Concept-Based Teaching and Learning, pt 2: An interview with Julie Stern

In which Dan interviews Julie Stern, one of America's foremost experts and advocates of concept-based teaching and learning. They discuss how Julie got into this (2:15), education's obsession with topics (6:55), how a concept focus leads to deeper learning (9:30), the importance of being open and transparent with students (14:30), the pace of learning (18:30), and the nature of assessment (23:10). As always, we welcome comments and questions on Twitter @BigIdeaEd 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey listeners, Dan here. This is part two of a two-part look at concept-based teaching and learning. In this episode, I'll be interviewing Julie Stern, one of the foremost experts on concept-based teaching. If you haven't checked out the previous episode, I encourage you to do so. I talk a bit about what we mean by concept-based teaching and learning, and then I speak with Trevor Alio, a teacher in Virginia who is implementing Stern's work in the classroom. Okay, on to the show. I'm your host, Dan Carney. Last episode I spoke about concept-based teaching and learning, and in the process, I used a lot of different terms. Concept-based teaching, concept-based learning, concept-based teaching and learning, conceptual understanding. For the purposes of this discussion, all those terms fall under the same umbrella. The idea that students will learn more deeply and think more critically when they make conceptual connections and build a brain schema to think about things in transferable ways. Let's get right to it. I had the privilege of interviewing Julie Stern, a teacher trainer and instructional coach who supports schools and teachers in transforming their practices. She served as a specialist for Dr. Lynn Erickson's concept-based curriculum and instruction certification institute. Julie previously served as the Director of Public Policy and Curriculum Innovation at Caesar Chavez Public Charter Schools in Washington, D.C. Julie is also the author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding, both for elementary and secondary teachers. And I should note here that these are fantastic books for teachers who are looking for practical how-to guides for conceptual-based teaching and learning. I began the interview by asking Julie to explain how she got into concept-based teaching and learning. I wonder if we could start by just telling me and our and my listeners about your background, uh, how you got into concept-based teaching and your connection to Lynn Ericsson.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

