disaster? And what can our students rally behind to try and make a difference? And and in in trying to help others, you come to have a deeper understanding of of the world. And I think the great thing about education is that it's you should learn about a world outside your own, and that allows you to grow. And if you don't learn about anything outside your own life and and and what you experience, then it may not be as a fulfilling life, as it as it could be. So I think that, you know, what drew me to education is that kind of really very simply, you know, wanting, to help others.

Barbara Smith [00:05:38]:
And, as an educator, I really enjoyed working, you know, with students to create projects together, not just to deliver a project or to train the students. These are words that don't really involve students having any, say. And and so, certainly, what draws me to them is to be able to do creative things with students and to excite them about, you know, what what where they can go with it. And so, you know, if I had some wonderful mentors in my own career, I wanna be that for other people too so that their voice feels that it matters and that they have a say, and they're not just, technicians, you know, handing out a curriculum that somebody outside a classroom has made for them and the test that someone outside the classroom has made for them to deliver. This is really not the democratic ideals that I value, and I think that only through democracy can you have innovation and can you have a society that, can support one another. So so that question is that's what drew me to education. I felt this was the best platform to be able to try and, you know, certainly help others, certainly, have some autonomy and have some say in in, how they get to grow in their lives.

Liza Holland [00:07:01]:
Well, you know, that is a great segue to the root of this podcast, which is really around student agency, and and I'm so glad that you talked a little bit about kind of that what we're measuring for is not necessarily what we really want. The pace of change is happening so fast. And, realistically, as you said, we need critical and creative thinkers who can process content as opposed to putting the focus on the content. It really needs to switch to this process, and and part of the magic of that is really digging into student agency and having students in responsible roles because the reality is it's no longer we don't live in a world where you can have your school and be done with it. You have to be a lifelong learner because things are changing. You know, what we're teaching in school today could be completely obsolete by the time they actually get out in the work world and start using it. So tell me a little bit about this new book, Urgent Care for Schools and Students in Responsible Roles.

Barbara Smith [00:08:04]:
Well, it started when I did my graduate research years ago, and, of course, what sort of inspired me to to research, the topic was, peer teaching. When students have were given very deliberate, very systematic experiences where they would be able to go and learn by teaching is basically what it was about. And you see lots of documents out there that said the highest form of learning is teaching, and the teacher in a classroom typically talks the most. And because the teacher is talking using the subject matter, they're becoming more and more and more expert at it. So I focused a lot on linguistics and what was actually happening when the students were teaching the other students. And at first, in the peer teaching research, I noticed that the when they the students there were grade 4 students, very young, being teachers of of younger kids. They wanted to sort of mimic how they were taught, which is a very teacher directed mode. So the at first, they would have a clipboard, and they would sometimes, like, at first, they think, well, I'd have to take attendance for 10 minutes, and then I'll have to do this.

Barbara Smith [00:09:14]:
And then after that, I was like, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. So I realized that the things I was teaching at the faculty of education at the University of Toronto, I mean, okay. How do I create a program for these grade 4 peer teachers so that they're actually designing let's at the time, it was multi intelligence lesson plans. So different ways to be able to go and to be able to reach as many students as possible in a classroom with what they were trying to teach.

Barbara Smith [00:09:42]:
So it was exciting because I saw something ex happen when students who may, in their regular grade 4 class, they may have this kind of pecking order where everybody kinda knows that this person is usually, you know, getting higher scores on tests than this person and so on. So there there is this implicit understanding amongst kids as young as grade 4 for sure and even younger, I'm sure, that, you know, some are supposedly more are brighter than others. And that's that was turned into we turned that on its head a bit because when the students got to teach younger students, they left that baggage behind. So the younger students didn't know about this bell curve or this, you know, this identity issue that the students had in their own setting. But when they went and taught younger students, they excelled in many, many ways. So they were able to teach things that, at first, the teacher would have been their own homeroom teacher was surprised that they had the capacity to teach what they were teaching. But when they didn't have a ranking system in place, it allowed them to take risks, to learn from their mistakes, and but to really excel. So it it jumbled up the supposedly achievement charts that they would have when they were actually presenting what they what they were doing in their classrooms.

