I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hiread. And this is Alpowentz, a podcast featuring tips for Adteachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research-based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Welcome to our Alpowentz Season 11 mini-series. It's all about how learning actually happens. This season we're taking a deep dive into the research-based principles, into research-based principles, from how learning works.
As we move through the series, we're going to be digging into complex cognitive science, but we're going to be turning that into practical actionable tips you can use to make your teaching more effective and your students learning more powerful. We'll be breaking down core concepts like the importance of prior knowledge, the role of motivation, and how to use feedback to drive achievement, all with a special focus on how these principles apply directly to the unique world of agricultural education. So with that, we're starting the book off at the intro. I want to start with the opening quote of the book, because I think it's really powerful and kind of sets the tone for this mini-series.
They start off saying learning results from what the student does and things, and only from what the student does and thinks the teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn. Shoot, the one who does the work does the learning. Yeah, boom, who's working harder? So important that you're good again.
We think about everything from when we teach lesson planning to when we teach what we're going to be, how we're going to be, by the way, what the teacher does, how can we guide them in that path to do that? Very cool. But it's so easy to get lost in that, right? Because you spend so much time in your preparation thinking about all these things that I need to do as the teacher.
We're just starting the school year. I'm seeing it with our pre-service teachers already. We're in this, what do I need to do? What do I need to do?
What do I need to do? Maybe we just got to be quiet a minute and really kind of process a minute. Like how much time does our talking take away from learner opportunities to think and do? I think it really goes back to my mantra too.
So many times I want to, we want to talk experiential learning. We want to talk hands-on, which the connect piece is certainly very important. But it's really about being minds-on. Who's engaged in?
How do we get students to start thinking and really being minds-on and really engaging with the material, the content and what's happening in the coursework? And all of a sudden we start getting students engaged and excited. And then what happens to our disciplinary issues and our challenges and the classes as well. So I think it's a great topic to add a lot of conversations around for this conversation.
I think it's a great point to my mind. One of the things my mind went to when we were doing this is wait time. Becky's talking about the importance of what the student does when he talks. For me sometimes it's a sense of letting go of control and lack of control.
But if I'm talking I'm in control. So things are going to be a little bit safer for me. And when you teach the wait time with questions, you say wait three seconds and it seems like an eternity. You're like okay now wait 10 seconds.
You're like oh my gosh. And so I think that silence allows the student to actually engage. And that's a good question. Yeah.
Yeah. And even that time for allowing people to engage. Like it takes them to think about what that answer is going to be and how often do we find ourselves. And guilty of this too.
We find ourselves like we've got all these things we need to do and we need to get to the next thing and do the next thing and make sure that we're that we keep moving that we miss some of this opportunity just like, hey, what do you think? Where are you processing? That's how are you making sense of what's happening? And more and more recognizing the diversity of our students in our ag ed classrooms and how they might be coming to any of our content.
That range continues to grow. And so thinking about just how much time do I need to really actually think about what's happening in class. Yeah, that whole idea and I really appreciate about this book. We're talking about is how learning works.
Sometimes we get caught up in activity, you know, in my product experiential learning sometimes you can have an experience and not learning. And it's the goal of sometimes we get so busy with busy work or activity or mainly men. Everybody's they engage. It was busy the whole time.
But are they actually learning something? Was there a change that actually happened in that in that students life for learning to occur. Yeah, I'm super excited to have these conversations because it does. I spent a lot of time thinking about that cognitive process and Brian, you talked about wait time and we think about the questions that we ask, but you know, the concepts that we're trying to teach students at times are super complex.
And so it takes more processing time to even come up with an answer or a response and you know, it's just not a matter of a memorized fact that they have to they can repeat very quickly. It's like, okay, I need to think through this. How do I organize my thoughts? How do I understand this so I can answer the question more effectively.
And I don't know, at least when I'm in the classroom quite often, I forget about the extra time that I need to allow people to kind of spend that time processing it. We mentioned the word time several times. And I'm saying here going, oh my goodness, because we have so many standards we have to teach we have so many we have to work for any certification. There's so much stuff that we have to do.
And I'm like, you're telling me to take time. And I'm like, I don't have time. I'm already seven, 10 pounds and a five pound sack. Come on.
What do we need to do this. But then we also know that learning takes time to really to. The number of the number of research projects I've even screwed up myself thinking that I'm going to measure pre and post after a one day lesson. I expect this huge game like I have changed their life in the last 15 minutes.
This is not going to happen. It's this cumulative thing that we have to we have to work through. Yeah, that's a huge philosophical tension that I struggle with and listen to teachers. You know, on one side, I got to cover it.
I covered it in class because I covered it. Students should have gotten it. And let's move on versus do we worry less about covering everything and making sure that there's deep learning happening and the things that we do teach and cover in class. And big, big tension there, particularly when we have expectations at the state level and accountability things for standards and yeah.
It covers great, but I only covered it once. I mean, and even for ourselves, how many things do I get on the first try? Oh, everything. I mean, no, it's a font.
Good for you. Good for you. Why experience with you? So that's not like always the case, but I can see how you would get that for yourself.
This is got to therapy session. With that, like, actually not with that at all. We're going to completely normal Brian just said. But I think both of you have touched on some keywords that we really need to unpack a little bit as we're thinking about what learning actually is.
And so we've thrown these words around a couple of times we've said process we mentioned change and there's kind of there kind of these three things we really are going to keep in mind this season specifically as we're talking about learning. First that it is a process and like that word already, but it's not this product. And I think we're talking about that idea of coverage. I did this thing.
