EduProtocols, with Jon Corippo

In this lively and thought-provoking episode, the Unpacking Education podcast team is joined by Jon Corippo, cofounder of EduProtocols, to explore how educators can teach better, work less, and achieve more. With a wealth of real classroom experience and a passion for brain-based pedagogy, Jon shares the inspiration behind EduProtocols, providing teachers with repeatable, tech-savvy lesson frames designed to increase student engagement and academic growth. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

Jon Corippo 0:00 So that's part of the teaching better part. We're going to accelerate all of that stuff, but the acceleration is based on feedback and targeted feedback. What tools can I use to make my feedback immediate, to make my kids enjoy the classroom more?

Winston Benjamin 0:17 The topic for today's podcast is EduProtocol with Jon Corippo. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:37 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:47 I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:49 And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators,

Paul Beckermann 0:53 and we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 0:58 Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:02 Our quote from today is from the EduProtocols website. It reads, "Teach better, work less, achieve more."

Winston Benjamin 1:12 Simple but powerful. What are y'all thinking, Rena, Paul?

Rena Clark 1:17 There's a lot in those few words. It's like, "Yeah, obviously, just teach better." You know, I've been working on doing that for a long time and helping others do that. And there's a lot of work to teach better, but then it comes to mind, when you know better, you do better, and you know, when you work, work smarter, not harder. And I think about all those things help you to essentially, when we think about working less, it's kind of funny. This was kind of swirling around in my mind.

I was thinking about, you know, as I—it's kind of funny—I go, "Well, work can be joyful," and then it becomes something else. It becomes more of a contribution, a craft, a service, a joy. And so then, is it as much work? Because I find such joy in my work, and we're constantly battling time, so then maybe we're talking more about like time and not so much about work.

So lots to think about with this quote, but I think ultimately I'm thinking about: How can we be smarter and more intentional about the choices we make so that we can best support those that we are serving? And if you love something, is it really work?

Winston Benjamin 2:31 That's a really good point, Rena. Paul?

Paul Beckermann 2:32 Yeah, you get in that flow state, right? And time just goes away. Yeah, you know, there's a ton of different directions I could go with this, because there is so much packed into that quote, and I feel like the meaning for me right now, just one of the meanings I'm taking, is almost embodied in how brief it is. It's like a short, simple statement that packs a big punch, sort of like a well-crafted, efficient lesson.

Good lessons have a certain economy to them that maximizes student learning in the available time. It's kind of like that old saying: people who are really smart and good at what they do aren't the ones who use the $1,000 words. They are the ones who can take that really complicated stuff and boil it down into something that just works. It's simple, it's relatable, it works, it's actionable. Again, I could go a lot of different ways, but that's what I'm thinking about right now.

Winston Benjamin 3:24 I love that. I like the idea of it driving you. But also, within education, we have a short time frame with a kid. We got one year, so we got to work hard—really work smart—with that time that we have. And because of our conversation, and this quote really helps us, we want to really introduce our guest for today, Jon Corippo, who's the co-founder of EduProtocols. Welcome, Jon. Thank you for being here.

Jon Corippo 3:51 Thanks. It's—what you guys have already—you're already on fire. We're only a minute and a half into this thing. I mean, sometimes we try, sometimes we try.

One of the first things that we try to do is help our audience ground themselves in our guest. So, can you introduce yourselves to our listeners, let our audience know your experience and the wisdom you're bringing with us?

Jon Corippo 4:10 So I'm an accidental teacher.

Jon Corippo 4:15 I thought I wanted to be a teacher, but I ended up as an advertising major, and because my dad said there wasn't enough money in it. And then, six years after graduating, I'd done a couple of different things, and my wife just basically told me, "You're going to go into teaching so our vacations match up." And I was like, "Yes, yes, dear."

And it was crazy, because within like two days of doing it, I was like, "Bro, this is what I do." Like, everything I've done in my life has led up to this. A degree in advertising? Do you know how helpful that is when you're trying to teach children math or verbs? They don't even want those, and you have to sell them to them.

