[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:16] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest is Dr. Elizabeth Birr Moje. Dr. Moje is Dean, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education, and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan. She is author of five books and numerous papers. Welcome, Elizabeth.
[00:00:43] Elizabeth M: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.
[00:00:46] Amy H-L: Would you tell us how the school at Marygrove came to be?
[00:00:50] Elizabeth M: Oh, the school at Marygrove, my favorite topic. The school at Marygrove is a collection of partners in the cities of Detroit and in Ann Arbor who came together when an opportunity to reimagine education on a college campus came fell into our laps. That opportunity sadly came about because the college was no longer able to enroll the number of students it needed to be able to sustain itself. But we didn’t want the campus to close and we didn’t want the educational opportunity that this campus had provided for almost 100 years to members of a Northwest Detroit neighborhood and beyond, throughout the whole city of Detroit, we didn’t want that to go away. So together with the Kresge Foundation, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, Starfish Family Services, and the newly created Marygrove Conservancy, the entity that took responsibility for the land and the buildings, the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan built a partnership dedicated to the education of children, youth, and adults in Detroit, especially in that neighborhood, but also to using this opportunity to provide a proof of concept for transforming education for all children everywhere. The school is actually dedicated to prenatal through graduate education. We have multiple opportunities for children and their families to learn together to learn in community, and we have multiple opportunities for teachers, social workers, nurses, physicians, dentists, and all sorts of child serving professionals to learn how to serve those children and their families more effectively more humanely, and to help them build really thriving flourishing existences.
[00:03:16] Amy H-L: You’ve been teaching and learning in Detroit for many years. Would you tell us about that?
[00:03:21] Elizabeth M: Oh, I love to talk about that. This is my 28th year at the University of Michigan. I am a Michigander by birth, and I talk about it as my third tour of duty here in Ann Arbor. So I’ve been back and forth many times, but this last tour has lasted 28 years.
I started right away when I came back to Ann Arbor with work in Southwest Detroit, in particular, in a particular community called Mexican Town, where, you know, many people of Latinx, Latine origins, Latinx origins come together to live and learn and work and, you know, be in community.
And I am an ethnographer by training. That means that I study culture and I study in particular youth culture and the way that young people use literacy and learn literacy inside school and out of school. And so I spent 12 years working in that community and with children and their families, following them from the time they were 10 years old to 22 years old. And, in fact, I still have some relationships with some of those research participants to really try to understand and document what it meant to be literate human beings in and out of school, and I was really fortunate because I was funded by a number of organizations, the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and I now sit on their board of trustees and the National Institutes of Health to do this work. And in the work, I was able to really learn about how children and their families use language and use literacy and then use that to inform teachers about all of the great knowledge and skill that children bring to classrooms so that they could build on what children bring into spaces because, you know, in the Marsal Family School of Education and for many educational professionals, we don’t think that children are blank slates, tabula rasa, who, you know, just have knowledge poured into their heads. We think of them as these creative, amazing beings who have not only questions, but ideas, and we can build on those ideas and help them make sense of the world through inquiry, project, and place based kinds of learning opportunities.
So that’s what we studied in those spaces, and then I branched out. I was working with about 17 schools in and around Detroit, and then moved, actually followed some teachers to another school, the Cody International High School, and from there to Detroit School of Arts in Midtown Detroit, and from there to Marygrove, which of course we built with our Detroit community partners.
[00:06:27] Amy H-L: And why this particular neighborhood and this community for the campus? Obviously it was a terrific opportunity, but what did that the campus bring to the community that you knew would be really special?
[00:06:41] Elizabeth M: The Marygrove campus is, it is an incredible campus. It’s 53 acres. The campus was first started by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so it was a Catholic school. It was a school for girls. And they built an elementary school on the site. Oh, I’m sorry. I think it was actually K-12 when it started, but it was only for girls. So it’s actually fairly small. Our current school is only K-5 because we couldn’t fit the entire K 12 school in that space. But they saw themselves as servants of the community, as people who really cared about social change and social justice. They wanted to make sure that every Detroiter who wanted an education had the opportunity to have that education. Of course, they brought education from a particular perspective, a particular religious perspective, but they are known in Detroit as sisters, as a community really dedicated to education and to opportunity and access. And if you walk around the hallway still, you’ll see many sayings that are about justice and service and community. So they just had the right ethic for the way we wanted to think about serving the community.
