Somehow the graphing calculator has stayed the same since the ‘90s Mathematics and engineering students worldwide have long been at the mercy of Texas Instruments, a company that has held an exclusive on graphing calculators for more than three decades. But that did not stop former Apple employee Romain Goyet from trying to disrupt the market.  Goyet applied his engineering and design skills to create the NumWorks Graphing Calculator. It has a sleek aesthetic design and an app-based menu to make using complex graphing calculators easy for any student. Throwing out the lengthy manual "When you buy a TI-84, it comes with a user manual that is like 400 pages long. When you buy an iPhone, it comes with a user manual that's like two pages long," says Goyet. "That's a problem in itself."  Goyet says that one could argue that math is complicated and needs instructions, but the disconnect is that the TI-84 manual is not about math. Instead, it's about how to use the tool. Consequently, NumWorks wanted to fix that.  They did so by not using any abbreviations. Something you see a lot of when using a TI-84. They also drew inspiration from video game consoles. Goyet says the menu works just like a Playstation. You just pick it up and start using it.  One subtle design change was that they moved the arrow key to the left side, making it more natural to teenagers. The Numworks calculator was initially released in Europe. But about a year ago, it was introduced to the United States. Teachers say, "I can finally teach and not train my students to memorize weird key sequences," says Goyet. For Goyet, the end game is for us to break a monopoly and offer everyone an alternative. "The big problem here is that there is really just one option, and that's not acceptable." To hear our full interview with Goyet, listen to Episode 204 of Class Dismissed.  You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes Impacts of School Entry Age on Academic Growth through 2nd Grade: A Multi-State Regression Discontinuity Analysis How Toxic Positivity Demoralizes Teachers and Hurts Schools All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Distracted students are not a new problem. It's easy to blame technology as a leading factor in distracting our students. iPhones, video games, and social media are multi-billion dollar industries created to demand attention.  However, our guest in Episode 203 of Class Dismissed argues that being distracted is not a new phenomenon. James Lang is a professor of English at Assumption University, and he's also the author of six education-related books, the most recent of which is "Distracted: Why students can't focus and what you can do about it." In Lang's latest book, he notes that people have been distracted since the beginning of the historical record. "Considerations of the problem of distraction date at least back to Greek and Roman antiquity," writes Lang. "In Ethics, Aristotle argued that distraction arises from a clash between activities which are more and less pleasant to us." Lang argues that it's a primary biological feature of our brain that we are drawn to novelty in our environment.  Why not just ban the distractions? One seemingly obvious solution to address distractions in a classroom or any setting for that matter may be to ban the problem. Consequently, educators sometimes prohibit phones and other electronic devices in the classroom. But Lang says doing so can create an artificial bubble that doesn't prepare students for their future work environment.   Instead, Lang says educators should focus more on cultivating the attention of students. People tend to think that attention is the norm and distraction is falling away from the standard. But the research supports the opposite.  "Distraction is like the ocean that we're always swimming in. Attention is like the islands that are rising out of that ocean," says Lang. The job of the teacher is to create those circumstances.  During the years Lang spent preparing to write "Distracted," he studied classrooms outside of his own and observed what made students pay attention.  When do people pay attention? In "Distracted," Lang dives into some in-depth solutions to combat distractions. But he also offers us some "low-hanging fruit."  Regular use of student names. Our names how tremendous power to gather attention. Use your physical presence. Move around the room. Not to menace or loom., but walk over to the student and invite them to the conservation.  In Episode 203 of Class Dismissed, Lang also gives us ideas on how educators can use curiosity and structured attention to prevent distractions. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. Other Show Notes This District Built a Better, More Reliable Supply of Substitute Teachers. Here's How All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Against the odds There are approximately 4000 people that live in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The town, a 40-minute drive south of Jackson, Mississippi, is a quaint community that boasts a Walmart a few restaurants. So when the Class Dismissed Podcast learned that a science teacher was developing a scuba diving curriculum for her students at Hazlehurst High School, we had to learn more. A while back, Veronica Wylie got the idea to earn a scuba diving certification to complete research with Diving With A Purpose, a nonprofit that partners with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to protect, document, and interpret African slave trade shipwrecks. The Challenge This idea is ambitious for any teacher, even those that live nearby the sea. But Hazlehurst has one swimming pool and is nearly a three-hour drive to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And it's even further from the more transparent waters the Florida panhandle offers. Veronica says that her ultimate goal is to "give students a chance to experience science, rather than just memorize it." For most of her students, this curriculum will be the first time they have traveled outside of the state of Mississippi. She'll create coursework inspired by her students' dives, including a lab manual and discovery activities that will guide student-research efforts and encourage them to think critically both inside the classroom and out. But Veronica says she's also driven by something else. "I'm always a fan of breaking stereotypes, and there's that big stereotype that black people don't swim. And further, that black woman don't swim," says Veronica. "The more of us that go out and try to break these [stereotypes]. We can kind of change the narrative for the people that come behind us." So how is Veronica going to pull off this ambitious project? Well, she has some help from Fund For Teachers and a lot of determination. She shares the details in Episode 202 of the Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.   