Reconnect with Doug Lemov

Nailer's Netter just talking to teachers Podcast pedagogy. What is Phil reading this week? Podcast pedagogy. Listening to teachers. Nailer's Netter just talking to teachers. Nailer's Natter the Book. Ideas and advice from the collective wisdom of teachers. Nailer's Natter brings together a wealth of advice from the most influential voices in education today. In this exciting one of a kind book, Phil Nailer revisits the very best interviews from three years of education podcasting, drawing on the advice and opinions from some of the world's most innovative educators, available now for pre-order from Amazon and out on July 7, 2022. Talking to teachers about educational books, why we love them and how we use them in our classrooms with guest authors, publishers, podcasters and of course, teachers. Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another special episode of Nailer's Natter and what a special episode it is for his hat trick of appearances. I am delighted to welcome Doug Lemov back to the podcast. Thank you for being here again. Doug, much appreciated and welcome. Thanks Phil. It's great to be back. I've never had a hat trick before, so that's a big news for me and this feels a little bit like coming home, so it's great to see you and great stuff with you. Thank you very much. I know you're a big football fan, so we can, sorry, soccer fan. We can send across the match ball to you as well. We'll get one. We'll get a Nailer's Natter match ball across there. That's going to be good. And also you can call it football with me. You're safe with that. I'm going to say, I've read your books, I know, I don't even know why I said soccer there. Okay, let's get into the book. I'm just speaking off air, listening to Doug about this. This is the most important book that I have read in a long, long time. And it just came at an absolute, the right time for me personally. And I know a lot of people here in the UK who are talking about this. So I think we're just completed literally an hour or so ago, the autumn term. So we're off on the Christmas holidays, most people as I record this. And it has been one of the hardest terms to come back into the very mind, you know, I'm a vintage about 22 years of doing this now. And we were starting to think, you know, is it just us? Is it just our school? Is it just our region? And then the more that you speak online to people and realise that actually a lot of people are feeling the same. And when I was recommended Doug's book, reconnect, I just thought it's such a pressing book in the sense that obviously when you wrote this, you were seeing these problems coming down in the line. And it's written clearly from the experience, obviously of what you've experienced over the years, Doug and from leaders and teachers. And I think it'll chime with readers across the world and provide some relief and reassurance that the issues we're facing appear to be, you know, almost universal. And there are positive solutions to them. So what do you mind, Doug, just introducing the writing team who you work with and sharing your writing process with the listener? Sure, I'd be happy to. You know, it was a hard book to write. I mean, all books are hard to write, especially for me, but this is like a hard book psychologically to write. And so when I was lucky to have a great team, there was myself, Daenerys Frazier, who's principal of a great school in Brooklyn. He's in a lot of our videos. He's just incredibly reflective. So having him on, you know, he was leading his school while we were writing the book. And so, you know, we're just getting like real-time information from him on what happens if you try things and how our kids responding to things. And oftentimes he would, he was so brilliant, he would assemble 30 kids in the afternoon and we'd meet on Zoom and he would be like, what do you know, what do you think about this? What would happen if that? What do you, like, what's important to you? So we were able to gather like real-time data through that. And then Darryl Williams, who's the CEO of the Teach Like a Champion team, who's also been a school leader and is just incredibly insightful about culture building. And how, you know, and school design. And so, you know, he was, he's the third member of the team and the fourth member of the team. I shouldn't remember them. He's another member of the team and the other member of the team is Hilary Lewis, who's also one of our team, who has done a lot of work with us on culture building and she's written our Dean of Students Curriculum, helped to write our Dean of Students Curriculum, which is designed to, you know, allow us to teach when students get sent to the pastoral office and really, you know, invest in students there. So it was a great team. We spent a lot of time talking before we were writing because there was so much to figure out, you know, I felt like we were like, it was a hard book to write because it was a psychologically really hard time. There were a lot of like literal dark mornings and there were a lot of metaphorical dark mornings writing it. But also as a hard book to write because it was like happening as we're writing it, we're all back in school, you know, coming back to school in these first years to find that students had changed and that's sort of where the book starts with this realization that like we came back, we thought we were done with the pandemic and actually the years when we were back turned out to be harder. It almost felt like you've been dropped into some sort of time machine like in some like 1980s sci-fi movie where like suddenly you're in your hometown but it's 20 years later and everything is, everything is like slightly different and the course of the movie is about like realizing how much everything has changed and I think a lot of us are just feeling that way about schools right now. Absolutely we are. Okay so let's get into the book, Doug, if we can. So into chapter one you've put an introduction about what's the problem. So you outline key challenges at school's face. So could you share with listener a few of those and then what do you mean by a pandemic within an epidemic? Yeah. So there were clear effects of the pandemic on students that were isolated, you know from from school and in addition to that creating learning deficits, you know like there's just no way that remote instruction does what the classroom does. It also opened up social deficits. You know school is an institution where you connect with other people and develop hopefully a sense of belonging but also an understanding of what it means to work within a larger group. And so kids are coming back with academic deficits and with the sort of you know their social skills have atrophied it's not just school that they didn't have they didn't have football they didn't have church they you know they didn't have