Pagnotta:        What kind of approach are you encouraging teachers to have when they work with students?

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Anderson:       We need to be thinking, “What is the role of school?  Is the role of school for us

to make kids do stuff and their job is to dutifully do the assignments? Or are we doing school with kids? Are we trying to engage them in interesting work? Do we want them to not only be partners with us but to sometimes even drive the learning?” Instead, it often feels like they come to school to support the goals we have. It’s a huge shift.  Forty or fifty years ago, it would have been totally appropriate for school to be based in compliance because that's the kind of work that most people were doing in the workplace. You showed up, you had a job, you had a boss, the boss would tell you what to do, you would do it. That was the work of the Industrial Age. 

 

Pagnotta:         I love this quote that you said in your Behaviorism blog, “We zigged when we

should have zagged” in reference to when society desired to increase learning in the classroom, we instituted standardized assessment instead of launching approaches that support engagement, creativity and critical thinking. We now have teachers who are responsible for helping their students be successful on these tests and wanting to foster high level thinking skills. How do you suggest that teachers manage these sometimes conflicting demands?

 

Anderson:       With humor and a sense of perspective! The Finland Phenomenon by Tony Wagner is a must-see.  He goes to Finland to discover their secret because every year Finland is at the top of the world ranking in the PISA tests, the standardized achievement tests given to high school kids every year. He discovered that kids don't get much formalized reading instruction until they're about seven or eight years old. They get very little homework. In elementary school, for every 45 minutes in class, they have 15 minutes outside. They do a lot of project based learning and a lot of choice based learning. They have a centralized, national curriculum, but it's pared down and a lot of autonomy is given to teachers and schools about how to teach it.

 

In my own teaching, I tried to focus most of my attention on teaching in a way that would lead to great engagement including projects that would help my students really learn high level thinking skills. I fostered a classroom environment where they could get curious and fascinated with the work that they were doing. And when it came time for standardized testing, I would do some light practice on the formats of those tests. We would practice doing some bubble filling. I would sometimes write morning messages using the format of the questions on the test. For example, “What's one of your favorite breakfast foods: eggs, pancakes, waffles, other.” We would talk about what it means if you see one that says “other”, so they felt like they were comfortable with the format of the testing.

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Pagnotta:         In your blog series, A Brief History of Behaviorism, you eloquently weave together the history of psychology and the needs of society to depict how behaviorism entered the classroom setting.  I think most teachers are on board with moving away from compliance driven classrooms and rote learning towards fostering critical thinking skills in a classroom that upholds mutual respect. However, I see many teachers struggling with how to foster these skills and set limits to promote expected behavior.  Essentially, they are wanting to give up the harmful tools of fear and punitive punishments but they don’t yet have the tools to take their place. This is often leading towards either a revert to punitive punishment (authoritarian) or a far slide to permissiveness.  What are some classroom management tools that teachers can fill their toolbox with that balance skill building with clear boundaries and foster mutual respect?”

 

Watching teachers navigate this shift from compliance to connection reminds me a little bit of what we did with the teaching of literacy back in the 80s when this whole new approach called whole language came out.  The idea was we should be engaging with kids and reading and writing exercises around whole texts, instead of doing focusing on worksheets and phonics.  However, the messaging wasn’t as good as it could have been because people thought they weren't supposed to teach phonics anymore.

 

I think it's sometimes we tend to be overly concrete and we think we're looking at either A or B, when sometimes it's a mix of the two. So my goal as a teacher is to have kids authentically engaged in work that they care about. And it's not a choice to write. If a student isn’t writing and it’s time to write, I can say: “We're all writing and so I'm going to try and help you find ways to be a writer. I'm going to help you find things you want to write about but it's not a choice to sit there and not do your work.” And so I think there needs to be a balance and we can do it without punishments, but we can’t do without consequences.  If a kid makes a mess, they need to clean up the mess. If they hurt somebody's feelings, they need to figure out a way to try and repair that damage. If they aren't doing work, we need to help them find another time when they're going to get that work done.