Other show notes The Best Advice for New Teachers, in 5 Words or Less All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Many schools are already back in session for the Fall of 2021. However, the Delta variant appears to have its own agenda. Thus far, in the south, thousands of students have been forced back into virtual or hybrid learning to navigate flareups of COVID-19. Each time a student or teacher is diagnosed with COVID, it takes schools time and resources to determine who’s been near the COVID positive patient and who now needs to quarantine. Administrators can accomplish the task manually by pulling schedules, going to each class, and sorting through who sits next to who. Or they can work through a clunky SIS (Student Information Systems) interface and try to determine who may have been exposed. But SchoolStatus customers have a much more efficient tool. Over the past couple of months, the K-12 software company built-in contact tracing and quarantine reports that can be generated with the click of a button. “We just want to give them a place to start,” says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. “The key is to get the students out of class as quickly as possible.” SchoolStatus already works with school districts in more than a dozen states. Their software integrates with existing SIS and harnesses that data in a user-friendly way. They also have robust communications tools that connect millions of teachers to parents each day. Davis says that adding contact tracing and quarantine tools just felt like the right thing to do. Schools can now click a button and build a report that shows who has a class with a COVID-19 positive student. They can also click another button when a student needs to quarantine, which generates a report on when students should return to school. “Basically, it’s a central clearinghouse to store this information to store this data. As opposed to keeping sensitive health data in a large Google spreadsheet,” says Davis. “So not only do you have a place to find the students who should be quarantined but have a place to store their quarantine information.” Davis says the information is also logged and recorded, so you can see who’s looked at it and when. To hear our entire conversation with Davis and learn more about how SchoolStatus is helping districts navigate COVID-19, listen to Episode 201 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. You can also learn more about the SchoolStatus contact tracing toolkit here. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Our 200th Episode! It's Episode 200 of the Class Dismissed Podcast! Over the past four years, we've shared stories of inspiring educators around the country, and today we're reflecting on some of our favorites. Using Restorative Practices​ in the Classroom Back in episode 109, we spoke with Nathan Maynard. Maynard is the co-author of “Hacking School Discipline, and he talked to us about using restorative practices.  Maynard gives a digestible look at the benefits of restorative practices and how we can start implementing them in our classroom. Power to the “Late Bloomer” I know I’ve been guilty of being in awe and applauding kids that can do things way ahead of their age. You know, the kids that amaze us with their music abilities on America’s Got Talent. Or those amazing students at the national "Spelling B." In Episode 129, Rich Karlgaard explains why it’s essential to recognize that some people’s prime comes a little later than others. For example, Karlgaard highlights a 53-year-old woman named Joanne. When Joanne was in school, she was described as a “high-mediocre” student. Many professors do not remember Joanne, but one professor described her as a student that would often stare off into space while in class. After attending school, Joanne got into a bad marriage, worked as a receptionist for a bit, and went into a spiral of depression after her divorce. For a time, she was even on public assistance. But Karlgaard says Joanne is an excellent example of a late bloomer. “At age 35, while taking a train, Joanne, otherwise known as J.K. Rowling, dreamed up Harry Potter,” says Karlgaard. It’s a great perspective that we should all consider.  Leading with love – The secret weapon of this tattooed principal In Episodes 54 and 55, Hammish teaches us how he turns around struggling schools. But most importantly, how he leads with love.  On the morning announcements, Brewer says over the loudspeaker, “If somebody today didn’t tell you they love you. Mr. Brewer’s telling you today that he loves you.” “We forgot to tell kids that we love them,” says Brewer. “So many of our kids don’t hear that word enough.” Brewer says if students are in “hot water” with him, he tells them that he doesn’t like what they did, but he still loves them. “If you build a culture and expectation around love, hard conversations can be had.” Brewer says he tells his kids that he loves them every day, and they have his back. Taking the fuzziness out of reading comprehension Jennifer Serravallo is the author of the Writing Strategies book and the Reading strategies book. In episode 72, she gives us tips about working with students on reading comprehension. Serravallo says her goal is to make sense of something that is sometimes hard to make sense of. There are many different viewpoints on what it even means to understand comprehension. Ranging from the Rosenblatt Reader-Response Theory to a Proficient Reader Research, it can get murky for educators. Serravallo says, “Sometimes the classroom teacher is left thinking, what am I really looking for? What does comprehension look like? What does it look like when a kid really gets it?” All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2018-2021.

