[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
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 I'm honored to be joined today by Mike Fisher. Mike is a writer, curriculum designer, and instructional coach who helps schools revitalize and modernize their curriculum. And he's the author of Hacking Instructional Design. 33 extraordinary ways to create a contemporary curriculum.
[00:36] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:38] SPEAKER_01:
Mike, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:40] SPEAKER_02:
Thanks a lot. Good to be here.
[00:41] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm excited to talk with you about creating or revising curriculum to meet our students' needs and to really make it extraordinary because I think for a lot of us, the experience we had of curriculum as students was not remarkable. You know, you get a book in and it's heavy, and you have to learn from it. And maybe that's the main thing we remember. And often when we land in the classroom, we find that, you know, maybe some things have been updated since we were kids. Maybe some things have improved, but there's still a desire for more. We want our curriculum to do more for our students.
[01:12]
And in the book, Hacking Instructional Design, you've given us an array of tools and approaches to doing that. So tell us a little bit about the origin of the book, Hacking Instructional Design. Where did this come from in your work with schools and teachers?
[01:26] SPEAKER_02:
Well, the original idea came from my wife for this particular project. She's a co-author on the book, Elizabeth Fisher. And we've been working with schools for 20 years, both as teachers and as instructional coaches and curriculum designers. And, you know, us noticing that things in the classroom are remarkably the same as they were when we were in school. And they aren't really that much different than when our parents were in school. And so we're really looking for that space to have a about why is school compelling?
[01:55]
Why would students want to be there? What do we expect? Is it learning or is it seat time or is it taking a bunch of tests? And so this kind of came out of trying to solve a bunch of different problems. And we were actually going to write a book on curriculum mapping. And we thought, you know what, if this was a menu of options versus a checkoff list of things to do, it might resonate more.
[02:15]
So that's what we did. We created this menu. And wherever you are in your curriculum design, whether you're using something that was purchased, some sort of product, or whether you're creating something new for your students or whether you're revising something that you've already created, we wanted it to be beneficial to any educator that's coming to this process and be able to give everybody something.
[02:36] SPEAKER_01:
And you start in the book with standards. Why do you think it's important to start with standards? You know, an idea that's been with us a long time, but, you know, we see lots of interdisciplinary things. We see lots of different approaches. Why did you choose to start with standards?
[02:50] SPEAKER_02:
I think because just like a recipe in the kitchen, you've got to have a foundation for things. So there is some science here. And we have standards for a reason, because we want kids to meet benchmarks that I'm not necessarily convinced that those benchmarks need to be laid out by individual grade levels, but we do need goals and objectives and finish lines so that we can continue the work forward from wherever we start. And standards is a good place to start. In fact, I don't think I wrote this into the book, but I heard a really great speaker several years ago. His name's Andrew Chin.
[03:21]
He's a professor at RIT. And he said that in his research and his studies around the world, he has noticed that America is is the only place where the standards are the ceiling. Everywhere else, they're the floor. And I think it's a great way to think about standards-based instruction because it gives us good conversation points for standards-based assessments. But understanding where kids are and where we need them to go. And it's a good checkpoint to make sure that we're on target as well for what's age appropriate.
[03:50]
We don't want to be teaching the Grapes of Wrath in third grade just because it's written on a third grade level. And we want to develop skills along with the content knowledge. There's some benefit to really knowing the standards and how they fit into your complete picture of the learning process. It doesn't mean that we have to create checkoff lists of what the kid needs to do to move on to the next standard, nor are we going to march through the standards like we're marching across a battlefield. They are there to inform what we're going to do.
[04:20] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and I love that idea of not seeing standards as the ceiling, but instead seeing them as the foundation. And you talk in chapter five about student goal setting. How can that help students reach higher and not have standards as that ceiling?
[04:34] SPEAKER_02:
Well, for one thing, their voices have to be invited into this conversation. I think for a long time, even now, teachers see their role as, you know, they're delivering everything. They're doing all the work. And even Harry and Rosemary Wong, years ago, in their first days of school book, one of the things that they said in the beginning of their book was, you know, you're the teacher. You're not the one that's supposed to be tired at the end of the day. It's supposed to be the kids.
[04:59]
They're the ones that are supposed to be doing the work. And so I think it's an idea that should be revisited often. The kids need to be invited in. They need to be doing the work. They need to be doing the exploring. And I absolutely believe they should help take part of these standards apart.