interactions at the ice cream shop where you learn to you know just connect with people and have daily social interactions. And so this general sense of academic gap social gap that came from the pandemic that's you know that's critical to acknowledge but I think the larger issue is that this change happened within a larger epidemic that began in 2011 which is the fundamental change to students' lives and all of our lives that was brought about by the rise and then takeover of the smartphone and social media. And in the introduction I share a lot of data from Jean Twangie's research she does these annual surveys of thousands of young people and she's been doing them for decades and so she sort of looks at the trends in society and she says that starting in about 2011 which was when the like button was invented on social media and when social when the smartphone became so prevalent that to have a normal teenage life you couldn't not have a cell phone anymore and I just would just to speak from experience here I was raising two teenagers during this time and we really didn't want our kids to have social media and smartphones but there was no other option right your football team does you know suddenly all the information about like when is training and when is the match and what color kid are we going to wear all that is communicated via social media among the eight you can't there's a price isolating your student from oh no one's going to call you on your landline to say hey hey here's where we're meeting up you know come join us there and so what Twangie found is that rates of teenage depression anxiety loneliness started to spike in 2011 relatively unacknowledged and were at historical levels even before the pandemic and that by 2016 these rates were at you know she describes you know a historic wave of anxiety loneliness depression isolation among teenagers fostered by social media use this is before TikTok and this sort of generation 3.0 social media apps P.S it's before the pandemic when what did students do when they were isolated from us and isolated from every institution in their lives they went to their rooms and they doubled their social media interaction and so the epidemic is the epidemic that the pandemic was insconced in is the epidemic of the cell phone and social media and it has fundamentally changed every interaction in our lives and our students lives without are really fully acknowledging it as schools and realizing how pervasive it is you know and like one of the things that's really that's important to realize about it is that it affects your life even when you don't have your phone a student that I interviewed for the book describes coming back to school after the pandemic and how excited she was to like you know she's walking down the hall she can't wait to see it she can't wait to see her friends she hasn't seen them in you know months or whatever it is and she's like underlooking down at their cell phones and they're swiping and they didn't even look up to like see me coming and you know she just described just like sense of I think the phrase issues in the book is she's like why did I even come to school if like you're not gonna acknowledge me that sense of like you can be isolated it's so much easier to be isolated in the group because people are always sort of half present this phrase and you know we're always we're always half somewhere else now and that has profound effects on students, psychology, mental health. health and sense of belonging. And ultimately, if we want schools to do their job with helping young people to thrive and learn, we have to have a strong sense of belonging in the schools. And so you could argue that the book is kind of a meditation on belonging and what it takes to build belonging in our work. Thank you, Doug. And I mean, we're going to come on to this little bit later on. Not only is it pressing, not only is it exactly what lots of people have experienced in schools currently, but also it's extremely positive. And there's a lot of suggestions later in the book for how you can build belonging, for example, and lots of use of, you know, techniques that people would be familiar with, but in a slightly different context, perhaps, as a result of all the challenges that you're outlining. So we will get into that. But there's another question that, you know, I found really interesting, which you talked about, um, potentially a loss of faith in institutions and how that loss of faith in big institutions, for example, governments, as that impacted disproportionately on schools, as perhaps the most public faith in institutions. And this is just a personal reflection for a listener. I'm sure that, you know, people in the UK will kind of echo this. You know, we've seen nationally a decrease in attendance, you know, the national attendance figures are into the eighties now, uh, in case in parental complaints, declining public support, um, and potentially less respect for teachers. So, you know, how do we go about rebuilding that faith as well? Yeah, so that's the sort of third piece that I try and point, which is like, it's an, that's a pandemic within an epidemic, PS at, you know, at also time when faith in institutions is at its lowest. And, um, schools are, every school is a collective action problem. It requires faith in institution to operate a school, because people have to agree or accept that they will make small incremental personal sacrifices, individual sacrifices, in terms of what they want at any given moment, in order to unlock immense shared benefits among a group of people. So, like the simplest example of this is just around behavior, which is like everyone is expected to agree that in the classroom, even though you think it would be really funny to make a hilarious burping sound in the middle of chemistry lesson, like we all agree that we're not going to do that because if we ask everyone to make that tiny sacrifice of like managing their own, their own impulses, we can have chemistry lesson and we can have achievement and you can go to university and you can become a doctor. And if we don't have that, then like the lesson is suddenly disrupted when anyone has the impulse to do it. You can't have shared positive outcomes unless the individuals involved are willing to make small sacrifices. And it is a very difficult time to ask that of people. When I was growing up, my dad told me like, so help me God, if the principal of your school ever called, ever calls, like I'm going to back him to the hill and whatever he tells me you need to do to learn, like I'm you know, you should know. I realize that this is a very generational thing, but people do not react to that. I'm not even saying like that's the ideal, right? But people do not react that way now to there's a, I tell the story in the book of a colleague of mine who she's the principal of a school in a relatively