The Kresge Foundation was involved in thinking about, at the request of of the college, of Marygrove College, in thinking about what would be the next life of this campus. And the Kresge Foundation really focuses on neighborhood development. They’re very well known in the city of Detroit for really contributing to this city and to maintaining this gem. I mean, Detroit has long been known as an amazing city, a city of opportunity. It’s gone through some slumps. It’s gone through some challenges, but the Kresge Foundation, among many really important Detroit based foundations, has been there all along, really urging the city back to its glory. And they believe strongly in the community being part of that, and in engaging the community in reclamation and revitalization efforts.
They also recognize that education is essential, that if a community doesn’t have great schools, the community cannot thrive. So their idea is sure, we could go in and we could rebuild the city or a streetscape, excuse me, we could put in, you know, better lighting and and make sure that their safety and security and all of those things are really important to great neighborhoods. But without a school, without a place where parents can send their children, we won’t be able to sustain the power of that revitalization. The thing that I would add to this as an education professional is you also have to be thinking about who will be the future. How will you sustain any kind of reclamation or revitalization efforts if you don’t educate the children of the community, if you don’t make it a place where they can be educated and stay? If they have to leave to find opportunity, then you’re going to never be able to really reclaim that glory and that power. And so that’s what made this neighborhood so special. It already had that commitment and that ethic. The Kresge Foundation was committed to helping in that revitalization, and we saw that education was central to doing that. And it all came together, two years of community engagement before we ever admitted a child to the campus. So we really tried to learn from what the community wanted and needed, and we’re working in service of that community. We have a long way to go. We’re not perfect, but that is the goal, to maintain this relationship, this community-centered kind of education experience.
[00:11:05] Jon M: What are the demographics of the community and of the school?
[00:11:09] Elizabeth M: The demographics of the community are bit buried, but I would say, and I don’t have those numbers right at hand for the neighborhood, but over 90 percent Black community. Economically, there’s a range. For the school admission, we set up a system for admission that privileges one square mile residence so that we would actually be serving that square mile, the closest in, and then has a second sort of level of priority that is two square miles. And so we capture two square miles, and there is a range socioeconomically in that two square miles. But I would say that it’s a strong Black middle class. There’s a working class dimension and there are some people who live in relative wealth as well.
[00:12:05] Jon M: You talked about the importance of universities building ethical partnerships with public schools. What does this look like in practice?
[00:12:14] Elizabeth M: Oh, such a great question. What is an ethical partnership? An ethical partnership, I would say, is one, first of all, where everybody is on an equal playing field, right. It’s not one entity is coming in to tell the other what to do or how to do it, where we’re bringing our perspectives together, where we commit ourselves to working through disagreements, and there are disagreements. We are all different. We come from different structures, different institutional structures. We come from different backgrounds. We bring all of that to the table and we commit to working through those disagreements and to building consensus. We have done a lot of work, I would say, to build trust. We’ve done outings together. We’ve had dinners together. We’ve tried to get to know each other and really know each other as human beings, because we find that an ethical relationship is one where you know the people and you respect that they have perspectives you may not have. You listen, you engage, you build these sort of norms together.
Even though we have that wonderful working relationship, we also have a joint operating agreement in writing, vetted by all of our general counsels so that we know that what we’re agreeing to is something we can actually do. And we also have a data-sharing agreement. Both of these are 10 year agreements and we’re actually already in the process of starting to renegotiate that first 10 year joint operating agreement, giving ourselves the time we need to work through, based on what we’ve learned thus far, any changes we might make to that agreement. This is really important in education, because education spaces see lots of turnover. Leaders change. Obviously, the children change, the families change, the neighborhood will likely change, the teachers change, everybody’s going to be, you know, different in 10 years. And we need to make sure that we have things memorialized in writing so that we can really ensure the changes in leadership in particular, but also all of the other changes, don’t disrupt our original goals. But at the same time, we need to make sure that, like our U.S. Constitution, that this is a living document, that it can be amended, and that we can change according to the times, and there will be changes.
I hope, I hope that our future isn’t, you know, stasis. So, we’re always working to try to be flexible, and to learn from what we’re doing, so that we can inscribe those needed changes into the future.
[00:15:20] Jon M: So speaking of sustainability, and obviously money is always a key part of sustainability, how is the school funded now? And what do you see in terms of long term sustainability?