[05:13]
If not for understanding what their expectations are on that foundational level, at least to help them learn how to set goals. Because one of the larger facets of what we're talking about here is self-regulation and self-determination. and them being able to make autonomous decisions about their learning and where they're going to go. Do we want them to go far afield and just go off into wherever? No. We want them to stay focused on whatever the task is associated with the skills and the content from the standard.
[05:42]
Does that mean we're not going to let them have those field trips? Absolutely not. We're still going to let that happen. But we want to keep the plan in place. And if the students are informed of how their voices can impact the plan, I think that brings buy-in to the whole system. I think it helps with engagement.
[05:58]
I think it helps with behavior because they've got a purpose. They've got a reason for doing what they're doing, not just because the teacher told them to.
[06:04] SPEAKER_01:
And I think that re-envisioning of the student's role of not just doing what the adults say, but really having some ownership and being able to make decisions about your own learning is so critical. And you encourage readers in the book to think like a kid. You say in chapter 15, ask yourself, would I want to be a student in this classroom? Would I want to follow my own directions for this unit? Or would I want to have, you know, kind of a different experience? What does it look like when we take that perspective as educators and think, would I want to be a student in my own school?
[06:37]
What possibilities emerge from that type of thinking?
[06:40] SPEAKER_02:
And in some of the schools that we work in, in their cafeterias, or like some of them have this quote up on the wall about, you know, if everybody in here had your attitude, what would this place look like? And I think about that when I think about like what kids experience in school, even with our my wife and our own children. You know, there's things that are going on that are worth fighting for. But the thing that we want the most is for our kids to enjoy what they're doing and be engaged and not be the problems and not be kids who are showing up to do a bunch of worksheets and come home. We want them to be just avid learners. We want them to be involved in the processes.
[07:20]
We want them to be thinkers. We want them to be discoverers and explorers. We talk about roles in the book quite a bit and not just inviting the kid in as a role, like a stakeholder role, but really giving them experiences to let them Understand what it means to be a scientist to be a historian to be someone who goes and explore something That's not known and I think about when I was doing research for a previous book I had talked to a kid who told me that he stays up in the middle of the night because he's interested in nanotechnology the technology that makes our phones and smaller and smaller unless, well, not my phone. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, but my eyes are old. So, but he stays up in the middle of the night to talk to colleagues all over the world. And these are kids that just like found each other on Facebook or in forums or Reddit or something.
[08:10]
And they attend online technology conferences in the middle of the night. And he goes and he tells this to his teacher at school who's teaching the technology courses. And the teacher's like, that's nice. Here are your plans for the bottle rocket that we're going to build that everybody already knows what's going to happen. And but we're going to do it anyway, because this is what you do at school. And I thought, wow, that's a wasted opportunity.
[08:33]
And this kid is sitting in this teacher's class, biding his time so that he can get back to what matters to him. And if we could really, you know, dig into figuring out what matters with kids and situating what we do with their perspectives in mind. I think it could transform a lot of the stuff that we're doing.
[08:52] SPEAKER_01:
And even the possibility of not just not shutting down that student, not just telling that student that that's not the right way to approach learning, but actually encouraging other students to approach their own learning with that degree of passion and self-directed research and kind of above and beyond. It seems like the potential is there, but it is a very different way of thinking about instructional design. What are some of the big picture realizations or kind of the thinking shifts that teachers have to make, that administrators have to make in order to create the kind of schools and classrooms where students are not only tolerated if they approach their learning that way, but actually encouraged to become that kind of self-directed learner?
[09:38] SPEAKER_02:
The teacher that I was interacting with on Twitter said that their job was to make their curriculum palatable. And like tolerance, I think it's a terrible word for education. You mentioned, you know, going above and beyond. That idea alone, everyone knows what above and beyond is. That's the new normal. That's where these kids expect you to be.
[09:59]
The old tradition, all of the old stuff, it's gone. It's done. We're not preparing kids for 1987. We're preparing them for 2025, 2035. And if we don't change some things, we're going to lose a whole generation. And I'm not fear-mongering.
[10:16]
I'm not trying to stir up something for an emotional response. It's really the truth. Apple computers and Apple phones, and probably all of them, have planned obsolescence plans. They know that in two years, you're going to have to spend another $500 or $600. And so they're constantly recreating their product. Why aren't we doing that as teachers?
[10:37]
Why aren't we constantly looking for what's the best version of what we can deliver to students? Not for them to pay another $600 for it in two years, but everyone else in the world outside of school iterates. They come up with versions of what we do. I'm an example of that. You're an example of that. You're not the same person you were five years ago.
