Redefining Smart: Awakening Students' Power to Reimagine Their World

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

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_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and my guest today is Tom Markham. Tom is author of Redefining Smart, Awakening Students' Power to Reimagine Their World, and is founder and CEO of PBL Global. And he works with schools and districts around the world to provide professional development and help them develop high quality, challenging and authentic projects.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_02:

Tom, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:42] SPEAKER_00:

Good. Thank you, Justin. Happy to be here.

[00:44] SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about where this book comes from. Because I think when we think of project-based learning, often this is a world where the resources that we access and the professional development that we access are very tactical. And we get straight into the how-to process. What told you that the world needed the book, Redefining Smart, and what brought you to the point in your work as an educator and as a consultant where it was time for this book?

[01:12] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's a good way to put it. Switching from the tactical to the strategic, I think that's exactly my objective with this book. I've been involved in the tactical maneuvers around project-based learning for 20 years or so. I've done a lot of work with teachers and schools on project-based learning. One of the One of the things, really, probably my most important learning from that is that it's very, very difficult to graft project-based learning onto the existing school structure, number one, but also very difficult to graft it onto the existing mental model we have of how students learn and what's rigorous education and a lot of the other principles that we hold that are sort of values attached to industrial or traditional schooling systems. And you try to bring PBL in, and it doesn't fit very well.

[02:02]

So the book is really an attempt to uncover some of those principles and, as I call it, redefine it. And Redefining Smart, that's where the title came from.

[02:11] SPEAKER_02:

So what's in that expanded definition of smart? I think we've seen different kind of attempts to round out our definition of smart, to go beyond just a few narrow things that include certain students. What are some of the more surprising elements of what's in your expanded definition of smart?

[02:30] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so one of the chapters in the book is devoted to exactly what you just mentioned, redefining smart as not just IQ or some sort of narrow slice of intelligence. And most of us are intuitively understand that. But I did want to emphasize in the book something that I think a lot of parents and teachers still aren't aware of, which is basically the whole field of IQ research is in disarray and nobody can really agree on anything. So it's not really a standard that we can adhere to. So when I looked out at other aspects of intelligence and how we start to get a hold of this field, which is, you know, difficult to do. This is kind of a murky, deep concept.

[03:12]

I saw a couple of things that I thought were important. One is that Intelligence does not take place in an isolated setting anymore. It takes place in the context of relationships. So there's a lot of obviously talk around how we're becoming more of a collaborative society. I think that reality has now penetrated very deep into every aspect of our lives. And so what that tells me is we have to start looking at a model that's not just the isolated scholar model.

[03:41]

but the collaborative model where students are working together in some deep way. And as I say in the book, that means moving from the idea of collaborative groups or cooperative learning into some deeper model of how students actually collaborate, as people do in the world these days, to create things in some sort of purposeful, intentional way. So the whole relationship-driven piece of intelligence, that seems to me is something that we're trying to understand better and also to bring into schools in some sort of much more powerful way than we do at the moment. So that's part of it. Then I guess I differ from some of my colleagues or some approaches. I just think that the cognitive model alone is not very accurate these days.

[04:34]

So I really talk about following the child. I call it the it factor, which is a little bit vague in itself. But when you look at what, let's say, employers are looking for, they're looking for some sort of quality of personality or something. Employers sometimes even call it the fun factor. They're looking for something deep that we can't quite define. Does that come out of the brain alone?

[04:59]

I'm not sure, but I think what we ought to do is have more of a whole child emphasis and really some respect for the inner qualities of children and trying to develop that in a respectful way. So I think the cognitive model alone, which is very popular and sort of a... goes hand in hand with the industrial traditional model of schooling, I think may fall short for us. And then the other one, another chapter I have in the book that I consider important is which relates to the comments I just made is the idea of reconnecting heart and brain because all the research shows that the heart has a very strong pronounced and a meaningful role in how the brain operates so as I often say we see education as only happening from the neck up but in fact it really is a whole body exercise and how the brain responds I'm sorry how the heart responds and

[05:59]

works in the body very much influences the quality of your thinking. So, for example, if you're in a negative emotional state, Well, that has physiological consequences, and the heart responds differently to that and sends different signals to the brain. It tends to put you in fight-and-flight mode rather than pushing brain activity to the front of the brain and the part that's more creative and forward-thinking. So that really leads to the last point I made in the book, which is we've got to look much more, I think, positively at the entire role of emotions. I'm a very big fan of positive psychology. There's a tremendous amount of scientific evidence coming out showing that positive emotions do all sorts of good things for you, not just health, but also mood, thinking ability, clarity, the kinds of things that we want kids to have.