Over the past few weeks, U.S.A. swimmer Caleb Dressel proved to be a dominant force at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As it turns out, he credits much of his mental success to his former math teacher. If you've paid close attention you may have noticed the seven-time gold medalist often holding on to a blue bandana. In fact, he's even pictured holding it while standing on the medal podium. That bandana once belonged to Claire McCool, one of Dressel’s math teachers at Clay High School in Green Cove Springs, Florida. McCool taught Dressel his freshman year of high school, but her impact on him was far more than academic. Dressel was a rising star in the world of swimming throughout high school, but when he was 17 years old, he took a break from the pool. “I don’t regret taking time off at all. It was really hard getting back into shape, back into the groove,” he told Yahoo Sports a few months back. “I needed the mental break … I was a 17-year-old kid, a top recruit coming out of high school, a lot of talk around me about expectation. I wasn’t used to that. I was like any high schooler, trying to figure out my life … Who knows where I’d be if I didn’t take that break?” During that difficult time, Dressel leaned heavily on McCool for advice. Dressel called McCool his “life teacher.” McCool was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. She watched as Dressel established his dominance, winning two golds in Rio and then an astounding seven golds in the 2017 worlds in Budapest. Soon after that, though, she succumbed to cancer. Her husband Mike presented Caeleb with one of her workout bandannas, and he’s kept it with him ever since. “The bandanna is very significant,” he says. “It’s a piece of her that I’m always going to have, one physical piece that I have left of her.” In Episode 199 of Class Dismissed, we discuss how teachers like McCool can have major impacts on students' lives. We also speak with Prakash Nair, the Founding President and CEO of Education Design International and author of  “Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create”. Nair explains how and why spent years designing schools the wrong way. To hear some of Nair’s solutions for a better-designed school, listen to Episode 199 of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

If there's one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear for educators, it's that Social-Emotional Learning needs to play a critical role in the education of our children. But transitioning to an SEL classroom takes time. Our guest in today's bright idea segment, Lorea Martinez completed her doctoral dissertation on SEL, and she found that “lack of time” was the single most important reason why teachers wouldn’t adopt new practices in their classrooms, even when they knew those practices would greatly benefit their students. Martinez also knows that many of us were not taught about emotions growing up. "In our families or in our schools. We learned a lot of this by trial and error. And in many cases, there was a lot of error." Further, Martinez says that most of us were trained to ignore or suppress our emotions because we thought they were interfering with our cognitive process. But what we know today from research is that the cognitive and emotional systems work together in order to make decisions, learn and retain information. Now she's released a new book, titled HEART in Mind. Its goal is to be a roadmap for creating an SEL classroom. To learn more about how to create an SEL classroom, listen to Episode 198 of Class Dismissed. You'll learn Martinez's key skills that are represented by the acronym HEART and more. You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017-2021

Can you measure what matters? When companies look for employees, they look for candidates that are curious, creative, and persistent. So logically, these are the skills we should be teaching and measuring in our school system. But how do you measure curiosity or creativity? When YJ Kim was a project director at the MIT Office of Open Learning, she dedicated years to answer the question. Yoon Jeon “YJ” Kim  “When we started talking to teachers more about it, we quickly realized that teachers do want to measure, they do want to assess those skills,” says Kim “But they often feel like at the end of the day we just have to do standardized testing.” Currently, schools assess students on content retention. Using a standardized test, it’s relatively easy to do. But there really is no standardized test for curiosity. In response to that, Kim and her colleague, Lousia Rosenheck have been designing what they call “playful assessments.” Rosenheck, who is a designer and researcher at MIT, says a lot of the construct behind playful assessments is helping learners recognize what they’re good at, how they can improve, and how the individual can tell if they’re getting better at those things. “Communication is an important skill. But what does that mean? What are the different kinds of communication?” Rosenheck says these are the types of questions they hope their tools can answer. Shadowspect One of the tools the researchers are designing is called “Shadowspect.” It’s a game-based assessment that looks like a fun puzzle. Kim says you rotate shapes and figures in the environment, and it measures not just