[00:01] SPEAKER_02:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and my guest today is Jolie Barker. Jolie is the author of The Fearless Classroom, and very excited to hear what a fearless classroom looks like.
[00:30] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:33] SPEAKER_01:
Julie, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you for having me. So talk to us a little bit about what A Fearless Classroom is and what brought you to the point in your career that you just had to write this book.
[00:45] SPEAKER_00:
It all really began about four years ago and I was selected by the Microsoft Partners in Learning Association. as one of their expert educators and I had the opportunity to go to the Microsoft home office in Seattle where we competed with other teachers around the country to go to a global forum that at that time was in Prague and the ability to well I met Jane McGonigal who wrote Reality is Broken and she made a comment about how we are hardwired as humans to like challenges and the way she put it to us was think about the game of golf the purpose of golf is to put the ball in the hole so why are we not just taking the little ball and dropping it in the hole because it's boring and we would get really tired of that it's not challenging right so we have created these you know obstacles
[01:51]
sand traps, water hazards, hills, slopes. And then we put this little bitty foot on a long, tiny stick and have to hit the ball as far away from the hole as possible. And I thought that's a really good point that we do like to be challenged as people. That kind of gets us moving and gets us motivated. And she also made the point that kids will play nine hours a day on a video game and it's not because of the graphics and it's not because of anything other than the fact that it's a challenge for them. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could harness that kind of determination and tenacity into my classroom?
[02:31]
So I originally started as gamifying my classroom and using gaming, but it transformed itself into understanding the brain functions and the different parts of our brain that fire off when we are engaged in different things. For example, like in curiosity, when we are curious about something and exploring it and discovering it, that's one part of your brain that fires off. And then using your imagination to do something else, that's another part. And then adapting and adjusting your learning is another part. So I designed the Fearless Classroom to have four different centers of collaboration and they are imagination, curiosity, adaptation, and passion. And there's the three prong approach to the fearless classroom.
[03:26]
And one is that teachers need to be fearless. Administrators need to be fearless in terms of letting go of the reins a little bit and letting kids have a little more voice in what happens. And that's not just in lesson planning, but in, Like PTO or PTAs should have a student voice and student representative in those things. Allowing students to help design learning spaces. Those kinds of things need to be happening. And so that's part of the fearlessness.
[03:57]
The second is my students and all students need to be fearless in terms of taking risks and being okay with failure as just a necessary obstacle. Because they fail 80% of the time when they're playing video games and they're okay with it. But yet you give them a low grade on something or you tell them to go revise a paper and they get frustrated and don't really care to, you know, push through. So it's in terms of fostering that kind of mentality of fearlessness in your students also. And then the final one is not using fear tactics. to get kids to comply and to do their work.
[04:40]
Um, using terms like you're going to miss recess if you don't do this, or you're going to have detention if you don't finish this work, or, you know, you can't use computer if, you know, that, that kind of thing. So, um, that's really what the fearless classroom looks like. And it's really an encompassing campus wide district wide kind of thing that can be, um, you know, put out there and, and, as a mentality and as a method for everyone, but it's really about letting go of the stress of scores and things like that. Because if the kids are engaged and they are learning at the highest level, which fearlessness will do, it's kind of a moot point. They, they excel at their tests and they do well on their scores.
[05:30]
So it's kind of a non-issue.
[05:34] SPEAKER_01:
So Jolie, I love that connection between fear and failure that we see as so present in the classroom. We always see students being afraid to try because they're afraid that they'll fail or they're afraid that they'll be embarrassed. And yet those same students, so many of our students will go home and play video games and try a hundred times. And I remember myself as a kid, I would play a video game and would try and try and try and try. And I would not get more and more demoralized the more I tried. You know, I would get frustrated at times, but that would sometimes even kind of double my resolve to beat that level or to beat that boss and go on to the next level.
[06:18]
And I think when we talk about gamification, when we think about games and developing that kind of persistence, often we're talking about electronic things. Now, in your classroom, is gamification something that happens primarily online? on computers or do you have different approaches to it?
[06:34] SPEAKER_00:
No, I actually, when I first started, it was all gaming. It was just a tactic. It was gaming words. And that's in my book, that if somebody wants to gamify, they have to use words like noob and all the little gaming lingo. And I even created little digital badges that they could earn. But what I noticed was earning the digital badges or getting a high score and those kind of things were not the motivating factor.
[07:03]
They couldn't care less about those things. And I was a little surprised because I'm like, well, you like to collect things, but it wasn't that. It was the way that it was presented. And I created a fake department that they were working for. It was the Department of PSYOG Training. And PSYOG, It's SIOG, and it stands for Significantly Important Operational Geniuses.
[07:30]
And Dr. Sayag, the head of the department, comes in every day and gives them a challenge. And it might be through Vokies or through some other kind of animated avatar, or I might dress up as some weird character. But it's about giving them a challenge. And even now, as I teach fifth grade, it's literally a matter of me just saying, your mission today is figuring out which one of those poems goes with which one of those myths. And they have to search through and they may be really abstractly connected, but the fact that they're reading intently and trying to find connections between poetry and mythology is what brings that deeper learning to them.
[08:22]
And it's a difference between I would like for you to do this or your mission is. It's really just about giving them the challenge. They don't care about what the reward is. They just like to say I won or I figured it out. So for me, my gamification is really more of, hey guys, the department came in and said this and I'll put something up on the board and they'll watch the little video. And then that's their mission.