[10:56]
You weren't the same person you were 10 years ago. But if we stay stuck in these boxes, we can't stay in them and then tell kids to think outside of it. We've got to be orbiting that box with them.
[11:05] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I love I forget where I heard this. Maybe this is a Seth Godin thing or from somebody else. But the idea that if you're not a little bit embarrassed by the work that you did a couple of years ago, you're not pushing yourself far enough. Right. You're not putting enough out there. And that continual kind of reinvention is.
[11:21]
is not just a great way to produce amazing things, but I mean, it's an essential career skill in this day and age when, you know, a lot of the jobs that our kids will have don't exist yet. And the jobs that they get initially won't exist for long. You know, it may be that a lot of the things that kids are doing when they get out of school will become obsolete. You know, the Obsolescence is built into our society now, not just individual products, but the whole workforce has some obsolescence trends increasingly being built into it. So I love that sense of adaptability and that sense of ownership. that you're talking about and that connection to what students want to pursue that's going to take them toward their goals.
[12:05]
And I think maybe one of the hesitations that educators have about really taking a fresh look at curriculum or giving students more ownership of it, there's a risk that kids first answer when we say, okay, where do you wanna go with this? What are some of your goals? There's a risk that a substantial number of kids are gonna say, I wanna play Fortnite more. And we have to say, okay, I know in advance that that outcome of like, you know, do something that maybe at least I don't see the value of, but maybe there is or is not a value to it. You know, we want to retain some control. We want to maintain some oversight to make sure that kids don't waste their time and do develop the skills they need.
[12:45]
What have you seen from educators who are taking some of those risks and not just, you know, giving permission to the kid who wants to play video games all the time or wants to do something that at least we as educators don't see the value of? How are they managing that tension and allowing something that we might traditionally have thought of as an independent study or a project or pursuing a passion? You know, what's the right way to approach that tension of autonomy, but also responsibility on our part?
[13:12] SPEAKER_02:
Let's take game design in particular. We put a chapter, a hack in the book about game design and about interest curves. And the reason we put it in there is exactly because of what you're describing here. We have teachers that are like, well, all they want to do is play Fortnite. You know, if the kids are coming and they want to play games, I mean, I'll admit when I go home, I like to play my games too. They're usually like word puzzles or like little trivial things.
[13:35]
I'm not playing Fortnite because I can't dance. But when we start asking questions of the kids, what is it that you're getting out of this game? Is it camaraderie? What transferable skills are you learning? Is it critical thinking? Are you having to be a creative problem solver?
[13:50]
What's the goal here? What reward are you getting as a result of playing the game well? All of those things can be transferred to instruction because we want to create instructional moments. We even have a whole section in the book called Engagement Actions. I think if I was turning the book into Mark today, I would probably call that compelling actions because I think compelling is a better word. We want kids that are not just engaged, not just eyes on the teacher or eyes on the material, but we want them involved because they're so compelled and just hungry, addicted to learning.
[14:25]
So when I look at a kid that's playing Fortnite, and they're playing it all the time, and the parents and the teachers are saying, well, they're just addicted to this game. Well, there's something in the game that's giving them serotonin. There's a reward system involved. We need to ask kids questions about that. We need to ask about how we can make those transferable skills happen in the classroom. And you could totally do it with curriculum.
[14:49]
In the hack on game design, we talk about a guy named Jesse Schell, who wrote a book on game design theory. He has like 120 lenses that game designers think about whenever they're creating a good game. And if you take those lenses and you think about them in terms of What could they change in the curriculum? Things like joy, interest curves actually is one of the lenses. There's so many different opportunities to think about how we might use these lenses to upgrade what we're doing. And then we're thinking like a gamer.
[15:21]
We don't have to play actual games. We're using game design to upgrade what we do. And kids appreciate that, especially if they have a voice in deciding what some of those lenses are. If you can get them to articulate what they're getting out of Fortnite and apply some of that to the curriculum, you're going to be a rock star. The kids are going to be in it to win it.
[15:43] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely. And I think we've got to ask ourselves just the question that you just stated. Why are they so into this? It's not just that it's electronics and they like electronics. It's not that surface-level explanation that often leaves us frustrated as educators. It's that those games have had a great deal of intentionality put into...