 

There are three different kinds of consequences that people typically talk about: natural consequences, logical consequences and punishments. The goal with punishment is to make the consequence sting enough so that the kid won't repeat the mistake and repeat the misbehavior. So an example of a punishment is a kid says something rude in the lunchroom and we take away recess. Losing recess has nothing to do with saying something mean in the lunchroom. Those two things are disconnected. But we know the kid wants to go to recess and so we say, “You said something mean so you can't go to recess.” We're trying to make them hurt enough so that they won't do it again. Typically what that teaches kids is fear, anger, resentment and revenge.  It's not good.  Natural consequences are consequences that we don't have to do anything about at all. They just happen. So if a kid forgets to bring their coat out to recess, they're cold.  That's a natural consequence.  If somebody spills their snack all over the floor because they were being goofy and now their snack is all ruined, they don't have a snack.  Natural consequences can be lovely because we don’t need to do as an adult except provide a bit of empathy.

 

Pagnotta:         And the trick is not to save them.  If the parent goes home and gets the coat for the kid or the teacher finds another snack for the kid, they will lose the opportunity to learn from the natural consequence.  It can be hard for the adults to tolerate kids being uncomfortable and when adults prevent kids from being mildly uncomfortable, we deprive them of the opportunity to become more resilient and confident that they can handle uncomfortable situations and this can lead to the development of anxiety in kids.

 

Anderson:       And I hate this term, “Oh, he's such a good kid. He's almost always doing what he should.” (Implying that we should save him from the discomfort of the natural consequence).  As soon as we say, “Oh, he's such a good kid”, that implies there must be other kids out there that we think of as bad.  You can't have good kids without bad kids. So we need to stop saying that. We might say, “Oh, there's a kid who's almost always responsible”.

 

Pagnotta:         And then instead of saving him, we think this is a golden opportunity for him to learn an important lesson.

 

Anderson:       Yes. My wife loves to say, we're not raising children. We're raising grownups.  So we should be looking for opportunities for kids who are often responsible to get a little lesson in what it means when you're irresponsible.  Otherwise, these are the kids who end up shoplifting when they're senior in high school because they've always been able to get away with just a little bit. 

 

At the same time, we have to be careful about natural consequences when the price is too high.  We don't let a kid climb all the way to the top of the swing set and tightrope walk across the top because the natural consequence could be a broken neck. So we do need to save kids when there's imminent danger or when the consequences is too rough.  For example, we shouldn't let a sophomore not do work for an entire semester, figuring the natural consequence is they'll fail the class.  We shouldn't allow kids not to learn for a whole semester.

 

Okay, so now logical consequences are the ones that we impose, but that are connected to what's happened. They're relevant, they're respectful, they're realistic.  If a kid is being goofy and they knock their chocolate milk onto the floor in the lunchroom should clean up the milk that they spilled. But they shouldn't have to clean the entire cafeteria.  That would be an example of a logical consequence. Here's another one. This is from a class I was just in recently, a second grade class where a teacher is struggling with being permissive. I think because he thinks that if he's engaging enough and kind enough and nice enough, the kids should want to do the right thing.  There was this kid who had a box of crayons and he begins flipping the box up in the air as the teacher is teaching a lesson.  Smack, onto the floor they fall.  The teacher said, “You need to keep the crayons on the floor.”  The kid tosses the box again. The teacher says, “I told you, you need to keep the crayons on the floor.”  He continues to say, “Remember what I said, you need to keep the crayons on the floor” five or six times.  And then it kept going and it didn't stop and it disrupted the entire class. A great logical consequence when the kid didn’t comply with keeping the box of crayons on the floor would be for the teacher to simply take the crayons.

 

Sometimes teachers worry that they're going to sound or feel mean. And they really want to be nice. They want to create a safe environment for kids. But consequences, when delivered well, actually create a sense of safety because what we're then doing is holding the kids to a reasonable standard of behavior.  We're saying that it's not okay to be disrespectful in the classroom. It's not okay to be messy and leave things around that other people have to clean up. And so, consequences are part of how we put up guardrails and keep kids safe amidst the chaos of being in a school.