prosperous neighborhood and she's thinking a lot about getting all of her kids to, you know, prepared for university and she's just struck by how much time she spends managing bus behavior, which is the kids, you know, they arrive at school on buses, which is a very American thing. And otherwise lovely kids are like calling each other names and teething each other and pulling each other and like, you know, year six kids saying totally and the inappropriate things in front of the reception kids. And so she just realized she was spending a ton of time mopping up from bus behavior. So she said, I'm going to have assigned seats on the bus and every kid is going to have a place to sit and I'm going to arrange it so that it's orderly and productive and I'm going to spend the time that I was wasting mopping up from bus behavior, building curriculum and instruction in the school. And there were three or four parents who were outraged by this who felt like the school had no right to tell their children where to sit on the bus and they first started calling her and asking her what right she thought to infringe on their own children's free will, you know, free will autonomy and individuality and then they started calling the district and threatened to get to the district, several of them were lawyers and in the end she spent all the time that she saved on the bus on mopping up bus behavior, talking with district personnel about how they were going to respond to a potential lawsuit from these three or four parents who just were absolutely unwilling to ask their to allow their children to be asked to make the small personal sacrifice of sitting where they wanted to on the bus for the net gain of having the school be more productive for everyone. And I think that that is that that story written in a thousand different versions is everywhere now. People are much less willing to make sacrifices for the good of the organization, the institution to believe that it's appropriate to be asked especially in prosperous schools and maybe to believe that the institution is likely to be right in what the things that they ask schools to do for the mutual benefit of their children and so that's the sort of running theme also behind much of the challenge of you know at exactly the time when we need schools to be more efficient and on the ball we spend a ton of time at least in this country arguing with people about basic decisions in schools. Yeah absolutely absolutely and that would be that I'm sure echoed across across the UK as well. Right let's get into the techniques if we can duck then so in terms of the positive techniques suggested in the book you're seeking to build belonging in the classroom. Now you've talked about how much of a challenge that is particularly in a growingly individualistic society. So how is that manifested in schools? Well I think the first thing is like so that there's a question of how it's manifested in schools more broadly which is like there are a couple of chapters on that but I think chapter three is about how it's manifested in the classroom and this is one of the big epiphanies for me in writing the book which is look there are lots of things we can and should do in schools to manufacture to magnify and manufacture belonging signals which are like tiny signals that students are constantly receiving that tell them that they matter that they belong that the institution cares about them that they're important because as you pointed out in the end people's perception of their degree of belonging in the group is the great is one of the greatest influences on their motivation and their behavior and their beliefs about themselves were profoundly social people evolved in social groups even though we don't think about it now because we're so individualistic. So there are lots of things that you can and should do I think as a school to create opportunities for belonging and connection but 80% of the time that students spend in your building they spend in classrooms and so even if you wired the rest of the school perfectly if that 80% of their time didn't communicate to students you matter you belong your ideas are important we care about you here you will be successful um we know you as an we know you as an important person as an individual even within the group then we're just not going to succeed if 80% of your time that you spend in an institution does not communicate your importance in belonging in the institution um it doesn't really matter what you do around the margins and so in the light of that realization which came in and from doing a lot of research on like evolutionary biology and particularly William von Hippel's book uh the social leap which is just tremendous I think um I started to rewatch a video of classrooms and and look for belonging signals and how they're how some teachers wire them into the classroom and magnify them and how it causes students to feel in a sense of belonging and so look one very small example is this technique called habits of discussion which is there's an example of a video and a student makes a comment in class and the next student goes and she says I agree with Vanessa because Yada Yada Yada she summarizes briefly what Vanessa says and then kind of builds her comments off of Vanessa and what that does to Vanessa as the first thing out of this second student's mouth is it says I heard Vanessa I care about what she says it's important to me and so if we know that young people are heavily are you know primarily motivated by the sent by their sense of like belonging and inclusion in the group that basically says the group is telling her that she matters is it important that the teacher says oh Vanessa would a lovely comment so important so insightful thank you sure that's lovely but Vanessa is much more motivated by what her peers think about her and with her peers say yeah that's great boy we love it when you do when you talk about trigonometry and you show that you're scholarly and we're totally behind you when you do that that is a belonging signal and so just that phrase that her classmate begins a conversation with I agree with Vanessa because I disagree with Vanessa even even if she said I disagree with Vanessa because that creates more of a sense of belonging and it communicates Vanessa's importance and the importance of her words far more than if she had agreed with Vanessa but ignored her in her comments and said something like students say all the time what I was gonna say is right if you're the first words out of your mouth when you speak in class or what I was gonna say is it's a way of saying the person who just went before me I don't give it down but they said it's totally irrelevant it would have been just fine if they hadn't spoken at all I mean kids don't deliberately mean that but it kind of communicates that and so this is a classic example of a belonging