I am a social studies teacher originally, and that's what I like about you being a social studies teacher. And so my background is teaching social studies. And so I always knew I I was trying to do something like concept-based curriculum instruction. And it wasn't until I came across Lynn Erickson's book, uh, let's see, I suppose it was in 2009, did I say, oh wow, this is what I've been trying to do. And she just she put lingo to it. Um, and so I and just a much, you know, much better structure. And so I I reached out to her because I knew she had her certification institute, and it was quite, it was kind of late. I reached out to her like in January uh of 2012 and said, I would love to be considered it. And her workshop was full, but um she said, I just had a cancellation and and and come on in. So at that time moment in time, I was also promoted to director of curriculum for all subject areas, sixth through twelfth grade. And so it was almost like within days of talking with Lynn Erickson, getting accepted to her workshop, I was promoted to director of curriculum and instruction. Um, and so I went to the workshop already, having done a huge curriculum revision process. So we, you know, we read her books among many others, and um was it was really exciting to meet her. And then the following summer, um, she reached out to me and said, Would you be my social studies specialist? So um that was really amazing. So for for six of her certification institutes, I served as her social studies specialist. So we got to know each other quite well. And I went to Corinne Press, her publisher, to say, um, would you be interested in doing a concept-based social studies book? And they said to me, Sorry, there's no market for social studies. Um really. Yes. And I I love to make the joke of, well, when there's no market for social studies, you see what our politics devolves into. Um, but it's all come full circle because I went back to Lynn and Lois, uh Lois Lanning, who's her her partner uh in writing, and said, I know you guys are writing a second edition to your thinking classroom book. Are you going to go more into instruction and assessment? And they said, No, we're not, we're not really planning to go too much into assessment and instruction. You know, you have our blessing to write uh a proposal to Corwin for all subject areas. And so I did, I submitted it to Corwin, and they said, We love it, and we want you to make it into two books, an elementary version and a secondary version. And so that's where my books, Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding, came came about.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Okay. And and I should mention here that the book is really a very teacher-centered book, um, really practical, uh, really a great roadmap for teachers who are interested. And actually, sticking with the book for a second, there's a quote I want to read. I hope you could comment on it from sort of the middle of the book, middle of the page, but it jumped out at me. You and your co-authors, right? What troubles us the most, however, is that missing from the hype of truly transforming teaching and learning is that the goals often remain surface level. What what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Wow, that's uh I'm loving that you're quoting us back to me uh after so many years. I know that's from the introduction. And um what we mean by that is personalized learning in particular, at the time that we wrote the book, was going through some growing change, which I feel like it still is. Um, but I feel like a lot of people misconstrued it to say kids working at their own pace on on mostly mathematics instruction. And and the goal was, you know, still procedural fluency of mathematics, not conceptual understanding of mathematics or conceptual understanding of anything. Um, and and so that's what really worried us about personalized learning in particular of, you know, let's just give kids a laptop, have them work individually, whatever they're missing, they're gonna catch up on, uh, whatever they're good at, they're gonna go to the next level. Um, but it really wasn't about sort of solving complex problems because that's what me and my co-authors are all about is how do we how do we prepare students to solve really complex problems? And if if we're still stuck in teaching to remember, um teaching to remember information, to regurgitate facts, then we'll never be able to have have kids who can solve climate change, for example, or solve the polarization that's that's um that's hitting our country as as well as so many others around the world.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Yeah, if you make the observation that most curriculums stop at the topical level. And that certainly has been my experience most recently with the uh California history and social studies standards. Why do you think that is? Why do most curriculums take that approach?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Well, it it we are we are living through, not to you know be trite or or uh stereotypical, but we are indeed living through the industrial era of schooling. And so we that we are living through a model of schooling that was founded um to produce people who could who could simply regurgitate what it is that we wanted them to do. And so it's it's requiring such a major shift as economies change and as uh what the world needs it changes. We have to change education, but but we know that that that is such a huge area to change. And if I could talk specifically to social studies, for a second, social studies is almost always the worst of all the standards because it's such a human-centered discipline, and because we put you know we use it as a political hot potato. And so, you know, I'm currently I was I said mentioned earlier that it all came full circle with my writing of books because I'm currently writing a social studies book, can you imagine? Um, which is really exciting for Corwin Press, the same publisher that originally said no. Um, so I love it because it's all coming back full circle. So I'm writing Visible Learning for Social Studies, which which takes John Hattie's research, and it's along with uh Doug Fisher and Nancy Fry, who've already written uh the three of them have already written Visible Learning for Literacy, Visible Learning for Mathematics, Visible Learning for Science. So we sort of felt like there was this one missing, Visible Learning for Social Studies, um, is gonna be out next summer. But um social studies, so I'm I'm you know, knee deep in social studies or elbow deep, I should say, in social studies research, and it's such a hot potato. I mean, we're we we could disagree on on basic ways to teach social studies, uh, which is sad, but um what we're trying to do is write a book that helps teachers take go from surface level understanding to deep to transfer, which is my passion. How do we get kids to transfer their understanding of the facts and dates of one situation to a new situation?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Right. Okay, so now it would actually be a good time to talk a little bit about the how. Um I don't want to get too much into the granular details. I've already told my listeners that if they're really interested in this, they should check out your website and the books. But could you briefly explain how examining concepts and the relationships between them leads to this deeper learning?