[07:01]

letting go of this whole notion that we have that emotions are negative and not to be discussed and not useful to us, or that emotions are focused primarily on survival, fear, competition, that kind of thing. All that is being dissolved by a lot of new science. So I think that's important to bring in to the classroom as well. So the role of emotions, relationships, heart and brain, these are the kinds of things things that I see be redone. And my question then is how do you bring them into schools and how do these become some of our guiding principles, which I think is necessary if we're going to get to the 21st century skills inquiry and problem solving question.

[07:43] SPEAKER_02:

Right, and that's what I was going to ask next. What does that look like in schools when, as educators, we do take seriously that heart side, as you said, and not just see students as an IQ number or students as people capable of doing academic work, but see them as, as you said, whole people? What are some of the design decisions that we need to look at differently with that perspective in mind? How do we need to set up students' school experience and the classroom experience and what we ask students to do in their work with that newer research in mind?

[08:19] SPEAKER_00:

The first thing that I see is a difficult step and that is I think teachers are going to need to take more responsibility for their personality which sounds a little odd to say but I think when we look at what we know about positive emotions connections between people how positive emotions and a positive relationship actually affects brain function of the people we're around, and there's lots of evidence that there's exchanges going on, that means that teachers are going to have to step up their mentoring abilities. So all of us are familiar with the... moving from sage on the stage to guide on the side. But it's really getting to the point where we're going to have to put some substance around that.

[09:01]

What does it truly mean to be a guide on the side these days? What does it mean in terms of our impact on brain plasticity? What does it mean in terms of our impact on the growth mindset? And what is the growth mindset? So we throw around the turf growth mindset, but If the mind is growing, that means there has to be a physiological correlate. What's happening to the brain and why?

[09:23]

So I think the whole mentoring role, or what I call in the book, leverage the power of care, has to be notched up considerably. And teachers really need to take seriously their role as a mentor. And really it's a core role these days. It's really working side by side with students. Now I'm very well aware that teachers care about their kids, most of them. They're good with kids, but I don't think most teachers have had the training or opportunity to reflect deeply on who they are as a person and how does that relate to the students in their classroom.

[09:57]

And I think that's going to be something we're going to have to do. So that's one important step. And as an outgrowth of that is getting much better on our coaching skills and what I call coaching thinking and the ability to coach students for performance, to help them take the next step, to really personalize the journey in education. That requires some pretty skillful techniques and protocols that teachers can use to help offer non-judgmental, helpful feedback to really sort of lay out with students what are the next steps in learning. So I think that whole mentoring, coaching aspect of teaching is going to have to come to the fore. It can't be kind of an add-on.

[10:46]

And as I mentioned, it's difficult. I don't think education any longer is just a case of having another strategy in your toolbox. You're going to have to make some personal changes in order to really be a good inquiry based teacher. So those are a couple of them.

[11:02] SPEAKER_02:

So when you work with schools, I'm curious as to your perspective on the idea of instructional change and the way that schools come to be ready to make that change and how they actually go through that process. I think there's probably a temptation on the part of district and school leaders to look to project-based learning as a solution to any number of problems and then look at implementing project-based learning as maybe something that happens over the course of a year but is more or less kind of a one-directional, one-time transition. And I get the impression from my contacts around the education world that it's not quite so smooth. So I wonder if you could take us through the relationship between what we've been talking about today with these deeper understandings of what students need from us and how we need to see our students and the school change process and the process of becoming a PBL school.