[00:15:32] Elizabeth M: Yeah, this is always a big question. So this is complex and complicated. The funding model is, first of all, this is a public school. So we operate on per pupil allocations from the state of Michigan. That’s our starting place. We do push in any philanthropic support that we can secure to provide the things that cannot be provided on a typical state allocation, especially to a school system that has been disinvested in over many, many years. It’s really difficult to raise mills from residents because Detroit is an economically challenged city, and so we can’t rely on what some other more well resourced communities rely on when they have special needs. They might hold a millage vote, and residents will voluntarily add to, you know, their tax assessment. We don’t have that option, at least not in the current moment. And so we do have to think about how can philanthropic support help us. So, University of Michigan raises resources, the Kresge Foundation, you know, we have the Conservancy hard at work, thinking about how they can lease space to other people in the community. I can talk more about that work, but basically it’s meant to be an entrepreneurial space, a space for developing entrepreneurs, but that helps to cover some of the costs of maintaining facilities. The district, of course, puts in its share. Starfish Family Services has a mixed income model so they work with state funding and federal funding, as well as private payer resources. So we all bring resources to the table, and we’re all always looking for more resources to help really augment the work of educating children. It’s quite expensive. And people sometimes say that education transformation isn’t simply a matter of money. And I would agree with that. Money has to be used effectively. It has to be thoughtful. We have to make sure that children are really at the center of our thinking. But I would challenge people who say that to explain them why private schools actually charge so much money per pupil expenditures. If it isn’t really a matter of money, then those private schools should be able to exist on the same amount of money that states allocate to public school districts. And that doesn’t seem to be the case. So that’s how we fund.
[00:18:26] Jon M: A lot of startup schools, you know, get extra money for say the first five years and then they’re expected to sort of just get their, you know, usual per pupil allocation. Um, Is there anything like that here, not in terms of five years, but generally, or is the expectation and hope that this will be a really long term relationship?
[00:18:46] Elizabeth M: This is a long term relationship, and there was no special startup funding on the part of the district or on the part of Starfish. You know, the two groups who really run the prenatal to five year old and then the K-12. We do push in support through our philanthropic work. So we do enlist many donors, and they have been so excited about the work, both as a service to real children in real time, where we also educate teachers and other child serving professionals, that’s exciting to a lot of our donors. But it’s also because it’s a proof of concept that if we can demonstrate that this kind of instruction, both for children and their teachers, if that makes a difference and we’re able to do that with our data-sharing agreement, that’s proof positive for the future and for many other places.
So sometimes people ask me about scale, and you might even be planning to ask me about how do we scale. And that’s one way I think about scale, that we’re not necessarily going around the United States building these kinds of schools, but we hope to be models. We hope to be translatable models that can help other people think about doing this kind of work.
[00:20:06] Amy H-L: What makes Marygrove a model in terms of curriculum and pedagogy?
[00:20:13] Elizabeth M: So, several things make us a model, I would say. And some people take issue with the idea of model. One of my good friends has challenged us, like a model is something that you make exactly the same. It’s a replica. We’re, we don’t intend for this to be a replica. I kind of think of a model a little more broadly, like I think a model is, can provide you with ideas about how you situate what you’re doing in particular contexts. But I would say for us, I’ll start with curriculum. Well, it’s curriculum and pedagogy. And then I want to talk about teacher education.
So our curriculum is project- and place-based. So we begin with inquiry. We are still building those curricula because it turns out there aren’t very many really great project- and place-based curricular units that are just out there waiting to be put into schools. So we’re building that. And that’s one way we think about scale as we build these and test these and refine them through design-based research. We can then start producing them for the general public in open access. So that’s one way. And this is project- and place-based learning in every subject area. We want children to be able to engage their curiosity through these projects, solve real world problems in their lives, but be motivated to use literacy, to use mathematics, to use presentational skills, right, to learn how to communicate with others with their teams and with others outside their teams to set tasks for themselves and achieve those tasks, like. All of these sort of fundamental important content and professional skills can be learned through project- and place-based work. We do think it’s a model to talk about place-based work. A lot of people do produce project-based curricula. I won’t name all of the different entities that do this, but they produce projects that are excellent. They engage kids. They ask them good questions, but sometimes they’re not situated in experiences that children have in their lives. And we find that when we start with something local, something children have experienced, and deliberately build these place-based projects to encourage them to consider, well, what happens in other places? How are these things lived out or experienced by other children around the state or around the city, around the state, around the nation, around the world, that they learn more deeply.