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Well, everybody, all everything that I read from the cognitive scientists, talk about the how experts organize information in their brains. And so from the National Research Council who wrote How People Learn and How Students Learn, Jerome Bruner in uh writing the process of education decades, decades ago, um, talking about how X the what distinguishes expertise from beginners or from novices in any field is that experts organize information in their brain. And so, how do we help kids do that? And so, what I'm my current sort of obsession is helping teachers to to figure out how to do that in a very simple but profound way. And so, if we can get kids to understand that concepts are simply words we use to organize and categorize our world, if we can expose, so what I always say is the first step is identify your concepts. What concepts are you trying to teach? The next step is figure out how you're gonna get kids to make meaning of those concepts, preferably by linking them to known examples, because we know when we link to kids' prior knowledge, um then they can the concepts take on such greater meaning. So, what I always advise is go to Google Images or Unsplash or well, actually Unsplash just I feel like that that uh royalty-free uh picture website just uh it is no longer. Um so we're finding alternatives to that. But you know, go to Google Images or any other uh visual website and put the concept in, even if it's something like for me, for so as for social studies, it might be like a nation's relative power in the world. Um, and so I you know, I put in power and just search and just see what comes up. And I I see aircraft carriers and I see the use of the UN veto and I see um even uh GDP, what we typically use to say this is these are just things that make a nation powerful. Um, and I use those images to say to the students, what do you think these images have in common? What's the common feature here? And so I don't even use the word of the concept that I'm trying to teach. It's a basic concept attainment, uh, which I describe in both of my books. But that's sort of step one. And once kids can see that these are the this is a concept that we use to organize our worlds, then they can start applying it to other aspects in their lives. Okay, this is another example of power, for example. And then the way that experts organize information is not only using those concepts that help them to sort of categorize information, but then when they start connecting those concepts and relationship, and that's the gift I think Glenn Erickson has given the field is is teaching us explicitly. Lots of people write about big ideas, for example, or conceptual understanding. How do we, you know, come come up with conceptual understanding in mathematics, for example? Um, but not many people tell us how to write those big ideas. Sure. So I think you know, Ericsson's gift is to say, ask kids about the relationship between two or more concepts. Um, and so I simply say to kids, how are these two concepts related? How are these three concepts related? Um, once I've done that sort of concept attainment for each individual concept, I start asking them how they're related. And that's what's building that structure in kids' brains that then they can use to both deepen their understanding and access new situations that they encounter.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

And that's that transfer you were speaking of. Yeah. And and why is it important for students to uncover those conceptual relationships rather than the teacher covering it for them?

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Oh gosh, that's such that I learned the hard way. We had when I was director of curriculum, we spent, I mean, we did Saturdays, we did week, we did uh weeknights, um, we did weeks in the summer. I just gather this huge group of teachers and other experts outside consultants to write this curriculum. We write it, we release it, and we do so much training. But I walk by a teacher's classroom who wasn't part of the original design, and she's got the big idea or the conceptual relationship up on PowerPoint and saying to kids, hey, hey, write this down. And oh god, I mean, I'll never forget that moment. It's emblazing this. Um, and the reason is because then it still means means nothing to the students. Um, we we we know that in order to learn, the brain needs to be stretched and the brain needs to be sort of put outside of its comfort zone. And so if we're just receiving information, hey kids, write this down, then it's the brain's not actually internalizing anything that the teacher's saying or covering. Um, and so the better tool is the question what's the relationship between this concept and this concept? And let's look at this fact-rich example from history or a very rich mathematical problem, a very rich science experiment, so that then they can say, Oh, I'm seeing right before my eyes what the what the relationship is. Um, and then it's embedded in their memory.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Right. Um you spend a lot of time in the book discussing the need for teachers to be open and explicit with students about the why and how of conceptual learning. And that that really uh rang true with me that I think often as teachers, we think of the curriculum as being something secret almost that we plan, but the students don't actually see behind the curtain. They just see what they're doing in class. Why is it important for the students to really understand concept, conceptual understandings, and why that why we're doing it?