Barbara Smith [00:11:04]:
And I don't say presenting. It's probably not the greatest word because they had to create interactive situations where the students would go to centers, and they would work with them in mini lessons at centers and so on. And they were trying to do the most informed kind of practices as opposed to maybe the traditional conventional practice with teachers at the front of the room and kind of dictating what has to be done. So they many of them got to learn the way they like to learn. So I guess I was at a conference in Alberta about a month ago, and they had 6 I think 16 panel members, and they were students. And it was really interesting because I had nothing to do with my research. My research was years years ago, decades ago, but they all spoke about the precious memory making times they had in school. And when they a few of them talked about being buddies or helping teach another student how to do something, when they talked about that, they lit up.

Barbara Smith [00:12:01]:
And that was the same findings that I'd had years ago. So so that drove me to say, okay. I never took time to publish the research, and I said, okay. So that would be one chapter out of, I think there's 25 chapters. That would be one chapter that will now be dedicated to sharing those findings. So people know that it's worth the time investment, and time is just is is is I'm gonna probably talk about that quite a bit. That's the issue. You have to make time to make memories.

Barbara Smith [00:12:33]:
And if you plug it all up with 85 different expectations, let's say, in language arts in grade 4, there's no time to give these kids the opportunity to peer teach younger kids. And we also did a peer teaching where we taught up. So the grade fours went into a grade seven class and taught them how to figure out the area of a triangle. Now this is a very tough concept for grade sevens. It's a separator on those standardized tests, but we had grade fours going in and teaching it to them. So not only was it an enrichment concept for all these grade 4 kids, the grade 7 kids paid more attention. And when they wound up doing their standardized test later on, it it was you know, all of a sudden, that one separating concept in in math was mastered by this particular class. So you can you don't always have to teach younger material when you you can also do it in another direction, and a lot of people don't think about peer teaching in that way.

Barbara Smith [00:13:34]:
But it doesn't just have to be formalized lessons where this research was over 3 months. They became teachers, so So they really took the time just like a lot of teachers in teacher education. So that drew me just to, look at it, but then I I discovered there are a lot of other ways that students were responsible. Students become action researchers. So they actually say why they you know, in one of my schools, like, okay. We wanna change the schedule, and we want more recess or we want and I said, okay. Well, you better do some research about this, so away you go. And when the students came up with a very viable reason to want to make some policy changes, let's say, in the school that I was a principal at, I would say, okay.

Barbara Smith [00:14:14]:
We'll bring it in, and we'll I want you to present it to the staff, and maybe we'll present it to the board depending on, you know, how significant the change is and how many permissions are needed to do it. But I found out they were you know, again, when they were something other than a student doing tests, they, all of a sudden, were engaged and were doing a lot more deeper thinking and learning than in the traditional, textbook oriented kind of, program. So then I found out there was other students who were doing service learning in big ways, lots of different ways. So I I captured a lot of stories all over the world from different things people were doing and really listening to their their quotes and what they said about how they so it's not just through my voice you get to hear that this is important. But this particular book, it it it does have a lot of pieces to it. The idea of internships in high school, why are they only in practical arts? Or even the question came up, why is there a separation between practical arts and academics? Why do people like, there's a lot that goes into redesigning someone's bathroom. And when you have your students go out there and the math that's involved and everything else that they're doing is very applied. And I think that, you know, a lot of these, experiences kind of blur the lines between some things that you traditionally think.