So we start with their place or their questions. And I could give you some examples of those if you want to hear about them. And then we help them, you know, think about this more broadly. And that is something that we’re building into our curricula, so that other people, when they get a curriculum like ours, can think about, well, how do I start with place of my children, and then take them from local to global, to local to global, right.
How do I help them move through that? We call those kinds of curricula, and this is not my phrase, this comes from people like David Cohen, and Betsy Davis, and Joe Krajcik, educative curriculum. So we want to build curricula. And right now we’re just in the place where we’re building the curricula, right, making something for teachers to use. And then we want to start making it educative, helping teachers think about why did we make that decision? Why is that here in this part of the curriculum? So it looks, Amy, like you might have a question. So I’m going to stop and see if you want to ask something about that.
[00:24:17] Amy H-L: I was just wondering how design-based research, which you mentioned, ties into all this.
[00:24:24] Elizabeth M: Yes, thank you for asking that. So design-based research, for those who aren’t aware of how it works, is it based on the idea that you think about a problem, you think about why the problem is the problem, so you have to do what we call root cause analysis, and then you think about how to address that problem, and you build a solution essentially that we call an “iteration.” You put it into practice and you study what happens as you put it into practice, because sometimes when we build solutions to problems there are unintended consequences. So we try to document those consequences and how the people who are putting it into practice are adjusting their practice to address the unintended consequence. And then you make a new iteration based on that information and you can do that, you could probably do it forever because no one is ever going to make a perfect solution. But we do that until we feel like we have it at a place where we can then test it with multiple other people. They try it out and the curriculum seems to be ready to take to a larger scale.
So if you apply that to teaching, we think, okay, we have this problem. Like how do you maintain kids’ engagement? How do you make sure you’re teaching them the literacy skills they need? How do you help them, you know, learn how to carry out a project? They’re eight years old. What kinds of things do we have to build for them and put into place? What scaffolds do we need to put into the curriculum so the teacher can carry out the project successfully? By the way, I’ll just throw in here, project based teaching is very challenging, managing all of it is very challenging.
So, you’re building this curriculum to solve this problem of how you engage all these eight year olds simultaneously in this really hard work and still make sure they’ve learned their literacy or their science or their math or whatever it is that your instructional goal is. Then we put it into place with teachers and we study it. We watch them teaching. That’s that iteration, right? So now we’re studying what we’ve come up with and we’re watching teachers actually navigating those things and we’re trying to document like, oh, we see they skipped that step. We want to then interview them. Why’d you skip that? So we do what we call “stimulated recall interviews.” we sit with them. We might watch video with them, right. Why did you skip that? Oh, I just missed it. Or I could see the kids weren’t having it. They weren’t getting it, they were struggling. I wanted to take them here because I thought this was actually going to help them. So we’re documenting this teacher’s expertise, their thinking.
What’s really cool about our work is we have novice teachers. And we have veteran teachers. So we can actually document. And by the way, we’re not at this level yet, right, because we’re still building curriculum, but we can document with these teachers at different stages of development, what their thinking is, and how they’re refining the curriculum and their own practice simultaneously. We document all of that. We take it to the next iteration of the curriculum, and we keep doing that until we have a curriculum that we feel like we can hand a brand new teacher, and it’s stable enough it’s well developed enough, and it’s educative enough that they could actually put it into practice on their own.
That’s where design based-research comes into play. And again, you have to first have the material, you know, that you’ve developed before you can really do that kind of close study. So we’re still working through that. We have four years of engineering curriculum that we feel really good about it’s vertically aligned. We’ve got our teachers invested in it. And I think we’re at the place now where, with the right research funding, we can actually start to document those different iterations. So that’s our curriculum, and you can see how pedagogy is implicated in that, because we’re always, to us, those two go together. We don’t really see that curriculum can just be scaled absent attention to pedagogy.
My vision someday is that we take, for example, this four-year engineering curriculum, which we hope actually will eventually be 11 year, kindergarten through 12th grade, and we, we can put that out for everyone to access. And then we build professional development video from the data we’ve been collecting with teachers. We have the teachers actually helping people understand their practice. That’s our imagined future, that’s our envisioned future not imagined. Does that answer your question Amy? Was that…
[00:29:48] Amy H-L: Yes.