I did years in contracting, so when I became an IT director, I knew how to talk about trenching and conduit. I coached football at Fresno State. I played football there for a couple of years, and then I was a grad assistant, and we learned a lot—way more than you would think—about how brains work, because at that level of football, you don't have time to just muscle your way through things. You have to do them correctly. We learned about feedback. We learned about Sun Tzu, The Chinese general.

So all of these things, when I became a fourth grade teacher, I said, "Everything I had done in my life has just been so that I could actually do this." And so it's been pretty cool.

So let me finish off the story. Started as an emergency credential teacher, did a couple years, moved up into the mountains, taught a couple years up there, ended up going to work for Fresno County Office of Education. I was a tech integrator for about two years there, and then my old district called me back and said, "We're opening a new high school. Would you design all the programs for us?" I didn't even interview. My superintendent just goes, "Hey, you got the job."

Okay, so we started a high school with 26 kids. We grew it to 550 kids. We were PBL in 2008. We were giving kids one-to-one MacBooks. Did all of that. Had an opportunity—do you guys know what Yosemite National Park is?

Rena Clark 6:24 Sure do.

Paul Beckermann 6:25 You bet.

Jon Corippo 6:26 So the California county that houses Yosemite had a position for a curriculum director. So I was like, "Let's go." They fired the superintendent. I became sort of the interim. Did that for a couple years, switched over to CUE, which is the California ISTE affiliate, and I ended up doing PD there and becoming the executive director. We grew up from 9,000 to 27,000 members. I was the guy in charge for a couple of years of a 7,000-person event in Palm Springs.

And at two in the morning in the back of an airplane coming from Australia, I sent my board an email, and I said, "I know it's only October, but I'm not coming back next year." Fired myself on the plane, went back to the classroom during COVID, and all the things I had been tinkering with for the six years—it was eight years—I was out of the classroom. I went back and I put my money where my mouth was during COVID. And when everybody else was yelling, "learning loss," my class's ELA scores doubled from 23 to 48%, and my class's math scores quadrupled from 9 to 41%.

And then, ever since then, what I do now is I am a consultant, and I fly out to schools and I show people how to teach better, work less, and achieve more in real life.

Paul Beckermann 7:51 I think I've heard that quote before.

Jon Corippo 7:56 Look at, we have that symmetry there. And Rena, I love your thoughts. Teach better for us means we're going to teach in ways that are more effective. What we keep trying to do is the same old thing with a Chromebook, the same old thing with Teachers Pay Teachers, the same old thing with PBIS. We got to look at different ways.

The work less—you guys are going to love this. We, as a group, believe that the teacher martyr thing is ugly and wrong. I do believe in what we call—my friend Adam Juarez, shout out to Adam Morris—he calls it work-life fusion. I believe that people that hate their jobs are the ones that need to run away from their jobs. We do need to be responsible, and we do need to be mindful of our time. But do you think—do you think a guy who's the cook—Guy, Guy Ferrari—

Winston Benjamin 8:50 Yeah, Fieri.

Jon Corippo 8:50 Guy, Guy Fieri.

Jon Corippo 8:51 Do you think on Saturdays he's like, "Hey, honey, let's just go to Burger King?" Why not? He does not do that because he's a food guy all the time. So when I'm watching movies, I'm thinking about things I can use to teach.

So for us, teach better is new techniques. Work less is no working off the contract hours if possible, and yet, the grading is done on time and the planning is done during my school day.

And then achieve more. You guys, I want to just give you an analogy. If a person started coaching any sport, and after 15 years, they were two and 12 every year, at what point would they become disenthralled with the process? There's a point where you're like, "Dude, what am I doing?" And yet, I know teachers that get the same scores every year. It's not uplifting, it's not fulfilling. We lose energy.