Barbara Smith [00:15:40]:
Well, these are gonna be gonna give people these technical skills, and off they go, and then we're gonna give people these academic skills. But you can't deeply understand an academic concept unless you apply it. And I would say robotics is the one area that has thrown a wrench into the whole system. Because are you gonna say that's a practical art? Because it is. But, no, it's an application of physics and math. And it's and when you talk about computer science, that's an application of patterning in math. So we need to to not just assume that the way schools and subjects and everything else was designed and and what we give people to, you know, as their curriculum, how different is it, you know, since 1950? And it should be because the world is very different than 1950. And I'm sad to say that it has more similarities to 1950 than it should.

Barbara Smith [00:16:42]:
And I think our kids, what they're doing is they're building tunnels under us because they wanna situate their own responsibility. They wanna they wanna matter. They wanna do something that that really will make a difference. So, yeah, that's why I kinda wanted to get that book out there to say, these aren't soft skills. Lose the word soft.

Liza Holland [00:17:03]:
Yeah.

Barbara Smith [00:17:04]:
These are essential skills. And you can have all the memorized know how in the world, but if you don't have the critical thinking to do something with it, to make some make some meaning with it, and if you can't create answers or you can't create solutions to problems that don't exist, then we're really not preparing our young people for a society that, you know, is gonna be helpful. We're gonna have to be doing a lot of backpedaling. And the more, you know, the more testing tends to be the goal versus learning, the more, you know, our schools are are not generally preparing kids for for what they need to do in the future.

Liza Holland [00:17:46]:
Even that piece about failure and finding new ways to do things, it's not consistent with this you gotta get an a culture that we have developed here, and I've been doing a lot of work in the career and technical education space. And that connection, you know, that kinda career connected learning sort of idea to blend that in makes so much more sense in what we're doing today, you know, because, unfortunately, the old system, when you talk to business and industry, we're not producing kids with those skill sets that we've been talking about already, problem solvers, critical thinkers, good communicators. So it really is incumbent upon us to, to make a change. One of the things that I loved in just reading the synopsis, your book is not out as of our time of recording, but was the fact that you have so many different co authors from, like, all over the world. Anything that you kinda wanna particularly highlight there that, when we get the book in our hands, we need to make sure to not miss?

Barbara Smith [00:18:47]:
Wow. Well, it's interesting because when you give students responsibilities, you you create scenarios. You don't give anybody knowledge. You don't give them these things. You sort of set a context in place where they can generate their capacities. And when you mentioned about internships, it made me think too. There's a whole chapter about apprenticeship, and these are examples of, students who have been doing one of the chapters on entrepreneurial studies. And so they wound up creating a a school restaurant, And they had to do you know, it wasn't as fun as, you know, putting up a few posters and say and then everybody came and eat.

Barbara Smith [00:19:28]:
And then, oh, isn't that wonderful? There's a detailing of any kind of business and and the learning curves of startups and and so and so. This was a wonderful like, I learned so much by reading what people were doing. Now I reached out specifically to you know, when I'm looking at comments on LinkedIn or I've been following what certain schools have been doing that I think are real maverick schools. These these schools are taking risks with time because they're repurposing how time is being distributed. They're also repurposing roles that teachers have. And this particular book really focuses on not just the students. There were some student many students wrote their own chapters, but there were facilitators. And these were the adults in the school that said, wait a minute.

Barbara Smith [00:20:14]:
Let's make room, because they played a very important role. And some of the chapters, the the changemaker chapter, for example, from Frankfurt, Germany, the school there, the administrator and the student wrote the chapter together about an event that they had put on for the the students in the school and what it involved. So I I can't there's so many that are so unique, and, you know, even a teacher telling the story of being a camp counselor and how a story like that seems so distant from teacher preparation. And, you know, when you read that heartfelt story you know, they they formed a relationship with those kids in the summer, and that made a difference in how they felt about themselves. But look at the number. They had 8 students. And people will say, oh, well, it's not. It's a quality of the curriculum and the quality of the teacher.