[00:29:51] Jon M: So as you mentioned, obviously, project-based learning is difficult to learn how to do and to implement, and place-based learning is probably new to a lot of people. So how do you select your teachers and what kind, you mentioned that down the road you have other plans, but in the beginning stages, what kind of professional development and support are you able to give to the teachers to have them do all of this?
[00:30:18] Elizabeth M: Great questions. So this takes us to the teaching school concept. So another dimension of our work is that we’ve built this concept called the teaching school based on the idea of a teaching hospital. Physicians go through four years of undergraduate, often pre-medical training, then four years of medical school, and then three years of residency. Teachers have anywhere from maybe one to two years, which is really for three to four semesters, of training with some clinical practice in the midst of it, and then some do a one year master’s as a separate kind of thing. And then they’re certified and they go off as 21-year-olds, like I did. And they’re expected to teach and achieve amazing outcomes. We know that we don’t have enough time. We do a very good job with our teacher candidates. We’re very proud of our work, but it’s not enough time for people to really be fully realized new professionals. So we decided we couldn’t ask them to spend more time. That’s very expensive and teachers’ salaries don’t justify, you know, they don’t produce a return on financial investment that would justify that tuition increase. So we decided that we were going to create a three-year residency post-certification.
So some people call residency something for people who got a four year bachelor’s degree in something else, and now are going to do teaching residency and learn how to teach. We have a four year bachelor’s degree with teacher certification that has intense clinical practice and student teaching. And then we have three years of residency. Those three years are paid. The teachers are certified. They are Detroit Public Schools Community District teachers. They are employees of the district, they are members of the teachers union.
But we continue to work with them. We do that in a couple ways. One is that we have negotiated to have, for the first two years of their three-year residency, a reduced teaching load, so that they have an hour of professional development time every day, in addition to their prep. So every teacher has a prep period, they have lunch. And then they have this coaching time. Now we may not do coaching in that time every single day, they may do different kinds of things. They might be watching their own video tape. They might be planning. They might be co-planning with us, but we have a coach assigned to each of our residents.
This is only for our residents. And right now we’re still very small, but they get that one on one support where they can take on real time problems of practice. and actually investigate those together.
In their third year, they then go on a regular teaching load. And after their third year, they move on to a new school. This is painful. It’s very different. You know, medical residents, physicians might leave a hospital, but they don’t have the same relationships that they’ve built with their patients, because the patients typically leave too. In schools, the children stay and the other teachers stay. And that is the challenging thing for us. And we’re getting ready to say goodbye to some of our first residents and this is, it’s going to hurt because they’re very, very good. They’ve really developed that sense of efficacy, they’ve done that, you know, this, we chose three years because we know the research tells us that teachers need to feel a sense of efficacy in their first three years if we want to keep them in the profession at all, let alone at a given school. So, I’ll report back as we continue to move on, but of course they need to move on because we have to make space for new residents.
And we all, we’ve committed to only to trying to keep it to about a third of the school as teaching residents, because of course parents want their children to have expert teachers as well. But so do we.
The residents need those expert teachers because this is another kind of professional development. The expert teachers are also mentors to these residents. Right. They’re talking with them. They’re modeling. They’re encouraging them. Now we’re a small school. And so it’s not as if the residents have a lot of spare time to go watch the experts teach. But they do have that professional development hour, and so that’s how they use that time on some occasions. Maybe they’re not with their coach, they’re off watching another great teacher. And what we’ve seen is they don’t even have to be in the same content area. They like to watch other great teachers to see how they relate to kids, how they connect, how they, you know, manage classrooms, how they set up instructional regimes, if you will.
So it’s, it’s pretty exciting to see what’s happening there. And one that we’re presenting a paper that I think the title is something like, “This is why I stay.” Because we’ve heard from our student teachers as they choose to stay and do residency with us; our residents, as they think about, “Can I make it through another year of teaching?” And our veteran teachers who are working with these young teachers, “This is keeping me in the profession. This gives me a reason to be here.” And we think that’s something of boost our profession needs. We think teachers need to feel like they’re real professionals and they have something to offer other people, but also that they have the support of other people. So we’re super excited.