It's not just this what I produced in classes, this constant building process throughout our throughout our journey to interact with the students and it's changed and that change may not necessarily be a change in skill as much as like, I hope they become a better well, they're over the course of our building class, but it could also be a change. So it could be a change in their knowledge. It might also be a change in their beliefs or their behaviors or their attitudes and like, I think learning as a change process is kind of what we think. Because they're like, we are doing brain chemistry.
I just had this conversation with one of my classes the other day, like we are changing brain chemistry with what we are doing in in beyond our classrooms, because then we're also thinking about how our students interpret and interact with those things in response from their own experience. And in regard to that one of the things that I think we need to challenge ourselves to do our agricultural content that we have to teach to is very important as well but just yesterday had a meeting with corporate leaders of a small company called Sejenta and ask them what they were talking about and what they needed from employees. They want people that know how to learn. And the best thing we could do is help our young people learn how to learn on their own, learn how to process this information, make sense of it and be able to apply it in the workforce and the jobs that they need.
And so I think we forget at times that we're in that learning business and helping young people learn how to learn. So one of the last pieces we're going to talk about in this series is self-directed learning and so helping helping young people take charge of and be able to direct their own learning and their own needs is a big piece of that. I look back, I think about my old night teacher. Yeah, he taught me a lot of things I used about soils and mechanics and animals and all that kind of stuff.
But when I go back to things that even, I mean, 30 plus years ago, I still learn from Mr Ferguson was the day that he was showing us how do we go about an attack a problem that we're trying to solve and how do we really figure out what you need to do that. I think those are the skills that we as teachers can really hang our hats on. While also doing the things we need to do to help make sure that we're doing the standards and certifications and all that kind of stuff that we've got happening to our students as well. It's kind of a cool.
I don't think we often think of it as a luxury. Like, but I think we tend to think about it as a way to like all these areas that Agad supports supporting industry, getting to these certifications supporting the other core areas in our schools. It's a little bit of a luxury that we get to connect our students learning with so many different real things. Like, whether we're talking industry, whether we're talking about where the work they go home to at night, whether we're talking about what they're doing in their core subjects.
We have a really, really cool opportunity in terms of where and how learning happens to make connections in our schools. But I think that also really ties in to how learning happens really naturally. And I think we can really fall into this this Travis teachers like I need to make the learning happen. I need to do this thing.
I need to get after this thing. But I think about the first time you learned something like to way back in the recesses of your brain, Ryan, Mike, like, what was one of the first things you learned? Seriously, answer the question. This is the part where we talk.
Okay, give us time to process. Exactly. I mean, how far back you want to go? I mean, we learned how to walk learning how to do those sort of things, you know, probably first of all, learning how to fall, I learned how to fall and then I learned how to walk.
You know, I'm pretty sure that probably the process that I went into. I mean, but I think we forget how naturally this process happens and that's happening without us as teachers all the time. Like, it's not something like so often we forget how do we really, how do we really support our students learning in ways that they are probably learning anyway. Yeah, and along those same lines, not only is it a natural process, but particularly in formal education, it's a social process.
And so how do we facilitate our classrooms, facilitate learning environments so that people can learn from one another because we're not all at the same level and we can learn and grow and pull people along in that entire process. And if it wasn't a social experience, we would just have big libraries in the town square everywhere where people could just go in and read and learn naturally that way. And some people do like to learn and can do that. But certainly in school systems, that's a little bit different approach and social elements of that super important.
So they're talking about the natural thing and that students are always learning just just just pop to my head. I mean, so basically what this says is what Becky just told us is students are learning in our classrooms all the time. The question is going to be, is that learning? Are we going to guide that learning towards some larger purpose goal to make them a better human?
Or are they going to learn how to not get in trouble to sit there and get in trouble to do something else? I mean, they're going to learn something or they're going to learn that teacher doesn't know what they're doing. So I'm like, I think that to me is even more of a challenge to me as a teacher, these students are going to learn something in this graph in this time today. I better try to do it all.
I can't help guide that to where it's positive in. Yeah, because it's not just taking into information either. It's also retraining our brain for how things work. It's reorganizing information based on what we thought we knew.
It's not even just the intake, which I think we often, we often kind of stop at the how do I get all the content in the brain. This is going to be some really cool stuff as I look through the agendas for future conversations. This is great, great stuff. And then I think it's going to be stuff that we that maybe has been in the profession for a while need reminders of and other folks can learn along the way.
So just real quick, as you're gearing up for season 11 is you're gearing up for the mini series, couple things I'll just remind you real quick on these eight principles. They are all at work all the time, which makes them really kind of tricky as far as how do you actually hear things across episodes. Wait a second, wasn't that for this wasn't that for that. Because they're really not function like it's not easy to just parse this out and say this is specifically just with this.
So we'll talk about them in a pretty linear like they will be released throughout our season they'll have it. They'll be episodes will drop into linear progression, but these things are all happening at once because we're talking about things like identity development, prior knowledge, knowledge organization, motivation, developing mastery, getting practice and feedback, your learning climate becoming a self-directed learner. And so if you think about those things, they build into each other that play off each other constantly at work all the time. It's going to be a great season.
All right, folks, well, I hope you are as excited as I am to learn how learning works. And it's about time I figured that out after being in this profession for a while. So hope you guys are excited and ready to join us. And so thank you for being with us today on this introduction to this great mini series here by the Al Pelle.
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Al Pelle. Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Stay connected and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode.
For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by the Al Pelle. Saying thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Al Pelle's tips for ag teachers.