Barbara Smith [00:21:08]:
You can put as many kids in a classroom as you can. No. You can't. If we had, I don't know, if we had all my authors on here at the same time, we wouldn't have this relationship and this conversation we are having now. And Vygotsky is a real important figure in educational theory. And, basically, he said, you know, it's a social situation for learning, and you've got it. The the more people you have to share time with, the less you get to elaborate on what you know. So that's why the tutoring industry is going crazy.

Barbara Smith [00:21:41]:
Because, first of all, it's impossible for 25 kids in the classroom to really all be able to master what it is to be learned. So they need to go elsewhere for that. So that's created a whole new industry. But, secondly, they haven't been able to form those relationships either. So the the student may know they're not getting it, but the teacher has to rely on some outside standardized test to know whether they know. That camp counselor with those 8 kids knows if they should be swimming without a life jacket when they when it's swim time. That counselor knows all of those things. So so there's something about learning and teaching that you know, we have a lot to learn that are outside the walls of a school.

Barbara Smith [00:22:24]:
And, you know, so education, according to Dewey, is everything that happens in life. So so parents play a big role. And if Absolutely. Parents, you know, you know, really don't understand that testing is not really testing what is valued and what society will value and needs, then they're gonna continue to push for, you know, buying real estate near a school that got some high score on a test, which is not going to guarantee that their child will, you know, be excited about learning and and education and will we'll do anything with that education. And that's a bit of a myth buster that is really hard to to, you know, do something about. So, you know, I try to, you know, I try to say how how can I, you know, how can I share my experiences and and others' experiences so that parents can have a deeper sense of what an education is? And it's pretty hard to measure critical and creative thinking. And it because it's so hard to measure, it's not being measured. And are we putting the right people in the right place on the bus when they get to graduate school? Something to think about.

Barbara Smith [00:23:34]:
And who are making these decisions in the future? They are people who are very compliant, and they do as they're told. And

Liza Holland [00:23:41]:
Well, they came through our industrial model system. They're they're exactly what we wanted in the thirties, forties, fifties. Not so much today.

Barbara Smith [00:23:50]:
True. Yep.

Liza Holland [00:23:51]:
Gosh. Well, that's exciting. I look forward to reading that, and I also am excited to hear that students actually got an opportunity to, to contribute or actually write some of their own in there because I do think that it's a massive paradigm shift for teachers. Right? They go through this old model, and then they go to school where they were taught the old model and, you know, that they were supposed to be the expert in everything. And it's a little scary to try to give kids agency the way we're talking about. Right? And and so it seems to me that your book will provide them a lot of context and maybe some some ways that they had not thought about for how they might be able to empower kids. I'd love to get your thoughts on, you know, because I have been doing a bunch of work interviewing teachers, and the overall constant amongst all of them, we were doing a a deeper learning cohort, was the value of time and the fact that we have put so many things on a plate of teachers that they don't have time to sit back and think critically and problem solve themselves to be able to introduce this new learning, so I'd love to kinda get your thoughts around that aspect of it.

Barbara Smith [00:25:06]:
Well, if and you're if this is exactly and it's such an important point that you're making is that how can we expect students to be critical and creative thinkers if our teachers can't model it and are not permitted to model it? And there were a time when, schools could design their own report cards. How dare they? Well, what does that mean? If you think about it, if you unpack that, what you're saying is, we trust the educators in that building. They have an education, and they have been professionally learning, and they're using their context with the students that they know best to design these particular tools. And most people that are have this as some when they say, but, oh, they all have to be the same so they can be compared. And what if they go to another school, and it's a different kind of report card? Oh, what will happen? Well, I don't think much will happen, at all. I mean, I think that the students are getting feedback about what they're learning from the people who know them best, And I think that is something that we need to think about. Now the assumption is that if all report cards have to be the same, then all students are the same.

Liza Holland [00:26:23]:
Yeah. And that is so not true. Nope.

Barbara Smith [00:26:27]:
And so the sameness is in there's time and then there's sameness. This is this this force that's, you know, pushing a lot of the things, and that's not helping because if you don't if you've I'll go back to something that is very disturbing, and that's when you have, school shootings. And I always ask myself I always go back and say, how many kids were at that school? I wanna know. So Marjorie and Stone in Douglas, sure enough, thousands of kids. Now can that principal know every single kid in that school?