You know, we’re only six years old. Our first resident we did not let go of, she was an engineering resident. She’s a brilliant young teacher and she wanted to stay, and we don’t certify engineering teachers, so she stayed and she is leaving. She has become the chief of residents. And that’s part of our structure, too. So, you know, in, in medicine, they call it chief resident, and that’s usually the third year resident. We’re calling it, because she’s no longer a resident, we’re calling her chief of residents. We have another resident who also stayed because there was a vacancy. And so she is going to take the handoff and become the new chief of residents.
So we’re building this intergenerational model, and that really, I hope you can hear that that emanates throughout our entire school, where we want to be vertically aligned from prenatal development all the way through graduate education, which is what some of these teachers are in. We want to really think about not just vertical alignment, but the intergenerational learning. We had this brilliant engineering teacher. Former resident had her ninth graders doing a project with the elementary school kids to build a play lab because they, they were short on play space in the school. And so, you know, there’s that intergenerational learning. So that’s our theme, like all the things we think we don’t do well enough in our systems of education.
You know, we don’t vertically align. We teach the same thing over and over again at the same depth every year, right. What is the saying? Our curricula are a mile wide and an inch deep. We’re really trying to disrupt that. We don’t do enough with cross age grouping. We don’t do enough with really engaging kids in their curiosities, with seeing the assets they bring. That’s why we think we’re a proof of concept because we’re trying to do all of these things.
[00:38:36] Jon M: How does the school promote social justice, which I know is part of its mission, right?
[00:38:43] Elizabeth M: Yeah. Our motto is “leaders designing change.” And so everything we do is meant to be about respect for other people, treating people fairly, justly, equitably investigating disparities in access to resources. That might be in health. During COVID, the math teacher pivoted and used, and actually they did this the next year, too, um, looked at COVID infection rates as a way of teaching exponential growth. And then as it started to diminish, exponential decay. Actually one of our Interns in their first semester of field experience developed that lesson and taught it and the veteran teacher observed the teaching and decided to do it with all of his other classes, which we also thought was super exciting. But all of our project questions are about problem-solving, but the problems are ones that come from the people who live with the problems, not outside observers, seeing a problem and saying, I’m going to fix it for you and tell you how you should fix it within your community where that’s a big ethic.
We’ve done the kids, and I can’t take credit for these. These are the teachers who are coming up with these. Um, again, that ninth grade in her first year of residency, ninth grade engineering teacher. We were renovating the school as school was starting. It was our first year. So she had the kids design the classrooms they wanted for 10th grade with an eye toward sustainability, feeling good about their environment. And then they presented those designs to the architects and the construction managers and then they got feedback and they iterated. So they’re also doing design based work. But again, like for us that’s social justice and social change because the children are seen as having something to say, as being leaders of change, as being partners in change, but they’re also being taught the skills they need to be able to do that effectively.
Sometimes social justice teaching can be about the big ideas doesn’t help to develop the skills kids need, like it’s not socially just teaching to have kids talk about ideas but never teach them how to read about those ideas. Like they need to learn basic skills and thinking skills and critique skills. They need to learn to ask questions. They need to say why and whose interests are served, and how can we change this, and why don’t people change these things? So everything we do is like marbled through with that. Well, you know, am I going to say every single moment of every single day? No, because we’re not. You know, everybody’s human. And sometimes we’re trying to teach quadratic equations, but the question, why, when would we use this, how is it useful becomes part and parcel of math teaching or teaching about affordable housing, or I don’t know if you’d use a quadratic equation in that, but you get that one.
[00:42:13] Jon M: So in your research, as you said, you focused on young people’s culture, identity, and literacy learning. And obviously all this is taking place in a period of very rapid tech changes. So how does the school, and what are your thoughts in terms of students attention with cell phones and distractions, and now obviously the additional feature of, of AI, what are ways that schools can approach this, and how does the school approach it?
[00:42:44] Elizabeth M: Yeah. So it’s so funny you ask about the AI today. I was meeting with brand new teacher candidates or people considering, you know, whether it come to Marsal. And one of them was saying, I’m really scared about AI. Going to be an English teacher. And I said, I am so excited about. How AI can challenge us to be better teachers? So the first thing I would say on all of these questions, whether it’s AI or attention spans or distractions, my root cause analysis of the attention issue is, especially in school, is that sometimes we’re very boring, and we don’t give kids things that are worth paying attention to. So that might be a first starting place like what are we actually engaging kids in as they learn, and. Are there ways we could shift what we’re doing so they’d want to pay attention? Because they are paying attention to those screens, right, they’re rapt. So what is happening there that we could learn from that we could maybe bring into classrooms into instruction?