students' mathematics strengths but also assesses the students' spatial reasoning, creativity, and persistence. Shadowspect Screenshot Credit: MIT Teaching Systems Lab “How those things are measured is because we are using a lot of process data that is logged through the gameplay,” says Kim. Shawdowspect monitors the things the user moves, clicks, and rotates, and then it uses those features to make inferences based on how the user solves the puzzles. Why is it called “playful assessments”? Kim says the notion of playfulness is essential because their goal is to reimagine what assessment really means. The researchers want assessment to go beyond something that students are just passively doing. “If you think about a playground, everybody who comes to a playground are equal players. They share they have fun, and everybody participates in the process of play,” says Kim. “When we think about assessment, it’s something that’s given to students, and they don’t really have any say in how they’re assessed.” What does success look like? Rosenheck knows that if a school can’t measure something, it probably won’t be a priority for the school. Louisa Rosenheck is a designer and researcher of educational technologies in the MIT Education “Our school system is so focused on assessments that the way it is, things are not going be taught, they are not going to be given priority if we can’t assess them,” says Rosenheck That’s why finding a way to measure skills like curiosity, creativity and persistence are so important. “So if we can find tools and mindsets that show everybody how we can value these skills, then teachers can finally focus more on those, and validate what students are doing, and celebrate the wonderful projects that students are doing that are meaningful to them,” says Rosenheck Kim says they can develop great assessment systems that have psychometric qualities, but if teachers are not using the assessments it’s not really a win for her. “I have two kids and they talk about how anxious they are when they take quizzes and tests,” says Kim. “And I really hope that in 20 years or so, kids won’t need to feel that way about assessments.” To learn more about the incredible work Kim and Rosenheck are doing at MIT, listen to Episode 197 of the Class Dismissed podcast.

There's little doubt that when students engage in classroom discussions, they're going to learn more. So for many teachers, it makes complete sense to find ways to motivate students to participate in class.  For years, Jim Lang (Assumption College) did this with a class participation grade. The English professor says he tried to keep track of each student's class participation to boost a grade (for example, a B to a B+) but not penalize students. However, Lang is now advocating against the idea of grading participation. "It just didn't feel right," says Lang. "Grades are really supposed to measure something we can document. Like the learning of the student." Lang admits that grading participation made him uncomfortable with the idea of nudging grades around in an informal way. He also didn't love the idea that students were rewarded for talking.  "There are other students that might be engaged just as thoughtfully in class, through the way they took their notes, though the way they participated in group work."    Recently Lang published "Should we stop grading class participation" in the Chronicle for Higher Education. He also joined us on Class Dismissed to explain how he maintained widespread class participation while moving away from grading it.  "Rather than make participation something that is optional and can be graded. What I argue instead is that participation should be the norm," says Lang.  In Episode 196, listen to how Lang makes this happen. Hear our full interview on the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2021

Constructive Conflict Most school leaders get into education because they want to teach. They want to enrich the lives of their students and create a stronger community. However, those in administrative roles have to tackle an entirely different beast. Much of the role of a principal or district administrator involves managing conflict. Not just conflict amongst students, but friction between teachers, and parent complaints about grades and discipline. The daily struggle of addressing conflict can be exhausting for many school leaders. Robert Feirsen (New York Institute of Technology) and Seth Weitzman (a retired New York principal) say that principals spend 20-40 percent of the school day juggling these types of challenges. In Episode 195 of Class Dismissed, Feirsen and Weitzman offer us real-world strategies on how to depersonalize conflict and tackle the issues at hand. "We call it 'Conflict Agility'," says Feirsen. "Conflict agile schools are able to process these difficult issues without getting crazy about it, without getting to a point where barriers are erected." Feirsen says that conflict agile leaders are able to take a step back from situations and understand how to move people in a direction that helps them resolve a situation constructively. To hear all of Feirsen and Weitzman's strategies listen to our full interview in Episode 195 of the Class Dismissed Podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. All Rights Reserved. Class Dismissed Podcast 2017 – 2021