signal and so then there's just in later in this video there's a beautiful moment where Vanessa is now speaking in class again and she's kind of like she's lecturing the class a little bit they've been disagreeing about the solution to this math problem She says if you go back and you check your notes you'll clearly see that and suddenly in the middle of talking to this room full of 16 year old She realizes that she's dead wrong and that actually she's confused in verse and reciprocal and She's very funny and she says I'd like to change my answer and It's this beautiful sunlight moment where she laughs at her own mistake and everyone laughs with her in the most loving way And she's like ha ha ha I got it wrong, but now I see what's right. Let me explain to you. You know the mistake that I made and It's it's inspirational because of her humility and openness to learning But if you pause the video at the moment where she says I want to change my answer And you look at the other students in the class. You'll see that they're looking at her and they're smiling and their faces and their body language say we're with you we support you We're connected to you. What you're doing right now is great. And so this idea of eye contact and nonverbal So you know the non for the body language that students send to each other It is as much a part of the story as Vanessa's own humility and graciousness and So the teacher in this classroom has kind of just built it into the expectations of like on to even when you're tired We're going to look at each other when we're talking to each other because it says I care about you and what you're saying is important And we're going to be attentive to our body language and we're going to try and like even on days when we're tired We're going to like smile and nod if it can or just like we're going to show one another we care about each other and Yes, that is a small personal sacrifice. You have to do it even on days when you're tired But what it unlocks is this Not only incredible powerful learning environment where like Vanessa can reveal her mistake and they can all learn from it, which is educationally optimal But it creates this climate where she feels psychologically safe and like she belongs and she belongs most When she talks about trigonometry with her classmates and that Sense that there are belonging signals that are happening or not happening in classrooms constantly that are both Optimal for learning and optimal for Making kids feel like they are part of the institution of school They're happening all around us and we're not attentive enough to them and so you know So there are a lot of case studies of the things that teachers do in classrooms to magnify and multiply And sometimes manufacture these belonging signals that students feel around them. It's a habits of discussion and habits of attention Which is this just the idea of like eye contact and positive body language or two examples of it Thank you dog. Now I'm probably going to articulate this next bit really badly, but I'm going to try anyway So in terms of habits of attention habits of discussion and the idea is using more techniques around turn-and-talk It made such a difference dog since I watched the videos and read the book So I've gone back into the classroom as I talk about every single week and everyone says oh wow Phil, you know, you're going to teach a couple of classes a week. I you know aren't you the superhero? But it has made a difference that my kind of Initial starting point was right. It's a lot of content to cover and we need to get through this because it's been a lot of lost learning But what we've found and it's not just me I'm sure a dog that's have this is as well as the decline in attendance. There's also been increasing truancy With students not feeling as if they can access to learning or you know actually get into the classroom around Lots of fractured social relationships. If you've talked about, you know and small Discussions become really Difficult and students fall out quite easily compared to perhaps what they did before But actually building that belonging with simple thing like habits of attention to turn and look at the person who's speaking They actually bringing back in of some more discussion based, you know Obviously tightly concentrated and tightly focused has made a huge huge difference and there's another interesting sideline on this dogum My class and my school I've started listening to the podcast now I don't know if this is some kind of Attempt to try and mock me as the family unspotted fire Actually, it's actually built a belonging between us as a class and us as a school that they're actually interested in Learning about these sort of things. So I just thought those videos for anyone who's not purchased the book yet You're thinking about doing it are just so valuable and you'll watch those and you'll just think wow, you know What are different these can these can really really make to belong in the classroom? Yeah, I think it's it's thank you and it's interesting. They're beautiful beautiful videos And I think that one of the things you could do with them would be actually to show them to students and help them to see how How you know a lot of the things that we have to do in school students might resist at first Certainly one of like I one of the things we talk about in the book is restricting cell phones during you know during the day in the building There's think it has to happen Our students gonna resist it first probably What's the right response? We love you and we care about you and we're gonna do this anyway because we think it's you know We think it's in your best interest and here is why and here's the data on it Will that convince students some students some will not convince other students probably But then if you could show them here's what a classroom looks here's what the school looks like when we put away our cell phones And here's what a classroom looks like when you're willing to take these steps. I think a You get a very clear sense for like what a happy Inclusive welcoming place the institution is when it changes Small parts of its Processes so I think that one of the things we found ourselves increasingly is we're writing this book doing was trying to just assemble like make the case For school so that they could make it make the case with their stakeholders with their students and their parents and their teachers Both around technology and what the right rule should be for technology, but also like Culture building in the classroom that if you could see it and we can make the case really clearly for you You could then turn around and make the case with the rest of your With the rest of your stakeholders so I find it kind of fascinating that you're really in many ways doing the same thing With your podcast, which is you're making the case for what and people