 

Pagnotta:         And that not only helps that student to improve and be held accountable for their behavior and increase their skills, but it also sends a message to the other students that that certain behavior isn't allowed, so that those students know that the teacher is in charge and the teacher can handle it. I've seen a lot of situations where there are permissive classrooms where the other students feel like, “Well, the teacher is not going to handle it, so I have to handle it.” And then it creates a lot of peer-to-peer conflict.

 

Anderson:      Yeah, or kids get unsettled when they're worried that the adults are not strong enough to be in charge. And then they start to get dysregulated. And then some teachers begin to have a narrative that I can't stand because I think it it displays a sort of a low opinion of kids’ moral and ethical thinking:, “Well, if one kid gets away with it, then all the other kids are going to want to do it And I just don't believe that kids want to get away with it. But I do think that when one kid is being goofy and the teacher isn't stopping it, the other kids get giddy or silly or nervous and they get dysregulated and then they start to exhibit silly and goofy and negative behaviors, not because they want to misbehave but because that's what's happening in the situation.

 

Pagnotta:         It’s the contagion effect.

 

Anderson:       Absolutely. But it's not that our children are out to get us or that they're looking for opportunities to misbehave.

 

Pagnotta:         Yes, and what you just said reminded me of situations where teachers are noticing a behavior and they really want to stop that behavior and they also want to send a message to other students.  This is a situation that can often breed punitive consequences because the teacher wants the other students to know there was a consequence so as to minimize the likelihood of the other students engaging in that behavior.  How would you speak to a teacher who was worried about that?

 

Anderson:       That's a really important question because kids are always watching us and they're paying exquisite attention to how we talk to other kids and handle situations. So one thing we might do if a child is just getting overly silly and goofy is to go over to the kid and say, “Katie, it's time to settle down. It's not working for you in this space, so we're going to move you to another space.”  We don't say that intentionally so that everybody else hears it but we also know that other kids are going to hear it and that's okay if we're speaking in a respectful tone.

 

I do think there's a time when we should make sure that kids know that we're addressing something. And that's when kids say mean things to each other.  The research is really clear that when kids think that adults ignore mean spirited behavior, bullying goes up in those environments.  And so, if two kids are walking in the hall and one says to the other, “You wore that sweater yesterday. What are you too poor to afford new clothes?” and a teacher hears that, right on the spot they need to call that out so that those two kids and the kids who are around know that the teacher is addressing it. For example, “Katie, that's not an okay thing to say. You and I are going to talk about that later.”  Then you can have the full discussion privately. You don't tell other kids what the consequence was but I do think it's important that kids know that teachers are acting when there's scary or mean stuff going on.

 

Pagnotta:         That's such a nice balance of making sure that everyone knows it's being addressed, and then having the further conversation and if there are any other logical consequences that take place in a private setting.

 

Anderson:       Yes, because there's no space in our schools for public humiliation.  It's not ok to put one kid up in front of the rest of the class and teach them a lesson in front of everybody else so that everybody else sees how bad this is.  Those are the kinds of things that kids carry with them into adulthood.

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Pagnotta:         In your book, Tackling the Motivation Crisis, you describe the six high impact intrinsic motivators: autonomy, belonging, competence, purpose, fun and curiosity. We have been so entrenched in behaviorism for so long, it can be scary for teachers to give up those practices.  What are some telltale signs that a teacher can look for to see if they are on the right track when they begin implementing more intrinsically motivating approaches?

 

Anderson:       One of the ways teachers can check to see if what they are doing is working is to look for the in-the-moment shifts in motivation and behavior. Just yesterday, I was teaching two demo lessons at a middle school in Connecticut.  I'm working with the school on supporting intrinsic motivation and how to help kids become more self-motivated.  It's a suburban district in Connecticut where the students are typically high achieving and are mostly pretty well behaved. But there's a lot of compliance and a lot of grade grubbing.  It’s common for a student to ask, “How do I get more points? I only got a 93 on the test. Could I take it again, so I can get a higher score?” or “What do I need to do in order to get a 4 on the rubric?” Teachers sometimes are okay with that, but they shouldn't be.