[12:04] SPEAKER_00:

First of all, PBL is an answer to some of the problems that educational leaders are looking for. It creates engagement. It creates a little more excitement in the classroom. When it's done well, it actually does what I see as actually changes kids. It's not just learning. It's about behaving differently, so it can be quite powerful.

[12:24]

But what I also find that if you try to graft PBL onto the existing system, as I said at the top of the interview, it becomes difficult. And when I talk about PBL to teachers, I say to them, it's a method, yes, it's a way to design a system. rigorous project in your classroom but more than that it's a philosophy of learning which might go as much deeper involves many of the concepts we're talking about now and the reason that PBL either sputters or fails in schools and is really not a one off kind of activity is because A school, and really we're talking the teachers in a school, have to make a philosophical transition, at least in the direction of some of the things I'm talking about in Redefining Smart. They have to see themselves a little bit differently. They have to see kids a little bit differently. Another chapter in the book, for example, is about rethinking rigor.

[13:18]

So we are, we use the term rigor quite, I mean, all the time, and we think of rigor as how hard Material is, as I often say, if you give 10 math problems, that's one level of rigor. If you give 20 math problems, you've doubled the rigor. Well, it's not that simple in a more PBL, inquiry-based environment. Rigor is really about much more of a personal rigor, how you hold yourself, how persistent you are, how flexible you are, how resilient you are. All these qualities that we're starting to hear more about in education become central to the whole inquiry-based experience. And they really, these days, become central to becoming a rigorous, successful person out in the world.

[14:00]

You have to have all of these qualities. It's not knowledge alone that does it. So that's the kind of thing we're looking at. And so how do you rethink that kind of rigor? How do you reset that so that when you see someone stand up, a student stand up and give a really outstanding presentation and hold themselves in a way that's more adult-like than 14-year-old like, for example, which you can see in PBL, what does that mean as a new standard for rigor, and how do we begin to accept that as a standard for where we're trying to get to go? So it changes the game considerably, and what I find with PBL, to answer your question directly, is if you don't start to make those changes, PBL tends to fall a little flat, and it becomes just a kind of another thing you do, and you don't get the change you're looking for.

[14:51] SPEAKER_02:

Right, because I think we think of PBL as giving students maybe a different way to approach some of the same things, but you're talking about, I think, a much more real-world set of skills, as you said, the way that we judge adults' work. their contributions, say, in society or in the workplace and looking at the skills that that will require. I wonder, for school leaders, as you said, this does require not only different teaching but different mindsets for teachers. What are some of the things that you think school leaders can do to treat teachers in such a way and to help cultivate in teachers the mindsets that teachers need in order to to make some of these shifts in their practice?

[15:38] SPEAKER_00:

Well, as I'm sure you know quite well, the traditional role of the teacher is not one that encourages personal growth. It really encourages you to take on more certification and perhaps more strategies, but it doesn't really touch the person. It really is all about the technique. So I think one of the things that school leaders can do is begin to actually look at a growth mindset in teachers and what that means. And we're starting to see some of that through personal learning networks and so forth and the ideas that teachers are taking on growth. However, I still think we're a ways away from thinking of the teacher as a primary actor in the classroom who's not just involved in teaching something but is teaching attitudes.

[16:23]

You can't teach attitude without having your own attitude in order and you can't convey it except through modeling. It's like you can't teach someone to drive a car by giving the motor vehicle pamphlet. They have to do it. So there's a doing aspect here and a modeling aspect that is very important. I think school leaders can start to put some emphasis on that. And of course you get that through some things that we know quite well, treating teachers with great respect, having a lot of opportunities for collegiality and professional collaboration.

[16:55]

This is probably the number one complaint that I hit when I go to schools. There's no time for professional collaboration. The more you have to build that time into your schedule, the more you honor that process, the more the teachers step up and take charge of it and do better with it. So that whole idea of respecting the teacher personality I think is important. I wouldn't be surprised at some point in the future, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years from now, teachers will have to do personality assessments in order to get into the classroom because it's very clear to me that you can't be a successful inquiry-based, project-based teacher unless you have a certain attitude of openness, which happens to be one of the top five personality attributes that psychologists study. I mean, you need to be open.