Liza Holland [00:26:58]:
Not at this level that you'd like for them to. Nope.

Barbara Smith [00:27:01]:
But if this is a community, whoever's the head of the the food chain there should be able to know not only every kid, but every parent. Okay? So that is broken for sure. And if somebody said about Sandy Hook, they said, oh, well, that's a small school. I said, do you know where the shooter came from? Well, how many kids were at his school? He was a disenfranchised youth. So that kid needed to find meaning in a very destructive way because there was no constructive opportunities that really presented themselves in their in their particular schools. And there's no excuse for, you know, if you can't do good, you you can do harm. There's no reason that should happen. But we have to look at what we can control in schools.

Barbara Smith [00:27:48]:
We can't just say, oh, that's the cycle of violence. Not my problem. Oh, that's the cycle of poverty. Not my problem. We have these kids for 6 hours a day. They're not our problems. They're our opportunities, and we have to talk about things we can control. We can control how many kids are in a classroom.

Barbara Smith [00:28:10]:
Yes. We can. And educators know I've been a principal. I've started 3 schools. I can control that I can have less than 20 kids in a class. I can try and aim for 15 or 14. That's ideal. That's the way I try to to to work it when I'm in schools.

Barbara Smith [00:28:26]:
We can actually make sure that the teachers themselves have the planning time they need to be able to do all these things that I I would like them to be doing in their classrooms. I want them to be able to apply the research on best on informed practice. And they can't do that with 45 minutes a day of planning time. It's impossible. And I'll use my example. My husband was in the oil industry, and he would have this stewardship meeting, you know, that would come up in 3 months. So it was maybe an hour, maybe 2 hour presentation. I'm not not sure the detailing of it.

Barbara Smith [00:29:04]:
And he would work on that for 3 months. Okay? He'd do he'd take calls and do some other things, but but, basically, that was the big thing. And so they he'd have 6 millions running around doing view graphs and all of a sudden, you know, doing all the graphics and everything else with it as well. And we're expecting teachers that are doing 3 separate hours, let's say, of classes or up to 5 in a day, and we're expecting them to prepare quality experiences for for those kids with 45 minutes a day. It doesn't make sense. But it's we value we don't value their capacity to to do that. And where did the great teachers? They do it on weekends. They bust their their their backs just trying to get all the things done because they wanna be the very best teacher they can.

Barbara Smith [00:29:50]:
They wanna apply all of these these things we're learning about education and research, and they're burning out. And now with the more that the emphasis on testing is coming down on them, the more they're just saying, yeah, whatever. They're just giving up.

Liza Holland [00:30:05]:
Yeah. They really are. And the reality is that we we are as a society are taking less and less responsibility for being part of the solution and doing a whole lot of finger pointing, and I think that the sameness that you talked about is really a good recipe for micromanagement by administrators. So that kinda brings me back around to looking at this piece of being more of a coach and a facilitator and empowering the students and how the experiences can help to shape a more positive school culture that might be energizing for teachers.

Barbara Smith [00:30:40]:
Well and it's funny because the next book I'm writing in that series is a I I said, what about educators in responsible roles? Because one of the ways to give teachers more time to be able to learn about and apply the informed practices from peer reviewed research is to give them other roles other than being in a classroom for 5 hours a day. And when I was a principal in Washington DC, we added a lot more teacher mentors to the to the, system. And so what they got is they I didn't wanna take them out of the classroom. Like, traditionally, all of a sudden, you create this coach role, and you take you you take a great teacher out of the classroom. And they go into the classroom, and they watch a teacher, and they watch the interactions, and then they have a chat with the teacher. But we said, no. We don't wanna do that. So we said to my coaches that that I inherited when I first went there, I said, well, I'm gonna give you, half a day teaching.