[16:03]
Creating the rewards, as you said, the kind of the psychological and the cognitive rewards that come from, you know, trying something that's really hard and achieving victory in that. Yeah. Sense that you get when you finally beat the level or beat the boss or accomplish something as a team in a game. As adults, often we miss a lot of the impact that those do. design choices are having on students and how they feel when they're playing a game. And I'm reading a book from a few years ago by Jane McGonigal called Reality is Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.
[16:36]
And I totally agree with you, Mike, that if we could take some of those lessons from the game design industry, which by the way, is a huge industry. I mean, it's bigger than Hollywood now. So much research, so much effort is going into designing these experiences that think through what players will be doing and how it will make them feel and how it will motivate them to continue. If we could do just a fraction of that in K-12 education, we could see a sea change. Just incredible opportunity there.
[17:06] SPEAKER_02:
And Jane talks about this in her work. I actually quoted her in my last book. And between her and Jesse Shale, we learned quite a bit about why game design is an incredibly important facet of contemporary curriculum design. In fact, in the last book that I wrote, and we brought it into this one as well, the three main things that a teacher needs to care about in order to have that contemporary label is how they're approaching inquiry, how they're approaching networks and networking with students, including social networks that they're all scared of, but they need to bring them in. And then game design, game design, network design, inquiry design. Those three things by themselves are going to be like good beginning points for creating a contemporary curriculum.
[17:50]
And they're included in hacking instructional design along with some of the more traditional foundational aspects of things that we've learned over the years. But I just watched Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. And I was thinking about like exactly what you were just talking about, how someone somewhere had to design all of these internal components. They're still the real world. But we're moving into a virtual space very, very quickly. In fact, we in my house, we love Google Cardboard, not even playing the games, just going and visiting other places.
[18:23]
Sometimes I go away like on a business trip and I come back and I pull it up in Google Cardboard and let the kids see what I saw.
[18:30] SPEAKER_01:
And tell us what that is. What is Google Cardboard?
[18:32] SPEAKER_02:
Google Cardboard is the virtual reality headsets. You can buy one for thousands of dollars or you can get an actual cardboard one that your phone will fit in on Amazon for 10 bucks. And there's all kinds of apps that go along with them. If you want to play with some of these on my website at digigogy.com slash cardboard, all the stuff that I do with teachers is right there. And some of the apps you can download to your phone and start using right now.
[18:55]
But I love going into schools and, you know, the teachers like, well, we're going to go look at cities around the world. That's part of our social studies curriculum. What can you help us out with? And I'm like, well, let's go there. You know, and I bring the headsets and we can read about something or we can actually be in Peru, on top of Machu Picchu, looking out as if we were there.
[19:16] SPEAKER_01:
So they're using the cardboard as kind of a phone holder and the cardboard divides the phone into two screens and it creates kind of a 3D virtual reality. Very cool.
[19:24] SPEAKER_02:
It is really cool. And it's something that I'd love to see in more classrooms. And it's an easy thing to do. And it's stuff like that, like one change at a time. It's going to give you an idea for something else you can change And we talked about Dan and Chip Heath in the book, in their book called Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Difficult. They talk about identifying bright spots as a motivator for doing challenging things.
[19:48]
And when you have a success, when you do something that works, that's your foundation for trying something else out and finding out what else works. And with game design in particular, going back to this Ready Player One, we are preparing kids for to go into these fields and be the designers of augmented and virtual reality. And that's going to be a huge economic thing in the future. We're already seeing some of this already. In fact, the McDonald's around the corner from our house lost a couple of positions. A couple of people lost their jobs because of the automated menu kiosks that went up.
[20:26]
And you don't even have to interact with anybody anymore. You don't have to go in and tell anyone your order. You punch it all in on the kiosk And you go sit down and someone brings it to you. You might get a thank you. You might just get a drop off. But somebody is designing that technology.
[20:41]
And I don't think that we're going to get there with our dependence on the traditional.
[20:46] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and for leaders and for our audience of leaders, let's talk for a moment about what this looks like at the school level because you conclude the book well. with some kind of big picture blueprints and some school level considerations. For leaders, what does it look like to catalyze this kind of work in classrooms and to create these kind of opportunities for teachers to rethink their curriculum?
[21:10] SPEAKER_02:
Well, for one thing, and probably the most important thing, as much as I want teachers to invite the voices of their students, I want administrators to invite the voices of their teachers. This is a team effort. This is not a top-down decision machine. And the more administrators that see themselves as a team member, the more effective they're going to be in how this all plays out. Teachers want to feel valued in their decisions and their expertise. And especially like if an administrator just shows up and says, well, I bought you a curriculum, you know, good luck.