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Absolutely. I mean, we we were a bit ahead of our time when we wrote that because of course the book came out in 2017, but you know, we wrote it in 2016. Um, and now the everything is talking about either metacognition or student agency and students owning their learning. And so um I've what's so exciting about that is we should we should teach kids how the brain learns. Uh, we should teach kids how experts organize information. What distinguishes me as more of an expert in history than my students who are coming into ninth, tenth, eleventh grade, um is is because I have sort of all these factual examples organized in in conceptual sort of file folders in my brain, and I've got this structure of how things are related that's grounded in factors, details, that's grounded in situations that I know about from the past. And so when I look at a new, I start off my year at my school year saying, look, here's a really complex situation. I used to use uh all the time the classic, it's still an issue, but the classic one that I always use was Syria because it's so complex. What's happening in Syria is so complex that even the most profound minds in social studies can't really quantum kind of unpick what's happening. And so usually I start off my school year by putting up a really complex scenario in real life. And mathematicians can, you know, math teachers can do this, science teachers can do this. Um, putting up something really complex for students to see how an expert would unpick this problem so they can see how they can, you know, because we're studying World War II, you're that is foundational to be able to unpack modern day problems. Because we can unpack the American Revolution, we we can understand race relations today in the United States. If we can't look at the history, it look at the past, um, then then we won't be able to understand what's happening today and just be really transparent with them about that from the start so they can see because kids want to be able to tackle complex problems. Um, and it's something that excites me the most about Generation Z is that they do want to make an impact. And they want to, you know, even millennials, they want to make an impact now. Um and often us older folks get get frustrated with that, but I try to harness it to say, look, if you learn this way, you're gonna be able to solve really complex problems that adults today don't know how to solve. And gosh, how motivating is that for kids.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Yeah, and that's something you talk about in the book a lot as well, that it's not just about the um academic conceptual understanding, but the real world conceptual understanding. And I think that will appeal to a lot of teachers that are looking to elevate uh their student learning beyond the classroom.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Absolutely. Gosh, I used to think you had to, you know, if you had time at the end, you could squeeze in some uh some real world examples. And now I think, no, no, no, no, like start with a real world example and then go backwards to unpack what it is you're trying to teach them and why it's important.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yeah. But we live in an educational climate in which many programs and curriculums call for faster, more, earlier. I mean, just yesterday I saw um an ad popped up for pre-AP, this new college board program. And I couldn't even believe what I was seeing. But I want to contrast this with something you write in the book when you're uh talking about conceptual understanding and this type of teaching and learning. You write, does this take more time? Will you cover less content? Yes, of course. Conceptual learning demands more time and energy for transfer, it's not optional. And that it's it's a it's a real um marked contrast to what so much of education uh preaches now and the the the pacing and just the um the feel of the of the classroom. And I wonder if you could talk about a bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think I think yes, of course, I would say is is certainly true of social studies teachers. I don't know that any I don't know that that's necessarily true of English and math, because so much if if you look, if you're an English or a math teacher or an elementary teacher who has to teach all of these things, if you look at the most curricular standards, uh they repeat so much. And every teacher knows, every teacher knows how quickly students forget what we've taught them. And so um, in some ways, since we wrote the book, um my thinking about that has changed a little bit in the sense that if we do this well, I've seen it happen with so many schools where I work, um students students remember and the need to reteach and repeat just dramatically diminishes. And you we have even we have examples of second graders bringing up in March things that they learned in January, bringing up things that they learned in October, because when you start to see the curriculum as connected, we start to see each subject as a connected entity, then the student and you start teaching kids explicitly that subjects are connected entities and that the best uh minds in each of these fields see the subject as a connected entity and see the connections to the real world, then the students start looking for those connections. And so that's what's really, really exciting is that the need to kind of use magic tricks to try to engage kids diminishes because they see the value. They don't need to, you know, have some sort of hocus pocus, turn off the lights or any sort of um tricks to trick them into learning. And then they also remember. And so I feel like on one hand, you do have to go slower. So we talk about, you know, sort of slowing down to go fast. So if you slow down and you invest in the time that it takes to do this well, then you'll see how fat how much faster you eventually can go because you don't have to repeat as much. The students are bringing in their own connections. I mean, I have examples, even you you said you interviewed Trevor Trevor Alio. He talks about how kids come kids come into class saying, you know what? I was up late last night texting with my friend about the connections between Lord of the Flies and the French Revolution. And they're connecting, you know, he's the one who told me that story. But I hear teach teachers tell me stories like that all the time that kids are connecting different subjects in schools. They're connecting what they're learning in one class to to pop culture, to movies, um to videos that they saw, to song lyrics, and they start seeing the world as this. Super interconnected. Almost the I use the analogy of the matrix, you know, we're almost like exposing them to this secret matrix. And then they start to see it. And once they start to see it, you actually can't stop them from learning. I have a fifth grade teacher tell me that each time she she really emphasized on emphasizes concepts and conceptual attainment, the kids don't want to leave her classroom. She has trouble because the bell rings and they don't want to leave. She says it just happened to her three different times. And so these are fifth graders. So it's really exciting. I hear stories like this all the time, um, where where time doesn't become the issue that it it is for many people.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Because those conceptual folders in the in the mind and the brain, as you talked about, they're not content or subject specific. They can they can transfer across anything. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