Barbara Smith [00:31:36]:
And they just went, because the whole point, I guess, for them, was to get out of the classroom, and that wasn't really the kind of coach that I would want anyway. So, basically, they learned to go back into the classroom, and they got to model the things they wanted other teachers to view. But then I gave them 3 to 5 teachers each as their mentor, so all after mentees. So in the afternoons, they would spend 1 hour, let's say, Monday, co planning a lesson that they would co teach with them the next day. So that meant my whole teaching staff was getting customized professional learning every single week.

Liza Holland [00:32:19]:
How awesome.

Barbara Smith [00:32:20]:
So instead of having 2 coaches, now I had 8. And so then I sent the coaches and the I at 12, I sent to Harvard project 0 to learn more about how to do project based learning, because that was something this particular school didn't know as much about, and they came back incredibly empowered and very excited about, you know, supporting others. So I really needed first, before I could sort of say, let's do all these great things with students, I needed the teachers to have some great things that they got to do. And that was these were some of the things I I learned to focus on. I I never thought I was gonna write about the needs of educators, but I wrote a book on teacher shortages, and it has 15 things in there that teachers need. And I said, don't just throw them a bone and give them 1 or 2 of these things. You have to do them all. You wanna you wanna keep teachers in the profession that are really worthy of being there for your kids, and you want to attract really good talent into the profession, then you need to do these things.

Barbara Smith [00:33:24]:
And that that's like, okay. If you've got 3 hours of lessons, then you need 3 hours of planning time. At least do 1 to 1. And I guess what that book did is it talked about how these things were actually done in class in school. So when we designed new 3 new schools when I was involved in them, we really designed them around these needs of the teachers and the students. So it can be done, and people say, oh, what about the money? Well, then I wrote a book called how much does a great school cost? So I analyze the budgets. And a lot of people love these line items in a budget, and they're like, oh, well, what are you putting putting in this year? And if you're repurposing your values of the school, you're trying to change the culture, which in other words is that, then the line items are gonna have to change. If they don't change, you're just, like, you're you're just pretending.

Barbara Smith [00:34:15]:
And so I think it and I found a quote. I put it at the very beginning of that book, and the book, I think, is about 4 or 5 years old now, but I've had the quote for over a decade. And it was from Joe Biden before he was vice president, and he said, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value. Yep. And that's what opens up the whole book. So then I had examples of 4 different schools and their budgets and and how they shifted their, you know, the kinds of things they could do by repurposing their budgets. So a lot of one book will kind of lead to another book because people say, oh, you can't do that, those great things for teachers because you just don't have the money. And I said, well, wait a minute.

Barbara Smith [00:34:55]:
Hold on. Let me tell you. I had my own budgets from my own three schools, and we made it happen because there's a lot of places where money is wasted, and there's a lot of opportunities for grants and so on, especially if you wanna do innovative ideas. So we never felt a pinch. In fact, I think in most of my I was always in the black by 3 or $400,000 every year. That even with giving, you know, teachers 15, 16 kids in a classroom. So so there is you can do it, but you have to not just, as a school leader, rely on somebody outside of the school to tell you what's gonna be on those line items. You gotta say, no.

Barbara Smith [00:35:34]:
No. No. No. I'm sorry if you don't have a nice little trend chart. You could do it because because that little space isn't there anymore. However, that should not be what drives what's happening in schools. And it it actually I think it does does drive quite a bit, and it's it's unfortunate, but you need to have some pretty bold people in leadership roles to shift, you know, how funds are being allocated for sure.

Liza Holland [00:35:58]:
Yeah. That is a little disruptive. It's it's out of the status quo, and and the type of change we're talking about is is definitely not, not status quo. So tell me, because you've had a tremendous amount of experiences over lots of different schools and even different countries and all that kinda thing. As you went to implement change like this, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced?