are people, you know Somehow we think that students won't be interested in what happens in the classroom But they're very interested in what happens in the classroom They spend eight hours a day there. So they're having a sense for like this is why We're going to do it this way and this is what you stand to gain from it. And this is how to change your life. I think is An important part of that transparency is important part of the equation Definitely, okay, so just jumping back doggy from right into chapter two, which is a great unwiring now I think you've given that the single best explanation here of why You know, well, let me rewind a little bit I've written as you have about the smartphone epidemic so I've written it in my book around, you know Schools bringing in policies and procedures around controlling the use of smartphones particularly for my safeguarding point of view But I did start to wonder sometimes as maybe you and your team did that when you were writing it That is it just because, you know me and I like what's it said in here, you know There's the more senior member of staff in terms of Touching at the age. Am I just you know becoming sort of detached from the realities of modern life and thinking well Perhaps nobody else sees it the way I do, but you give a great example And that's what I said at the beginning of the question around smoking and the normalization of smoking in high schools So are the smartphones really leading to social isolation and how do you Recommend to perhaps school leaders, school administrators, whatever it might be that they can go about You know writing policies and live practice around combat in that smartphone epidemic Yeah Yeah, it's so interesting. So the the chapter on smartphones starts with this analogy of you know when I went to high school in late 1980s It's not just that you were allowed to smoke in the building, but it was actually like tacitly encouraged and enabled There was a smoking area student smoking area with like ash bins for your convenience and it was marked on the map of the school When I tell my own children this like their jaws literally dropped. They're like what like this the school Not only thought it was fine free to smoke at school, but they kind of like made it they enabled it And I was telling the store and I was like yeah, well, they were like the argument that people made was like smoke You know tobacco is going to be a part of their lives going forward And so rather than restricting it school should teach them to make decisions about tobacco And I just as I was telling them that story was like this is I heard in that the echo of what people say about cell phones Which is School should not restrict cell phones. They should you know, uh cell phones are gonna be a part of kids lives So they should teach them to make smart decisions about cell phones going forward As if teachers Who are gonna like who are otherwise busy trying to teach Math, art, science, etc Are gonna stand up at the front of the room and make a few pithy run a few pithy lessons on hey kids, you know Don't become overly absorbed in your smartphone And that's gonna combat a device that likes cigarettes is engineered By the finest minds in society to be addictive And has addicted and entire generation including the including the adults right in that somehow Those few pithy lines from teachers who are otherwise untrained is gonna like unwind this Product that is designed specifically designed to add a young people and that young people are particularly Susceptible to because the prefrontal cortexes have not matured. They don't mature until they're 24 They're not adults and so we should it is not appropriate to be teaching to be treating 16 year olds Like their quote adults with Smart phones and devices no matter how much they argue it and say they're adults and how much they feel like adults and how much they're approaching adulthood It is different and so given you know that we know that cell phones They fracture attention and degrade learning Ever been out and create a state of fracture detention and attention is central to learning. They actively disconnect people and create anxiety every time they're out in the room. We have to recognize this is our smoking moment and that in 20 or 30 years people will look back and we will tell our kids that when I was growing up you could have yourself went out in school and the school enabled it and it was easy to use and there were people who said that we should just be preparing kids so they will look back and their jaws will drop. Like my kids do when I tell them about smoking we have to recognize that and make those changes now in the interest of our children. There are schools that have done it and if you talk to them and I do talk to them we share examples of it in the book. The cultures change swiftly and suddenly and ironically a lot of the kids who were like you will never take my cell phone from me are much happier when there are restrictions on social media and cell phone during the school day. Yeah I couldn't agree more with that and like I said I've written briefly about that obviously sort of pre-pandemic but we decided to go down the policy of taking away smartphones and what we noticed Doug as you know in terms of what you've talked about belonging. We noticed you know students playing with each other in the playground. Students footballs came back out which had been you know it did almost disappeared for people who had been going around a smartphone. It was it was joyous to see and conversation started you know conversations between students and conversations with students with staff. Now if we're honest it's crept in a little bit as maybe a result of returning back to school but it's something that you've got to constantly kind of maintain and you've put a really useful case study in there haven't you from as it denarius is school that you've put a case study in there about as well haven't you which I think is really useful for anybody who's reading the book. Yeah and just and there's a lot of like comments an example sourced from other schools as well though I wish I'd love I love you're the line that you just had there which is you know suddenly the footballs came out again right like that's exactly what we want to have happened which is actually tell tell the story of a school in Cardiff Wales that they restrict cell phones and at first the kids are like a little bit hesitant about you know it takes a while for the footballs metaphorically to come out and so they set up card tables where they just put decks of cards on them and ping pong tables and chess sets to facilitate the sort of humane humanizing interactions of like when you play cards with a group of people you have like eye contact and so you develop your social skills and you make these sort of connections and you feel happy and connected to a group of