That's right. I have it's another teacher who says concepts to her ninth graders, concepts are hashtags, which they love that as an analogy because it's you know, you can put infinite number, you can you can assign um hashtags to to different things. You that's and it's sort of searchable. Um, you can search across a lot of different experiences. Um, and so all of those analogies are amazing. I think, and different kids sort of latch on to different analogies. For younger kids, I just say file folders.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Yeah. Um on assessment, um, I a lot of the a lot of what you write in the book, I think would ring true with many listeners, many teachers, the need for quality feedback, the use of rubrics. But there's one thing that perhaps might be counterintuitive for some teachers. And in discussing assessment in concept-based teaching and learning, you write that particularly summative assessments should be novel or dissimilar to what the students have been learning. I wonder if you could speak a bit about why students should be presented with a new situation in a summative assessment.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

That's definitely the most uh radical thing that I say. I'm glad you picked up on that. Um and in working with schools long term, it's the one that I, you know, I don't push it right away. It's usually if I have a partnership with a school district for more than a year and more than one academic year, then then I I push it in the second academic year. Um well, that really comes from uh Susan Brookhart, who's sort of the the queen of assessment, assessing higher order thinking. So if we if we think about Bloom's taxonomy's um cognitive dimension, I write a lot about how people don't look at the real Bloom's taxonomy, they look at the old triangle. If so, if we're if we're looking at the one that people are most familiar with, uh with remember at the bottom and create at the top, um if Susan Burkhardt says, and you can't deny it, it if it's not a new situation, you cannot be sure that they're truly uh uh understanding, applying, uh, and analyzing or anything else because they could be remembering my analysis. And so, you know, that was a watershed moment for me in my career. I just said, you know what, that makes perfect sense. I can ask questions about World War II that are analysis level questions, but if it's if we've already talked about it in class, then I can't be sure they're not remembering my analysis. And so that was a big uh sort of lightning moment, lightning bolt moment for me. It has to be a new situation if we're trying to assess higher thinking. And if we're truly trying to assess their conceptual understanding, the relationship between two or more concepts, the same principle applies. It has to be a new situation, of course, where those concepts are present. I'm not gonna think of a situation where I'm gonna be very careful about what the situation is that I'm gonna pick. Um, but that's becoming that's actually uh a lot of people were talking more about it, which is really exciting. In fact, I had a teacher in um in Manila for his before I came to their their campus, they were doing teach, you know, teaching for transfer and assessing for transfer. And he talked about um for his master's degree, he needed to do a project on assessing for transfer. And so he had he was doing his like sixth grade science teacher. So he was doing kinetic energy and force in motion. And so, you know, in in class, he made sure you you have to transfer in class. So you can't wait till the assessment to be the first time that kids apply to a new situation. That is also something I went the hard way, of course. Uh, you have to transfer at least, I would say at least twice, so that kids become very accustomed to transfer and be very transparent with them about that being the goal, and of course, be very transparent with parents about that being the goal. Um, so there's a lot of sort of back-end stuff that you need to do before you you go, you you do this, but it works. This one particular uh teacher did sort of um Newton's cradle and different ways of different context of force and kinetic energy and motion. And on the assessment, he had them uh analyze force and motion and kinetic energy on roller coasters. Um, and he had never talked about roller coasters in class, but he interviewed this his students to say uh individually to say uh to ask the question do you think that was fair? That I assessed you on roller coasters and we had never talked about roller coasters. 100 he was floored. 100% of the students individually answered the question, yes, absolutely. I think that was fair. Obviously, he had done a lot, and his school had done a lot as a collective body to to make sure that kids and parents understood what they were trying to do. Um, but where I've seen it done and done well, it's there's complete buy-in, and and they and even young students get it. They get why.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Yeah, your explanation is really clear. I I I can totally see that, but but the fairness question, I I that stands up to me as the biggest roadblock from parents or students if if they haven't been fully um brought into the to the why. What what other challenges do you face as you travel around the country and working with schools that to implement this?