Barbara Smith [00:36:22]:
I think the biggest challenge is time, and I'll give an example kind of where I have an experience that, you know, is one of those memory makers, and I have to say, gee, which ones would I share? When I was opening the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit, it's a high school, charter school there, we designed the curriculum so that we would have 10 to 1 ratio for English and math classes because these kids tested in supposedly at grade 3 or level, most of them. So we had quite a challenge when teachers would say, well, I've gotta teach, you know, quadratic equations. I was like, yeah. Well, how are you gonna do that without any knowledge of algebra and so on? Like, I mean, and some kids, there were a few that were ready for grade 9 math, and they were differentiated, and they had it. But we had to, really collapse a grade 3 to 5 program, collapse a 6 to 8 program, and then move them in within a couple years by grade 10 to the program. Now most of those kids did go on and get into colleges, and whether they all graduated from the colleges is another issue, but we definitely, had our work cut out for that. But one of the things that I valued was social emotional learning, as I mentioned. And I said, every Wednesday afternoon, I've made arrangements with this local Baptist minister with a bus, and he was going to take all the students to a veterans hospital.

Barbara Smith [00:37:49]:
And when they went there, their job was to build a relationship so that the students could write their biographies. And these students, they played cards. They did all sorts of things. But every day, they took notes like a reporter about the person that they were connected with. And at the end, they published their, an anthology with all the biographies in them. But to me, that was much more powerful than writing an essay about, a Shakespeare,

Liza Holland [00:38:17]:
book. Absolutely.

Barbara Smith [00:38:19]:
And that was an example. But what happened was when they were tested that 1st year, board kind of came along and said, oh, well, we came forth in the city. Well, they didn't come last, but they came currently to do that. So we need that time back. They need to do more language arts and more traditional, courses in that that afternoon. But it's over later, I think, when since the school started. And guess what? They're still in 4th place. But the 9 years of students have not had that experience of forming those relationships with seniors in their community and writing something that really mattered.

Barbara Smith [00:38:54]:
And when those kids talk about their overall experiences, sure enough, they remember that. And so time is the biggest challenge, and you've got the politics of people saying, who may not have any background, unfortunately, the trustees, not much background in education, and and they they they react quickly. So if I was gonna start a school again, I would say, you leave that get that testing. Like, get it out of here for 3 years. Don't don't come near us for 3 years. Let us really develop the application of what an ideal skill could be based on their research. But don't let the testing ruin it because that's what happened. So they went back to, doing more kind of like in the old days, we used to call things called SRAs.

Barbara Smith [00:39:42]:
And you'd read a a paragraph, and then you'd answer multiple choice questions about it. Yeah. And most kids hated them, and they got rid of them for a while because we knew they weren't sound, from a curricular point of view. But now because they're aligned so beautifully with these, standardized tests, they're come back in. And then it's like, oh, we we can fix this. And as if the numbers that they can show on a single page dashboard is telling you a school's improving or a culture's improving, you're wrong because you should see some other indicators in your community. Are the number of people entering prisons going down? What about the health figures? Like, we're not independent of that. So if our education was really contributing to society, there should be a lot of changes in the thing in in other indicators than whether they were motivated to read about penguins when they're from inner city Detroit on a test.

Barbara Smith [00:40:38]:
It just, it sort of baffles me. But to me, that's the biggest challenge. And why I write the books is to be able to show or tell stories about people who navigated around those challenges and the experiences that created. And even though that experience of being in the the veterans hospital, when many of those vets never had anybody visit them for 5 or 6 years, to me, that's, like, really powerful. It's not soft. They had to write about it. They had to construct meaning. They had to make sense of some stories that sometimes they've said, oh, there's some big gap gaping holes in the story.

Barbara Smith [00:41:13]:
I need to go back and think about it. So they became reporters. They became writers. They became something other than a student taking a test.