One thing that I’ve done a lot of writing about is the kids I work with engage in literacy practices like reading because they want to be part of social networks. They enjoy reading what other kids are reading or what their parents are reading. Believe it or not, they do actually say that. Parents don’t think that, but kids actually talk about their parents a lot. I clung to that as I raised an adolescent. I remembered, my research reminds me that, you know, adolescents do love their parents. At any rate, I think that we have to ask ourselves, is this engaging? And if it’s not, what can we do differently? So for me, it’s an exciting time because we’re forced to think differently with AI, I’m super excited because I think there are so many applications that we could engage in with kids.
First of all, my wonderful former colleague Ying Xu, with her colleagues out at UC Irvine, has written about a heuristic for thinking about teaching with AI and teaching AI. And it’s about teaching kids how to prompt effectively, then teaching them how to get the information from the prompt and ask questions about it to analyze its accuracy or inaccuracy, to look for bias or to critique the bias, right, and then to figure out what to do with it. How am I going to integrate what it produced for me into the thing I want to do? So that’s one way we can think about AI. Like, we have a responsibility to teach kids how to use it effectively. We also can use it to engage them in improving their writing. I don’t think it’s bad to, say, tell AI to write a first draft of something. And then engage kids in like, was this very interesting? Did they do a very good job? Is this your voice? Is this how you would write this? What would make it your own? How do you make it special? How might you use different words?
With my advisory board, you know, my visiting board, we did a whole bunch of AI exercises and we had it write a poem about literacy and we had Professor Xu with us so she could teach us how to prompt better. It was really fun because she said, now sometimes you have to compliment the AI and tell it that it did a good job, but it would do better if it did this, this, and this. So we produced this poem about literacy and it was absolutely horrible. It was actually very clever in terms of its rhyming and its thinking about like what someone might say about literacy, but it was so it was like, I don’t know, treacle isn’t quite the right word. It was so over the top. And I performed it for them and they all got a good laugh because it was so ridiculous. Right. So my colleague who was there just said to this young teacher this morning, if you knew Elizabeth, you would know that that was not her voice at all, which is also a good reminder to teachers like if you know your students, then you will know if something is not their voice. And you will be able to say to them, I like your first AI attempt, but could you possibly rewrite this in your own voice, right? So it’s going to force us to do things so differently.
There are some people who say things like, it’ll replace teachers. It’ll never replace teachers. Because we always need that human interpersonal dimension, we know this from research on even on tutoring, the most effective tutors are actually humans in person, and usually certified teachers, but what it would do is make our lives easier. It could draft a lesson plan for us. It could help us build a curricular unit, and then we make it our own. It can help us start a grading or evaluation process. Not rely on it, but start it. As a high school teacher, I taught 180 students my first year of teaching. I couldn’t possibly read everything they wrote. So, can it help us start a process where we’re giving feedback? I think there’s just a lot of potential.
Sorry, Jon, go ahead.
[00:48:29] Jon M: No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking as you’re talking that what you’re really talking about is the centrality of inquiry. And you’re talking about applying inquiry in the context of a new technology.
[00:48:39] Elizabeth M: Thank you for saying it that way. I’ll remember that. I’ll quote you, though. So yeah, I think that’s right. I think the tool is never enough. Now I can’t find one. You know, this is a tool. And I don’t, you know, just put it on a piece of paper and let it do the writing. Obviously, it can’t do that in the same way AI can. But the tool is never the thing that makes the, the good stuff happen. The tool is something that facilitates good stuff.
[00:49:11] Amy H-L: Most educators are not going to have the opportunity that you did to really start from scratch, right. So how can educators in our listening audience replicate some of what you’ve implemented?