[21:44]
What's a teacher who's gone to school to become a professional educator going to do with that? They're probably going to follow the rules because they want to have a job. But these people have expertise. And I would like to see that expertise come back into the fold and be able to try stuff out. You know, for a while, especially with the Common Core, we got away from risk taking. We went right down a solid path of some vendor created things for us.
[22:09]
The vendor doesn't know our children. We're doing this all so that we can maintain the money that we got. And we're going to test the kids to death. And it didn't work. You know, we're in most states, we're still running 30, 35, 40 percent proficient. even with new standards.
[22:26]
And if we standardize everything, nothing stands out. And kids aren't numbers. Kids aren't to be standardized. They're all individuals. And I even think about, again, our own two kids at home and how different they are. They're chalk and cheese.
[22:41]
And to have 15 or 20 or 30, that level of differences in your classroom, the standardization stuff has just got to go. We need bigger opportunities. We need people thinking about the experience of the child The way that corporations think about the experience of their customers and how they design their spaces to maximize, you know, the customer's experience from the moment they walk in the door to the moment that they leave. And I think we need to be thinking that way for our students and looking at all the different facets of what we do. Curriculum, instruction, technology, relationships, time, schedules. Schedules in school are ridiculous now.
[23:19]
And who's in charge of that? It's not Robocorp. You know, it's the school, it's the district. And, you know, if you need more time to read, take it. If you need more time for math, take it. If, you know, kids want to have some exploratory time, build that into the schedule.
[23:38]
Do whatever it is you can to make the experience the best it can be for these students. And that comes from inviting all of the voices, the students, the teachers, and the administrators have to be open to those voices giving feedback. actionable feedback and then acting.
[23:54] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and you described that toward the end of the book as a curriculum culture. Talk to us for a minute about why assessment and curriculum have to go hand in hand.
[24:03] SPEAKER_02:
Well, it's not just assessment curriculum. It's really the data. You know, a lot of times when we go into schools, they'll ask us to do a data meeting with our teachers. And I'm like, hashtag snore fest because who wants to sit around and, you know, just look at the data. It's pretty data. We have charts and bar graphs and We're not going to do anything with it, but we're going to know what it's there.
[24:24]
And the whole point is, you know, not to determine a teacher's effectiveness. It's to determine why Jill or John or Henry, what are we going to do with this data to help them be better learners? And in order to do that, we have to talk about, you know, what's happening in the curriculum. What did I do? What did they do? What do we need to do better?
[24:46]
What did they need to do better? Did they perhaps come up with something that's more worth my time than what I had planned? And if we don't use the data in conjunction with the curriculum as it's written, we get into bad habits. And those bad habits lead us to the end of our career where we say things like, well, I've taught 35 years. And in actuality, you've taught one year, but you've taught it 35 times. So we want to create conditions where there's some analysis going on, where the data is being used for the benefit of the people from whom the data was collected, and that we're making changes to the curriculum in the moment.
[25:23]
We're not waiting till the end of the year. We're not waiting till the exam week in January, where we've got time to look at, you know, places where we can write notes in our curriculum. We're making those changes so that our curriculum is an ever-changing document that represents the most successful version of what we can do. And you can't do it separately. If you're going to have a curriculum day, then you also need to have the data in there with it. You can't have a data meeting without having your curriculum right there with the data.
[25:51]
You should never have conversations about either of those separately. They should always be the same conversation.
[25:56] SPEAKER_01:
So the book by Elizabeth Fisher and Mike Fisher is Hacking Instructional Design, 33 Extraordinary Ways to Create a Contemporary Curriculum. And Mike, if people want to connect with you online and find more about your work, where's the best website for them to go?
[26:12] SPEAKER_02:
My website is digigogy.com. That's D-I-G-I-G-O-G-Y.com. Of course, I'm on Twitter constantly, at Fisher1000. My wife is at ElizabethFisher1000.
[26:24]
on Twitter and I am very responsive on social media. So I love being connected. I love talking this out online and problem solving with teachers and just continuing these conversations because we're all in it for the kids and what's best for learning and being loyal to the learner. And that's what I hope to accomplish by sharing our ideas with educators.
[26:45] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Mike, thanks again for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a blast. All right.
[26:49] SPEAKER_02:
Thanks a lot.
[26:50] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