Liza Holland [00:41:23]:
It answers that age old question, why do we need to know this? Why do we need to do this? And those are those are experiences that actually answer that question and create that life long learner that we need to be producing moving forward, and the testing system's not gonna cut it. And I honestly, you just gave me a whole bunch of great things, but my final question is that what would you like decision makers to know? And I know you've given me a bunch of them, but any final thoughts on, on that piece?

Barbara Smith [00:41:52]:
Yeah. I I I actually when you told me this question in advance, I said, this is really oh, man. I could I could talk for hours, but I wanna just I'll say 3 things. One is that I really hope decision makers will pay attention to stories of schools with students and teachers who are engaged. Pay attention to that. Learning is much bigger than test scores. So that's the first thing. Pay attention to the qualitative research.

Barbara Smith [00:42:21]:
Because if you want a quality school, quality results, then you can't just narrowly look at quantitative results. So and the second one, you can't force engagement. Can't force it, and you can't force learning. So what works at one school will not work at another school. And so the notion of replicating what this school over here is doing, because all those students might be from the same demographic background. And the idea of using words like accountability, delivery, training, these are clues to a system that wants a compliant society that basically will either answer to or buy products from or be under some other society that is a critical and thinking society. So we're actually creating a society with these you know, just because it's organized and it's easy to do and technology could make it happen, does not mean that that is actually gonna be to a society that and and, of course, that's what made the United States, for instance, so incredible for so many years because their graduate schools were second to none. There was so much innovation and so much excitement coming out of them.

Barbara Smith [00:43:42]:
And now it's like, okay. They can't be creative until they get there, and then they're expected to be creative and come up with their own ideas. And now AI is saying, well, we can write your paper for you. It's like, wait a minute. Where is what are we doing to grow their minds? And I and I don't think this this direction will do. So that's my second point. And my third one is trustees, because they're at the top of the food chain in the public systems. They need to make it their responsibility to learn about informed practices.

Barbara Smith [00:44:15]:
So I would every time I meet a trustee, I says, well, what courses are you taking now? What do you mean? Well no. No. Wait. Are you talking about assessment? Are you talking about differentiation? You what because, you know, you're making budget decisions and you're making personnel decisions and everything else. Based on this, you're choosing a director of education who you should know how to choose that person. And I would also say ministry of education and department of education officials, the same thing. Who who's leading? Are they following the testing movement and the and the these should lead, but they should be informed leaders, and they need to get well, I really believe also that that trustees, need to make it their responsibility to really learn about informed practices because they're at the top of the food chain. They have to hire the directors, and the directors have to be able to hire their lead teams as well in the administrative area that know about informed practices, not just operational practices.

Barbara Smith [00:45:17]:
Okay? Not just leadership administration. I'm talking about curriculum and teaching and learning. Like, what do we know? And if that requires more time, then the operational block scheduling isn't cutting it. It's not gonna allow for the research about how kids are learning, what kids are telling us in their stories about what what what's a memory maker for them, what what makes them wanna go deep in learning. We have to pay attention to that. And I think those things are missing. And and I I really hope come across a trustee, I'm gonna ask them what courses are you taking and what are you learning next? Because you shouldn't be expecting your students to learn or the staff or anyone else that's involved in your school community and your organization if you're not gonna be a role model yourself.

Liza Holland [00:46:04]:
That is such an excellent point. And for our American listeners, these are the school board people that you need to be talking to about what what courses are you taking. That is that's really brilliant, actually, because they need to be learning what the what the research supports as opposed to what might be out on social media or, the trend in a political party or any of those kinds of things, So Exactly. That is great. Gosh, I have enjoyed this conversation so much, and I really look forward to reading your books. That's No.

Barbara Smith [00:46:35]:
Thank you, Liz. So exciting.

Liza Holland [00:46:38]:
I appreciate it.

Barbara Smith [00:46:39]:
Well, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation too, so

Liza Holland [00:46:43]:
Well, I appreciate you taking the time to, to share with us and being on Education Perspectives.

Barbara Smith [00:46:48]:
Okay. Take care.

Liza Holland [00:46:52]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.