[00:49:27] Elizabeth M: I think if it’s individual classroom teachers, I think project-based work, building projects and like being realistic, starting small, doing the things they can do, but also again, maybe AI is a tool here. Maybe they can plug in, build me a lesson or a unit plan on X and make it project-based, make it engaged. I mean, they’re, I’m not that great at prompting yet so I’m not giving the best prompts here. But where would I begin? So using the tools that are available, building those kinds of projects, looking for the ones that we’re going to be producing eventually, and putting those into practice. When I was a teacher, high school teacher, I engaged kids in things, like we tried to reenact the Constitutional Convention and every child represented a state. Sometimes they had to do, well, we only had 13 at that point, but, um, maybe a few more by the time of the Constitutional Convention, but like they, they had to take on learning about the state and then make arguments. And they started to learn how our country was formed and what are the politics that produced the structures that we have.
Using games. Games are great projects, right. They’re simulations. The Sims is one. Civilization is another. There are lots of great kinds of tools out there that I think sometimes as teachers we’re afraid to bring into classrooms because we think I’ve got a curriculum and I must follow this curriculum and in some cases, teachers are required to follow a pretty structured rigid curriculum and you can guess my opinions on that. I think materials are great. I think following anything rigidly flies in the face of what we know about children. Uh, they’re all different and they need different kinds of things. So no one curriculum is going to fit all of them.
I think another thing that teachers can do, and this, and I’m not sure if you’re asking about individual teachers or about collectives, I’ll go to collectives in a second, but teachers can actually form their own collectives within their schools. So one of the things is thinking about, am I in a department? What are the other teachers doing? How can we collaborate? I’m a huge fan of co-teaching. That’s a big one. I’m also a big fan of looping with children. I don’t know if your listenership, you’re nodding, so maybe your listenership would know what that means, but that idea that you follow children, that is a way of getting at vertical alignment without necessarily restructuring your whole school’s curriculum. If you can loop with your students, you know where they are the day school starts in the second year. I know this is my daughter had so fortunate looped twice and her fourth and fifth grade teacher in the fifth grade parent meeting said, “This is the best year I’ve had because I knew exactly where my students were, and we just hit the ground running and we’re way ahead of my prior fifth grade classes because we all know each other, we all have our norms, and we didn’t have to do all that startup.” So I would strongly encourage teachers to be advocates for looping and for co-teaching. And there are so many interesting ways to do that.
Another is, especially at younger grades to think about developmental teaching that that really works with a co-teaching arrangement, so say, a first second split. Right? Because then kids who might become readers late in first grade or early second grade aren’t necessarily positioned as being behind because they’re in this space. And of course the kids who are already reading when they got to kindergarten can be excelling. And again, my child was in splits, so she had that experience where she could do the next grade’s work because she happened to be in a classroom with the next grade. So I think those are things that teachers can advocate for. Of course, it all depends on how many kids are in the school and all of that. And you’ve got to have a principal who’s willing to work with that. But I think building those alliances and trying to figure out what are the things that we see routinely.
We studied when I was in my doctoral program, we studied 4th and 5th grade science lessons, and they were doing units on electric circuits, and the 5th grade, the curriculum was going to do exactly the same lessons that they had done in 4th grade. And lo and behold, they did it and they had no better understanding of electric circuitry than they had left 4th grade with. So they’re going to go into 6th grade, and they’ll probably do it again. So as teachers, can you partner with your colleagues and say, look, this is what I’m teaching about electric circuits. Can we plan so you teach this or maybe you don’t even teach circuitry. You teach the next thing. Like we just have such bad curriculum alignment in our schools and I don’t blame the teachers. Those come from standards. But how can teachers tackle that?
Then if we’re thinking about just education collectives, this is my, feels like my 137th year in the profession, but it’s not quite that much, but it’s a lot, right. So I was really fortunate, after 22 years of doing work in Detroit and building relationships, to have this opportunity to develop with partners this amazing space, this amazing education collective. That’s not, like you said, going to happen for everyone. And I, I would hope people don’t have to wait 22 years to make something like this happen. But that takes work, and I think we need to think about how people can take kind of smaller bites of the apple and really come together. And I think right now, we really need to unite and figure out how we’re going to sustain the work to make sure that our children are learning to think, learning to understand facts, separate facts from fiction. And that is going to require all of us as adults who are committed to this work to actually work together. I don’t have the easy answers of how to do that. And it’s so hard for teachers because there’s so little time. It’s exhausting. But if we don’t do it, who will?
[00:56:45] Amy H-L: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Elizabeth Moje of the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan.
[00:56:53] Elizabeth M: Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to talk. It’s great.
[00:56:59] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes.
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