[08:51] SPEAKER_01:
So, Jolie, one thing that I think a lot of teachers and especially administrators wonder about when we start talking about giving more ownership over to students and looking at approaches to gamification. One big question is around assessment. And if we want to eliminate fear, certainly assessment is a source of fear for a lot of kids. And I wonder if you could talk to us about what assessment looks like in your fearless classroom.
[09:21] SPEAKER_00:
Well, there is several chapters about assessing students, not just on paper, but ways that you can have authentic assessment. one of those things I usually do like a three prong approach to my assessment as well they will have a pen and paper assessment part to it it might be writing a paragraph it might be doing a quick check or an exit ticket or something like that but I also interview my kids and I also have them create something so they have to produce some part of it they have to tell me what they know about it. And then they have to write about it as well. Because what I found is some kids are better at telling me than writing it.
[10:12]
And some kids are better at writing than telling. And some kids are better at showing me. And I am only looking at every kid in one aspect. I'm going to miss out on what they really know. And I think that's one of the problems with standardized testing is and even district assessments and things like that is, you know, we're expected to differentiate for every child in our classroom, yet we aren't differentiating our assessments. And I assess the same level of understanding.
[10:43]
The standard never changes. But if you can tell me what you know and somebody else can write it and somebody else produces something and then explains what they did and all of you have the same level of understanding at that student expectation of the standard, then why do I need to make everybody do one thing or another? And there are requirements. I do have to do district assessments. I do have to do, you know, the standardized testing in our state, but the rest of the time I can assess through all of those methods. And there's clear understanding that I gleaned from all of that.
[11:25]
And as far as, like administrators learning, um, ways to kind of interject some fearless classroom into their classrooms and what the effects will be. Um, there are rubrics that I have in my book that I created not for grading host, um, lesson, but during lesson planning. So if you want collaboration in your lesson, there's a rubric for it. If you want more, um, products or some kind of creativity that goes on in it. There's a rubric for that. So I do have rubrics that I created that you would start first with and then create your lessons from that as opposed to using it as a grading system.
[12:15]
There's another thing about assessment. I always tell my students to alleviate their fear. I always tell my students that the assessments are my report card. that it tells me if I've done my job in teaching them. And that it's literally just, you just show me what I've taught you and do your best and show me what I've taught you. And then I look at the score because that's really what it is.
[12:43]
It's my report card. If they don't, if they fail a test, it's not their fault. It's I didn't teach them either to that level or I didn't intervene enough with a child. and it I have to reflect on that as my responsibility if I'm getting to every single kid where they need to be then their assessments are going to show that and a lot of teachers don't like that remark because you know we do have different levels of kids but if you know a kid is below grade level and you give them an on grade level test without any modifications and you can expect them to not do well but if you've taught them certain strategies of getting through, then they might do better than you think.
[13:29] SPEAKER_01:
So, Jolie, to our audience of school administrators who are collectively responsible for the education of tens of thousands of students, what do you really want to see each student experience? Or what do you want to be the case for every student? And what can we do to get started on that as educational leaders?
[13:49] SPEAKER_00:
I would say that the most important thing that we can do for kids is Above and beyond what our call is as educators and administrators is that our kids need to know that they matter in this world. We need to give them opportunities to learn outside of your classroom with other students from around the country. We have enough technology available that you can connect out there. Service and empathy projects are always exceptional when it comes to giving the kids not only a purpose for their learning, but a deeper understanding of their impact and their significance in this world. And students of all ages need to know that they have a voice that will be heard if they know how to use it properly and that they can make an impact and a difference.
[14:46]
And even in just one person's life, it changes the world. And if we can just cultivate that kind of mentality on our campuses across our nation, the learning will be there. They just need to know that they matter on our campuses.
[15:02] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is The Fearless Classroom, A Practical Guide to Experiential Learning Environments. Jolie, thank you so much for joining us for Principal Center Radio.
[15:11] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
[15:14] SPEAKER_02:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[15:19] SPEAKER_01:
So, high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my interview with Jolie Barker about The Fearless Classroom? And I would encourage you to check out the book. It has a lot of different elements, including gamification and including kind of some cultural things about how we set up the learning environment to be more student-centered and to be less fear-based. But I want to encourage you...
[15:41]
to create an environment within your school that creates more safety and less fear for your teachers. And I'm sure you can imagine the situation Jolie was in when she first embarked on this journey to make her classroom more the way it is today. I think for a lot of people, making those changes would be intimidating because there is fear that, you know, if an administrator comes in and sees things being done differently, sees some kind of non-traditional assessment techniques being used, That would lead to negative repercussions in a lot of schools, and I think it's our job to make sure that we're giving teachers the safety that they need to safely experiment. I think there are lots of things that would benefit the school if teachers would have the courage to try them, but we're not giving people the space that they need and the sense of safety that they need.
[16:32]
to make some of those changes. So we talk a lot on Principal Center Radio about early adopters and people like Jolie who go to conferences about innovation and get invited to work at Microsoft and speak at Microsoft and work with people like Jane McGonigal. These are your early adopters and generally they are less afraid than everyone else, but the way you treat them sends a signal to everyone else about how they're gonna be treated when they try something new. So check out the Fearless Classroom and think about how you can create a fearless school and a fearless professional environment for your teachers.
[17:10] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