And so, like I just shared myself, I can show you guys dozens of teachers that have adopted our pedagogies. They're getting double, quadruple the growth. Yes, and that's with GATE students and with special education students. It's across the board, because we're using brain science to make the learning irresistible.

Rena Clark 10:12 I think you kind of answered my next question in a way, but maybe you can lay it out a little bit, because basically I was like, "What is EduProtocols?" And you kind of told us a little bit about that being...

Jon Corippo 10:26 Yeah, another quick analogy is for the listeners, is if you're familiar with like, Kagan instructions, right? We're similar to that, where we have repeatable pedagogical practices you can use with any grade level or any subject.

The things that differentiate us from Kagan in particular, though, is Kagan is not tech ready at all. Think about it, Kagan does not do tech at all. And that's not—I'm not saying that as a complaint—I'm just saying that's their sphere. Kagan also really doesn't teach teachers how to give feedback, how to get it into the grade book, and what to do with the feedback. So they'll teach you double bubble, and they'll teach you partner sharing and all that stuff. But where does that go in the grade book? And so our methodology is a fuller example, but they're pedagogical practices.

Paul Beckermann 11:14 All right, so let's make it super concrete and real. Can you give a couple examples, maybe like one for elementary and one for secondary? What's that look like?

Jon Corippo 11:23 So I've seen this in myself, in multiple classrooms that I visited. It's January. We're in fourth grade, and we still don't have our times tables. Can I get an amen? Because that's everywhere. Well, you're supposed to have your times table in third grade, and it's January. So if we still don't have our six, sevens, eights in January, bro, when are we doing division? And then, if it takes till April to do division, when am I doing fractions, decimals?

So using one of our pedagogical practices, one of our lesson frames, called The Fast and the Curious, we had little—we try to give them all little cutie pie names. So we've got like, Cyber Sandwich, Iron Chef, because when we tell the kids, I want to do this, I want it to be a name that they go, "Oh my gosh. We're doing Cyber Sandwich. I love that one."

So what we do is we'll give the kids on day one of fourth grade, twos, threes, fours, and fives on day one, and we will use tools like either Blooket or 99 Math or Word Wall or Gimkit, and using this technique called The Fast and the Curious, we can get kids to grow 25 points a day.

Case in fact, I just did this today with seventh graders that were not even my kids. Second graders. We got five weeks left to go school. I look over, teacher, I go, "Hey, do they know their times table?" She goes, "No." So I go, "Well, we're going to find out right now." So I put them in 99 Math. I did not give them any instructions. We played one quick round, one minute. Dude, they were 65% on the first try.

So I go, "You guys, here's the three that many of us missed. Let's talk about those for a second." I spent about one minute coaching them on the three most missed. We got back in there. They went up 14 points. I said, "Here's the next three you guys are struggling with." We went back in there, you guys, in three minutes of work time. We went from 65 to 85% with second graders on times tables. And I looked over at her and I said, "It's entirely possible that you could teach them times tables before they go to third grade."

So that's part of the teaching better part. We're going to accelerate all of that stuff, but the acceleration is based on feedback and targeted feedback.

A branch off of that for you, Winston, is—and you guys know, we, us sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers, we love our Latin roots. We love them. We—it's like the precious. Most sixth and seventh and eighth grade teachers that are teaching Latin roots, it's going to be all year. Can I get an amen? It's going to be all year. It's going to be 25 weeks, 30 weeks. Every week I make a packet. Every week I don't grade it. Every week I give a test. Every week, and I got to grade the test.

So for you, Rena, that's the work harder thing. I'm working at night. I'm making packets. I'm calling parents for packets that weren't turned in. You got—you see the eye roll, you guys. She's like, "Oh my god, no."

Rena Clark 14:20 Packets are a bad word in my...

Jon Corippo 14:22 Yeah. So what we'll do—and I've seen AP teachers use this all the way down through fifth grade—First day, I give them 100 Latin roots in Gimkit, 100. They get 45% right. The kids are mad. "You gave us an F." I go, "You guys, it's the first day. We're 45% done." I can get kids through 100 Latin roots in two weeks, you guys, with no packets, with feedback, with no grading.