people but it's actually not for some kids it will be intuitive and will come become right back but for other kids like one of the things we can do is facilitate those things by putting out the chess sets and the ping pong tables and the card tables and so they kind of facilitated the return of those metaphorical footballs and I just thought that was such a lovely idea and they're actually pictures in the book of you know the kids and the quadrangle at recess you know suddenly learning to reconnect with each other and I just think that like that is something beautiful that institutions can do for young people to help them thrive and create a sense of belonging connection in their lives and it's at a time when they've been so such so socially isolated it just I just don't think we can afford to overlook that. Now couldn't agree more and you know we did something similar with the footballs that we you know we bought a set of footballs and we brought them out at break and lunch and just encouraged students to you know start engaged and start playing at first it was it was quite strange for them you know they just got a ball each and kind of ran around with it a little bit but in the end I mean you might recognise this tuck in terms of you know from the haters it was it was rubbish bins for goalposts it was a battered old football and it was one person who had one year eight to boy who had the responsibility to look after the football take it home come back out each break and lunch and rather than text in each other to see what time he was coming out or you know message each other to make sure that he'd got the football they just all stood there and waited till he came out and they picked the teams then they organised again it was just all those building all of those social skills within that kind of environment and that that bit has stuck so that's been really encouraging as well. I love that and just the recognition that those social skills have atrophied for young people either they never developed them because they spent so much time on their phones where they you know the idea of like hey let's grab the rubbish bins those will be the goals like you know what picked teams you're in charge of the like those are important social skills that should happen in school and they have atrophied for young people. Okay so in terms of the audience for the book ducts obviously people who have read teach like a champion in both iterations will be naturally drawn to the book anyway but obviously for people that haven't read that you've then explained a lot of the techniques that are within T-Like and kind of described how those can well in this in this chapter that I'm looking at here rewiring a classroom how those can amplify belonging so you might just spend in a little bit of time just talking about some of those techniques and how you've maybe tweaked and changed those in relation to reconnect so for example props and sending guy and snaps just tell us a little bit about what you mean by those phrases so it's so interesting the idea of props the video the sort of video that starts the chapter is this video that I was describing it's a maths lesson it's Daenerys who's teaching it and it's Vanessa and her classmates are you know like one of the key things that happens is that people talk to each other instead of past each other and that is the technique of habits of discussion and there's eye contact and you know like nonverbal signals and in addition to that like one of the things that happens when Vanessa starts or when when any kid in the class start speaking is like the kids are clicking with their fingers you know just and the clicking is a system that Daenerys has put into place it says I approve I support you right it's just and so like you're giving an answer in class and you're a little bit hesitant and you're wondering is what I'm saying sounds stupid right now does anyone understand exactly what I'm saying is or maybe I should stop talking and suddenly like you hear this clicking which is like we support you we're behind you we appreciate what you're doing and it causes kids to be more willing to participate when they do participate to say more than the bare minimum because they're getting these constant nonverbal reinforcement signals and the first time I watch this lesson of Daenerys is I thought that was a gimmick I just thought it was like oh that's cute but it's not really and and then as I started to watch it more in in line of all the like the research I'm belonging and thinking about social isolation I was like this is not a gimmick it's even whether or not clicking is the signal this notion that like if your peers are telling you they support you they encourage you when you take academic risks when you speak in class it makes you more likely to speak in class and more likely to take academic risks and feel more connected to them and it's it's actually was nearly invisible to me but it's profoundly important and so you know props is the idea of finding subtle belonging signals that students can own there's this one beautiful moment in the video where like one of the girls in the class is like she's snapping it up for her classmate she's clicking it she's clicking for it because she loves her idea about math but then she's actually looking around and nodding at her classmates and trying and encouraging kind of like encouraging them to to click more themselves as if like do you guys even realize how great this is and I think it's beautiful because it shows how much she has established ownership of this system she wants it she but she likes the way it makes her feel when they can people can give positive reinforcement to each other and so she's like trying to like drum up use of the system but she's also telling us that she feels that she owns it now and that it's really her system as much as denarius is and so it just was really profoundly struck by how much that affects the environment and there are other signals that teachers have invented that sort of give students these peer-to-peer ways to tell each other that they support each other and when we do that they like it and they want it so one other is sort of sending shine which is just kind of have to see the videos in the book but it's student sending a nonverbal to signal to someone is sort of answering a question and they're hesitating or there it's a sort of signal with the fingers is more probably more appropriate for younger students and for high school students but basically says we're with you we support you keep going you can do this and you can just literally see the kids reacting to the signals in the classrooms either when the teacher cues it and says send some shine to David or when David is talking you can just see the students spontaneously encouraging one another and students are happier when it feels like a team sport when learning feels like a