[17:40]

So I've certainly worked with a number of teachers who are not open, and it's really they can't do PBL. They have a sort of fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset. So I think emphasizing that, not just focusing on students having that growth mindset, but teachers as well, I think that's one big step that educational leaders can take. And I would say a second one is to respect PBL as a very deep process of change and to approach it that way. I mean, I have been to schools where they say, why don't you come by for three hours and we'll introduce PBL to our school so our teachers can do projects. It's not going to happen that way.

[18:20] SPEAKER_02:

Respecting the people and respecting the depth of the challenge that we've taken on.

[18:24] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I find that teachers really respond to that. I think they're hungry for that. In schools that are doing this well, The kind of energy and creative purpose that is liberated when you get into this conversation is really terrific. I mean, teachers want to do this. And in the right environment, they just take off in terms of their thinking and what they do with kids is phenomenal. So if you provide them that opportunity within an environment of respect, you get great results.

[18:58]

And to me... That's where we're at as a society. In this country and globally, we're in a creative stage. We're trying to figure out things.

[19:07]

So let's give people opportunities to figure things out. And there's a lot of human capital out there available to do it. So I think that attitude is very helpful to school leaders and to a school in general.

[19:21] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is Redefining Smart, Awakening Students' Power to Reimagine Their World. Tom, if people want to get in touch with you, find out more about your work, where can they find you online?

[19:30] SPEAKER_00:

They can find me at tommarkham.com, and I spell Tom with an H-T-H-O-M-M-A-R-K-H-A-M.com, and they can buy the book through that. They can also email me directly if they'd like. I'm happy to do that, and that's tom at tommarkham.com, and I can answer any questions they have or speak.

[19:49]

arrange for them to get a copy of the book. So those two ways are the best way to contact me.

[19:55] SPEAKER_02:

Fabulous. Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining me for Principal Center Radio.

[19:58] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much, Justin. I appreciate the conversation.

[20:02] SPEAKER_01:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[20:06] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Tom Markham? One thing that strikes me about what Tom shared from his work and from his latest book is that often the work that we're asking teachers to do and the work that we're asking students to do is very deep work. And we might look at it from a tactical level, from a practical level of what needs to happen or what needs to change, but not look... more deeply at what needs to change in the people, perhaps starting with us as leaders, starting with us as education professionals and in the internal work that teachers are doing and how they see themselves and extending into how we see and how we treat students.

[20:48]

So if there's one admonition from Tom's interview that I want to kind of reiterate, it's that we respect the depth of the challenges that we're asking teachers to take on and asking students to take on. And we respect the work that's taking place within them. I think the idea of emotional intelligence is one that we touched on today. And I think one that's really critical to understanding how we can go beyond some of those more traditional definitions of intelligence, some of those more traditional definitions of schoolwork, and those more traditional paradigms of what we're asking students to do. So if you're taking on some new and ambitious work, I want to encourage you to check out Tom's book and think through it with confidence. some of your leading teachers.

[21:30]

Don't make this something that you do individually, but make this something that you do with the teachers that you trust most, that you listen to the most when it comes to a new initiative or a new project. And I think the reality is that high performance instructional leaders are first and foremost good listeners. We listen to to the people who have the greatest information, the greatest expertise, and who are most closely connected to our students. So whatever kind of change you're making in your school, take the challenge seriously. Take the people seriously and make sure that the decisions that you're making are part of an ongoing dialogue that takes seriously the need to build the capacity for the work that you're taking on. I think too often we bite off more than we can chew.

[22:16]

And if we're smart about it, we'll go slowly. We'll build capacity. We'll build understanding. If you're interested in building capacity for instructional leadership in your school, I want to encourage you to go through the 21 Day Instructional Leadership Challenge, which will help you get into classrooms. The challenge is a free program to help you provide evidence-rich feedback from classroom walkthroughs. And if you're ready to go to the next level, I want to encourage you to check out the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, which is our comprehensive program on building instructional leadership capacity in your school.

[22:48]

You can find out more information on the network at principalcenter.com slash leadership.

[22:55] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.