And I think you guys are like this too: There's an equity component. We don't talk about that. Because we assume that it takes a whole year. Now, if I got a kid who can't read and I'm not going to teach him half of the Latin roots until after February, that is not an equitable approach. I need to give that young person all the content when they need it, not dribbling it in in April. So those are a couple of concrete examples.

Winston Benjamin 15:22 I love those. I love those examples because, like, right now, I'm thinking about Luis Moll and his concept of funds of knowledge, and how you access students' knowledge information in order to allow them to be able to access the information that you're teaching. Right?

So here's my question. As you say, all educators, we want—not we want—you to validate what you're doing. We want you to validate what you're doing. The validation is in the proof of the pudding. So in my opinion, I think you have some validation, right?

But here's the question: What research or best practices are the protocols built upon? And how did you develop those protocols, right?

Jon Corippo 15:59 So the beginning of it was in 2005. I went to five days of Marzano training, five days, and I was driving home after the last day. And I loved it. It was spectacular. I'm a PD geek. I was taking notes. I still got—I still have the spiral binder. I can tell you exactly where my McRel Marzano spiral binder is in my house. It's next to my gaming PC on the first shelf about halfway down. Black spiral binder. Okay, but I'm driving home and I realized I don't know how to execute any of that.

And I'll give you an example. Winston, what's your favorite non-linguistic representation lesson style? What do you got? Because most people are like, "Ugh."

Winston Benjamin 16:44 If you can see my eyes, ladies and gentlemen...

Jon Corippo 16:48 How do you teach similarities and differences? How do you teach similarities and differences? Similarities/differences is number one on Marzano's list. That's 45 points of growth if students are excellent at that. How do we teach it? Because we keep teaching with what? A multiple choice, fill in the blank, annotate. Those activities do not lead to the ability to compare.

So if you think of Marzano's top nine, we folded all those into the protocols. And I can give you a couple of quick examples, but like a Cyber Sandwich, which is our version of Think-Pair-Share, has seven Marzanos in a single activity. And I love Marzano's work and all that, but what I see from schools over and over again—and you guys can tell me if you've seen something different—is "This month, our Marzano is comparing." One Marzano a month. You ain't gonna make it like that. So that's one example for you, Winston.

Another example is with Hattie. What's the number one, least effective teacher affective strategy? Lecture.

Jon Corippo 17:52 It's a negative point two six. Negative point two six. What is the what is the worst student behavior? Boredom is a negative point five. Boredom is a negative point five.

But if you go all the way to the other end of the scale, what's the highest teacher strategy that you can execute? Jigsaw. Well, when's the last time you saw anybody doing one? If I was in the NFL and I said that tush push works 94% of the time, I better run that play. Everybody's doing it. Everybody runs that play. You know why? It works.

But in teaching, we say things that sound like this: "That's not my style." And then what happens is we don't get better results. And now we're in this loop of trying to force 30 kids to do what we want instead of what we know about brain science.

And then I'm gonna throw you guys two loopers right now that most people don't know, because in our team, we're very aware of how do students absorb information and keep it, because it's relevant. That's the key. And so here's an example.

Jon Corippo 18:50 Have you guys heard of the Ebbinghaus effect? And I will not be upset if you open up a new tab and Google it. Ebbinghaus: E, B, B, I N, G, H, A, U, S. The Ebbinghaus effect. It's also called the forgetting curve.

More popularly, we use it in sports like crazy. It's called reps. We use it in marketing. That's why you get two Starbucks emails a week, because if they send you 43, at some point, you're going to go, "Darn, I'm going to go get me some stars." It's all about the repetitions and the feedback.