SPEAKER_01 28:00

I mean, I think the biggest roadblock, of course, is that the assessments on which schools are measured have not caught up. And those tend to be, I mean, there's some bright spots here and there. And even you mentioned um the AP. The AP, the college board is starting to move to a more conceptual approach to their assessments. They um, or you maybe said pre-diploma program, but uh of course the IB has always been focused on conceptual understanding, but they're there they've also grown in the 50 years that the diploma program has been around and continue to revamp and continue to refine their assessments, but also the advanced placement has has been doing that as well. However, you know, the day-to-day, the English and the math, the map testing, all of those things tend to be more um surface level. So uh if that's the goal, then it becomes really hard to get um some teachers to buy in. And so what I do is what you know, my my workaround for all of that is almost always I just I focus on the teachers who are really jazzed, excited, ready to rock, and and the momentum builds. Uh, you know, the naysayers become uh convinced when they see children doing extraordinary things. And so, you know, I don't you don't need me to convince them. I use the kids, and the kids do extraordinary things, even at I've had kindergartners, I've had pre-K students um say and do extraordinary things, and then you know, the naysayers come along.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

That's so often the case, isn't it? That the students become the best ambassadors of what we're trying to do rather than the adults.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Yeah. Um, well, I really want to thank you for joining me today. Uh, one last question for you, although I feel like you have uh covered this, but we could kind of crystallize it here. For uh administrators, um uh department heads, policy makers, what's your 20-second elevator pitch as to why they should adopt concept-based teaching and learning?

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Well, my my first and for uh reason I always use is that kids will stop forgetting. Um, every teacher knows, and every administrator hopefully is is familiar with the the problem that kids forget. Kids forget what we teach them from from one lesson to the next, um, or certainly from weeks to weeks or months to months or even years to years. And so when we teach this way, kids remember. Um, and when they remember, they they feel more confident. And the success builds on its itself. They're able to unlock more complex situations, they start to believe in themselves, they become more motivated, um, and it really becomes a snowball effect of of positivity. And so, you know, just try it. And uh, if if for nothing else you want kids to remember better, then this is the way the brain organizes information, they will, and then all kinds of other good things are will come of it.

unknown 30:55

All right.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Julie Stern, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

We live in a time when there is widespread acknowledgement that education needs to change. In what direction it needs to change and how far it should go is a matter of intense debate. Lynn Erickson's Lois Lanning's and Julie Stern's work in concept-based teaching and learning offers schools and teachers a clear and clearly reasoned path for guiding students to deeper thinking and using knowledge and processes to make real-world connections. Now, in my interview with Julie, you heard me bring up a quote from her book about the pacing of concept-based learning. That is, the teacher should expect to cover less content in order in order to achieve the conceptual transfer. And Julie pushed back a bit on this and explained that her thinking has changed slightly since publishing the book. I'll speak from my own experiences in school that have done a fair amount of work with concept-based education. And it is that the pace of learning does tend to slow, but that's a good thing. I think it's very questionable how much students are retaining in learning environments where they are rushed through curriculum to emphasize a lot of different knowledge content. But I also think that it's a false choice between deep conceptual learning and knowledge-heavy learning. And certainly Julie wasn't making the case that this is a choice, but this is a false dichotomy that's often presented on social media or in policy discussions. Concept-based teaching and learning, when well implemented, uses rich knowledge bases to promote transfer, interdisciplinary learning, and a strong awareness of the real world. I hope you've enjoyed this two-part look at concept-based learning. Again, if you have an interest in learning more, go to Julie's website, ed2.com, and check out books by both Lynn Erickson and Julie Stern to find out how you can start implementing this in your classroom or school. As always, we welcome comments, questions, criticism on Twitter at BigIdea Ed. Thanks for listening, everyone. Shadow of 7 low and game button.