 

So yesterday, when we debriefed with teachers after the lesson several teachers talked about how quickly they saw students shift when I made certain moves. For example, in one health class, the kids have been studying different classifications of addictive drugs.  The teacher said that last year, there were a couple of questions that he felt he could never really answer well.  This is an eighth grade health class. They've never met me before. There are eight teachers sitting around the perimeter of the room observing. They're all at their own separate seats masked because of COVID. So, I was thinking, “How are we going to get kids to participate by just asking them what questions they have about addiction?”  I was just imagining it would be like crickets chirping.  So, I said, “How about we find out what questions kids have and then give them the opportunities to search for some of the answers.” He collected a few resources and had those ready to go ahead of time.  

 

At the beginning of the lesson, I said to the students, “You've got to have questions about addiction.  It's so complicated, and there's so much that we don't know. So, our goal is to see what we can come up with.” By starting off asking them to identify their questions, I was tapping into their curiosity, sense of purpose and autonomy.  To minimize the embarrassment of the task, I asked the students to record questions that they were interested in on their own, anonymously on pieces of paper.  Then I read some of the questions they'd written out loud, and the teacher recorded those up on a board. We must have had 12 or 15 questions within a few minutes

 

Then instead of saying,” Okay, now we're going to do research to try and find the answers to these.” I said, “Alright, now our challenge, as a class, is to do a scavenger hunt in the resources to find the answers to these questions.  In the debrief, several teachers mentioned that when I called it a “scavenger hunt” the kids' eyes perked up and their bodies shifted because a “scavenger hunt” is a little more fun than doing “research”. Shifting the language we use can elicit these immediate shifts towards intrinsic motivation.  

 

Pagnotta:         Understanding the power of the language we use is what you highlight in the 

resource that you had created, Teacher Talk that Matters. 

 

Anderson:           Yes.  One of the biggest shifts we need to make if we want to help kids to be 

intrinsically motivated about their work is that we have to stop talking about the work as if we own it and the kids are working for us.  That is one of the biggest language habits we have collectively as educators. Instead of saying, “In this next activity, here are three things you need to do for me.” or, “I'm going to be looking for students who are putting in a lot of effort.” or “I need to see…”   When we talk about all the work from our own perspective, in the first person, we shouldn't be surprised when the kids feel like they're working for us and are engaged in a compliance task instead of true curiosity, intrigue or interest to learn.

 

Pagnotta:         What are some other key moves a teacher can make to increase intrinsic motivation? 

 

Anderson:       At the end of a class period or at the end of an activity, teachers can say to the students, “What did you think of that?” or “Was that enjoyable?” or “I was trying to craft something there that you would be really excited about. How did I do with that?” 

 

Here is an example:  I taught a revision lesson in an ELA class where they're writing persuasive pieces. Instead of giving them a laundry list of all the things they had to revise, I talked with the teacher and we came up with three items that everybody should look for.  Then, as a class, we generated some other things they might look for too.  Next, every kid went through and prioritized what two items they thought were most important for their writing.  They went ahead and made those revisions.  After they had done the revisions, I wanted to find out if it helped for them to have some ownership over the revision and so I asked them, “Did that help?  On a scale of one to five where one is it didn't help at all and five is, That was really helpful!” Almost all the kids said four, which I think is interesting.

 

Pagnotta:         Inviting that reflection really encourages the students to be a part of what's being offered. The more they can feel a part of it, the more they're invested in it.  

 

In all the ways that you support schools and teachers, what is the single most effective strategy, approach or mindset that you would want teachers to begin utilizing in order to meet the needs of their students?

 

Anderson:       For an approach that teachers should use with kids, I would say give them more choice.  Give them choices about what they're learning and choices about how they're learning it. Give them more autonomy.  Let them set some of their own goals and work toward them.  Those choices can be as simple as when we are practicing long division, “Do you want to do the workbook page that's in the math text or would you like to make up your own long division problems to practice?” Even a simple choice like that can allow kids to self-differentiate and find problems that are a good place for them to work on.  This helps them feel more autonomy.  