And so Ebbinghaus research shows that if you do something four times over four days, four weeks later, your retention will be in the low 70s. And if you've ever stood in front of a group of freshmen or sixth graders and said, "Hey, we're going to write a narrative," and they're all like, "What's a narrative?" It's not their fault that they forgot. It's that we didn't get them enough reps in a small enough window to make it stick.

Jon Corippo 19:54 And so back to the Latin roots thing, you guys, using that Fast and Curious EduProtocol. I have multiple teachers who have a fun—watch how I'm going to say this—fun, passive-aggressive side, and they have given kids the semester final from January the last day of school, just to see how it goes. And they're reporting that those kids are having 75 and 85% retention.

So that's the Ebbinghaus effect. We're big on that one. If you do something multiple times, it gets locked in, which, again, is just sports. You would never give a team a play on Monday and then say, "I'll see you at the game Friday." Insanity. You're going to run that play. And Winston, I see you shaking your head. You're going to go, "That is not what it's supposed to look like. Let me walk you through it, and we're going to do it about four times." And then Tuesday, we're going to hit it again, and I'm going to go, "That's better, but we screwed up on this." By Friday, it's all shined up. And then we launch it on the other team, right?

So those are those repetitions, but in school, we believe we don't have enough time, because we want to do a 30-minute lecture router over 50 minutes. And so then the time is lost.

Jon Corippo 20:53 The other one that I learned from a cool little superintendent—she's only like five feet tall in India—I was doing some of this work with kids, and she says, "Well, Jon, isn't this just ipsative learning?" And I was like, "Sister, I've been teaching for 23 years, and I'm 55 years old, and I've never heard of ipsative learning. What is it?"

And she basically explained it as it's learning from yourself. So you do a thing, and it could be called basketball. You shoot the basket. It doesn't go in. You adjust your elbow. You hit the golf ball. It doesn't go where you want. You adjust your stance. Why do we keep hitting the golf ball? Because we're seeing the result and we want a better result.

Well, here's where teaching comes in. We get, you guys...

Jon Corippo 21:55 I have an Instagram picture of a kid who got a cake for their professor to celebrate the three-month anniversary of them not having their essays graded. It has 112,000 likes.

So when you deny kids the feedback aspect, what happens is they disassociate with the work. That's why, when you hand their essays back five days later, they don't care. That time in their life is gone.

So when you use a tool like We Will Write or Short Answer or one of our versions, which is called the Random Emoji Power Paragraph, what happens is the kids are writing for each other. They're all going to see each other's work right now. And it is the craziest thing to be standing in a room of sixth graders and hear them chanting, "Read mine, read mine, read mine." They just want anybody to read it, and they're so excited about what they wrote. And once you've got that momentum, everything changes.

So Winston, does that kind of answer your question?

Jon Corippo 22:50 On the research, we don't have a white paper on us; we don't have research on us, but we're aligning all of our best practices to those.

And so again, like in a Cyber Sandwich, the kids are going to summarize. They're going to—that's Marzano number two. They're going to compare their notes with another student. That's Marzano—that's top in Marzano. They're going to use an advanced graphic organizer. That's number four. They're going to collaborate, I believe that's six. They're going to share their thoughts in a quick didactic engagement, and then they're going to write down about their learning. They know exactly how the scoring is, and they're going to get their feedback right away.

So just like that, six, seven Marzanos in a single activity, and then we're going to do Cyber Sandwich two or three times a week all year, which means my kids are going to do it like 90 times this year.

Jon Corippo 23:44 They get really good at taking a chunk of text, breaking it down, looking for important facts, looking for highlights, comparing it with another person, understanding the lens the other person read it with, asking questions, and then writing either a response to literature, a summary, a critique, whatever it is I need.

And now, with AI tools, they're getting their grade immediately. Like, I used to be pretty good at scan grading it, but now with a tool like Snorkel, have you guys seen Snorkel yet? With Snorkel, they're going to get rich, detailed feedback immediately.