team sport to them and they feel like they're part of something that is connected in the classroom and these are like the very subtle tools that create that there's this beautiful quote from Daniel Coil which he says he says belonging signals are light you know belonging is like a flame it needs to be constantly fed by small signals and those small signals I contact someone you know like snapping their support for you when you're talking are much more profound than like grand statements of like we're all in this together and we have to support each other when we're learning those are the things that really shape behavior and culture I also enjoy Doug and this is perhaps my misunderstanding because I went back and read T-lack and this has kind of always been the case but perhaps it's not been used correctly so for example one of our seven habits is star so around sitting up and tracking the speaker but with almost exclusively used that to track the speaker and the speaker being the teacher and actually thinking you know the power of, you know, you hear it a lot in the classrooms, you know, track the speaker, but we mean we'll track the teacher. And actually, when I watched the videos of, you know, that kind of, you know, the props backed up with tracking the speaker and the students having done turn and talk together and then offered an answer via a call call, which we'll talk about in a minute. It was just really powerful to see the encouraging signs when students tracked each other and it just really made me rethink how I've been doing staff, for example. Yeah, it's great. The most important time to be tracking is when your classmates are talking. Look, it's also important. I also believe in students tracking the teacher, but I think it should be universal. Generally, the expectation of the classroom should be when someone has the platform and is talking, we should show that their words matter and that we care about them when we support them and that helps me to pay attention. But when peers do it to one and other, it says what you're saying and what you're doing right now matters to me and that is the single biggest cause of motivation and belonging for students. And so I agree with you that it's profoundly important. There's also a paragraph in there where you say, and should teachers also get to feel like the people in the room respect their words and feel like they're important when they speak. Well, that caused teachers also to feel more of a sense of belonging and happiness and connection. Yes, is that important? Yes, you know, are you a better teacher if you feel connected to your students and feel a sense of love and belonging? Yeah, of course. So I think that's just a classic example of a tiny thing that's been overlooked. And you've alluded a couple times to turn and talk and how important that is. But I think one of the interesting things you could see turn and talk in addition to the ways that I describe and teach like a champion. I'm thinking about Owen Eastwood's book called Belonging. He talks about how whole group behaviors are rehearsed in the small group. And so we want when we want students to like look at each other when they're talking and show appreciation for one another's ideas and listen to each other and build off of them in the way that I was sort of describing Daenerys's class doing as a whole group. Students can rehearse that in the internal talk and rehearse the sort of social cues and social skills that allow them to allow us to knit individuals together into the fabric of community. Thanks Doug. And just the one last one if I can on cold call because cold call is perhaps my favorite question and technique. But I like what you've done in terms of the kind of subtle change to inviting students to cold call and also providing a little bit of a structure to that cold call. So you just share with listener a little bit about the way that you've used cold call slightly differently to kind of amplify that belonging. Yeah I think a cold call tells a student of all the people in the room right now I want to hear from you you matter to us we need to hear your voice. And so I was reflecting in particular on I think it's one of the most inclusive techniques because students often doubt like am I allowed to speak here? Is it my place to speak? Can I speak successfully? And so I kind of present you know like a recipe for cold call success. Like I think I'll just share a couple of things that I think are really important which is when you call call if students students should be prepared in advance right so if I let them turn and talk or write first they are more likely to succeed but also feel successful in the cold call. And then if I can walk around and observe what they're writing or talking about during that everybody writes or that turn and talk then when I call call I can make it explicitly positive in their minds. Love what you wrote Phil about about the Pythagorean Theorem and its application. You're doing sharing that with a good could you start us off by sharing that with the class right and that says your words are important and I'd like to we'd like we'd always to hear from you that would be valuable. And then that phrase can you start us off I think it's like it's my favorite pro tip for cold calling because it communicates to a student that they don't have to give a perfect answer they don't have to get all the way to correct they just have to share something of value and that the rest of the team will then bring it forward and I think it also signals to the rest of the team hey get ready Phil is going to start us off but you're going to take us the rest of the way so be listening carefully and again it socializes maybe the theme here of all that is that like the most the most important part of participation speaking is important to participation but listening is even more important because listening is invisible we overlook it but listening is the culture builder if we know that people are listening to us if we feel that they're listening to us then we feel connected to them and so this phrase get us started cues the listening process in the same way that habits you know teaching students habits of discussion teaching them to say yeah grew Phil and I'd like to just build off of this point not only sends a belonging signal to Phil but um causes me to listen well to him as a habit and signals that people are listening well to him and and and those listening behaviors are the key to belonging so then the so the three steps I've sort of described a positive co-call here are like let students prepare through turn talk to everybody right use observation to be able to call out good ideas ask students get us started so that other students will build off it and then actually let students build off of that idea great can anyone develop what Phil said about the pathagorean theorem to get us started