 

Anderson:       We often say that we can't have great, regulated students in the absence of good

schoolwork.  If the schoolwork stinks, or if the environment of the classroom is mean-spirited. or scary, kids won’t be regulated.  The same goes for adults. We need a safe environment and we need our basic needs met.  If we're going to be regulated, we need to be getting enough sleep.  If we are staying up too late grading papers or if we're not exercising because we're working so hard, then eventually, no amount of willpower will allow us to overcome those things and we're going to break down. That was the whole point of the Well-Balanced Teacher.  If we're going to have teachers who have the mental fortitude and the emotional reserves to handle teaching, which is a really stressful hard job. We’ve got to take good care of ourselves.

 

Anderson:       We need to be reflecting and being aware of if we are helping our kids make slow and steady growth and progress. At the same time, it’s important to keep perspective.  Saying, “I'm a good teacher if all of my kids behave well.” would be like a dentist saying, “I'm a good dentist if none of my patients get cavities”.  There are so many things out of our control.

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Pagnotta:         How can administrators really foster an environment that supports well balanced teachers in concrete practical ways instead of simply offering sweats as tokens of appreciation?

 

Anderson:       I’ve heard from multiple teachers this past year, “I’m so tired of my principal telling me to take care of myself.” Here are some things some school leaders could do.  Think of your faculty the same way you want your faculty to think of their students.  What are the environments that we need to create so that adult learners can thrive? What should staff meetings look like so that they help people stay connected so that they're fun and enjoyable and so that they stay purposeful?  How can we meet those psychological needs for teachers through staff meetings, instead of staff meetings being these sort of lists of administrivia; things that could have been put in a memo.? School leaders could be modeling some of these things too.  If you're an administrator and you're working at one o'clock in the morning, and you want to send out an email to everybody, put it on a delayed send and send it out at eight o'clock the next morning. There's no need to do that at one o'clock in the morning because it just sets the tone of workaholism.

 

We've got to go beyond giving them a coffee mug of appreciation with little marshmallows in it on Teacher Appreciation Day and saying, “Okay, everybody, make sure to take good care of yourselves.”  We know that's not enough.

 

Pagnotta:           In your  blog article, Weave SEL Into Your Daily Teaching- A Four Step Process,

you guide teachers on how to reflect on challenging parts of their day with students, ensure they have realistic expectations of their students, and then help them identify which SEL skills to teach. What are some challenges that you see teachers face when they begin to utilize this four-step process? And then how do they overcome these challenges?

 

Anderson:       I think the biggest challenge is to be careful of expecting miraculous or immediate results.

So oftentimes we'll go through the process where teachers will create a plan to address a behavior like blurting, teach a lesson around it and then expect that the behavior will cease immediately.  It doesn’t work that fast. If you're a fifth grade teacher and you have a fifth grader reading at a first grade level you know you can't just sit down and have one really great reading conference with that kid, and have them all of a sudden be reading like a fifth grader. A kid can't be like, “Oh, now I get it. Oh, okay. I'll just read the fifth grade text.” We know there are too many lagging skills. There are too many strategies they don't have yet and we know that meaningful growth and progress takes time. But sometimes when it comes to behavior, something like blurting or sloppy transitions or even saying kind things to people, we think that if we have a fifth grader who's presenting like a six year old, if we just come up with the right consequence, or if we sit down and have a good talk with them, then all of a sudden they'll see the error of their ways.  Instead, we should expect slow, steady growth. I keep saying to teachers that if you have a class that's really challenging at the beginning of the year, they're probably still going to be challenging in the middle of the year and they're probably still going to be challenging at the end of the year. We are there to help them make progress.  One of the biggest challenges is to keep reminding ourselves that we can't expect miracle cures. We just do this one strategy and everything's going to be okay. If that was true, we all would have done it already.