break can anyone it you know one expand on his thinking or anyone see it differently because what happens when I do that I'm basically cueing habits of discussion when I do that if I cause Phil's peers to talk about Phil's ideas then they are sending the signal that they value what Phil did and I'm just sort of I'm I'm creating the environment where that is more likely to happen and so you are getting a signal that what you did in the classroom mattered you belonged and you belonged most when you talked about the pathagorean theorem and you engaged in rigorous academic work and that's how I think we get to this you know like there's this terrible choice are we going to focus on reconnecting students and feeling helping them feel more connected to institutions or we're going to address the massive academic gaps that they that they now have and we are doing the book that we have to find the sweet spot they have the area that does both of those things that it can't be a choice between the two and so I think like this this case of like listening behaviors that cause students to listen better and therefore learn more and communicate belonging to one another at exactly the moment when they're doing academic works they feel the connection most when they're most scholarly like that is that's the way that we get into the sweet spot where academics and and reconnecting students overlap absolutely thank you Doug right just one last question if that's okay but it is quite a big one if that's okay so we're going to enter chapter four which is why I'm in the school for social emotional learning and we've talked a couple of times already about students and arguably others adult social skills and lived virtues of atrophy during the pandemic so what do you suggest that schools can do to build character into the fabric of our institutions yeah well fast and there's a lot of research about this and it you know socio emotional learning is sort of a buzz word in the US and it's everywhere but it's not especially good and it's not especially research driven and so we talk a lot about virtues and the power of teaching character virtues and in particular there are a few that are profoundly important and the research really supports them and one of them is gratitude which is so unexpected but um one of the things that that one of the things we know about happiness is that happiness is caused not only by pleasure but by a sense of meaning and by sense of belonging and so if we want students to be happy like interestingly pleasures when cognitive science study which of those three factors causes happiness most pleasure finishes third like we'd really like to have meaning and we'd really like to have belonging and so the that connects also to the research number on gratitude which is when you ask a student to show their gratitude to someone two things happen one is they say something nice and supported to someone else but the second thing that they do is they they build a cognitive after image when you start looking for and making a habit of noticing things that you can or should be grateful for in your life you start to look for things to be grateful for and therefore you start to see more things in your life that you could or should be grateful for and you start to realize how much around you is good and is positive uh and that it it changes your perception of the world because you see what you look for and so if we if one of the virtues that we instill in students is gratitude we not only build community and fabric people saying thank you to one another as a belonging signal but we also cause them to see the world as a better place a more receptive place for them which is often the ironic you know the which is are also often ironically the opposite of what happens to students now which is like we cause them to talk about you know the ways that people have done them wrong and they're you know the but it's so if we care about their well-being helping them to see the people who care about them and the people who support them and all the things that they do to care about them and support them is actually much more beneficial to students psychologically in in terms of their thriving so we take the position in the book that one that building, you know, emphasizing character virtues is the most useful way to build student thriving and mental health and that those things are best embedded in the culture and they should appear throughout the school that are much better than like having a time of day when we talk about virtues explicitly we should have mechanisms there should be a tiny you know that what we put on the walls of the school and what we talk about at assembly and whether we're going to have a 10 minute assembly at the beginning of the day when we talk about the great things that are happening in the building and the good things that people have done for one another in the building that those are the ways that we change students perception of the world and help them see it as a place that loves them Absolutely thank you Doug right just to remind listeners so we're talking about reconnect which is building school culture for meaning purpose and belonging so do you mind just finishing off Doug just by telling us a little bit about where the book is available well listeners can get hold of a copy and a little bit about where you find more about you and on common schools yeah thanks so much so the book is well ideally you'd buy that your local bookseller to build those community connection but it's also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble another sort of common online booksellers again it's called Reconnect and my co-authors art and areas, Frazier, Darl Williams and Hillary Lewis and a quick shout out to them for all their work in making it possible you can find out more about the Teach Like a Champion team at Teach Like a Champion.org/Blog in particular we try to share all you know what we're learning online there you can see lots of videos from classrooms and that kind of thing and we're actually we've we love on common schools what we've actually were separate from on common schools now of the Teach Like a Champion team so we're on our own and so you can you can check us out again at Teach Like a Champion.org so and I hope folks will we love to be in touch and a lot of what's in this book are things that we learned from schools and school leaders who were in touch with you know via you know via a variety of means including social media so there are lots of little tidbits that people shared that we got through you know email and Twitter that we were put into the book so we hope to be in touch with you and all your listeners. Great thank you Doug and Merry Christmas to you and to all the team and thank you for being on Nailer's Netter again real pleasure and to you it's great to be in touch again Phil talk to you soon.