So what's my planning now? I don't need to plan anything. It's just a Cyber Sandwich tomorrow. What am I grading tonight? Nothing. Snorkel did it. It's just completely changing the flow of the classroom, and then that gives me way more energy to be on during class, because people don't understand, if you haven't been a teacher, you're on stage for six hours.

Jon Corippo 24:43 You can't make a mistake, you can't screw up, you can't have dead air. They'll eat you alive.

Rena Clark 24:51 I mean, so much of this, I think, and it resonates so much with probably a lot of our listeners, and a lot of our listeners that engage especially in a lot of our AVID work. And even what you're talking about, like, I know, in Summer Institute, like, when we're talking about focus note-taking, and it's that, I mean, we play the video like we have to engage in this over and over again, and our retention and why it's so important. So I think for many of us, we're like, "Yes, yes, yes." We're just continually nodding.

And I also was thinking about, you know, in my own practice, I was a STEM facilitator and really focusing in on mathematics, especially in three, four, and five. And you alluded to this, this problem of, we call it stop and drop, where it was like, okay, especially after the pandemic, we'd have students come in and there's the gaps are big and wide, and so I have to stop everything in order to get everyone up to this.

And then we—and what ends up happening for equitable reasons—we just drop things off. Well, that just causes more problems, because then we go in the next grade. Now we're, you know, I'm air quoting here, "behind." And the same thing keeps happening. And this, we've kind of seen some big, huge problems with this teaching. With best of intentions, we're going to stop and try to get caught up, but then we're just dropping off and not giving kids access to the standards.

So like, that is a big challenge I have seen. But I'm curious, since, you know, you've been out there, you're working with all these people, what are some of the biggest challenges you see in education today? And then as far as how might some of your EduProtocols be used to address like, maybe some of those bigger challenges you've been seeing, right?

Jon Corippo 26:30 Well, the two largest challenges I'm seeing everywhere are attendance and engagement. Right? The kids are head down, the kids are bored. The kids are blowing their Chromebooks up. The kids are off task, literally, with paper clips. Oh yeah, one of the things... No, it's good. I love the jib jab.

So it's hard to explain to people without hurting their feelings. But what we're serving to kids is so antithetical to everything else they do, that the teachers are assuming the kids are being rude. And I'm here to tell you the kids are being polite. If they were at Starbucks right now, they would be telling the server what they think of them. The kids are actually being incredibly patient with us, mostly because the kids aren't far enough along in their life journey to understand the bigger implications.

But looking back now, okay, it isn't for you again. Winston, in the 70s, when I got hurt in football, everybody yelled, "Walk it off." Now they call a helicopter.

When I played football in the 70s, they said—listen to this, you guys—"Don't drink water. You'll cramp." Let's match that up with Stanley Cups.

So, the—here's the point of that analogy, though—the world has changed. These kids go to In-N-Out Burger or Whataburger. They order what they want. They give reviews. These kids play on Roblox, they play on Minecraft. They interact with kids. They do things. They get feedback.

I had a student the year I went back, and the various people were talking about my student, about all of his deficits, and I said, "You know what? He has 10,000 followers on his Minecraft tutorial channel. So how many followers do you have on your YouTube channel?" You know, and so we've got to quit looking at kids as kids of the 1970s. We've got to start looking at kids from the way—the way that they function now. And they're no different than us, you guys. People want feedback, and kids are just in that zone now.

Jon Corippo 29:21 So the other thing that we do that's really differently is we assume the kids are bad at school. You like this one, Rena. We just assume they're bad. That way, I don't get emotional about it.

And so we do the first three or four days of school is what we call Smart Start. And so what we're going to do is—and fun fact, you guys, this should resonate with other people—If I go to Fresno City College as a freshman, I get about a two-hour orientation that we meet in the auditorium. There's the dining hall, there's the science building, there's the library. "Hey, it's going to be a great year. See you guys later."

If I go to Fresno State, they have Dog Days, and I check in 9 a.m. I spend the night in the dorm with four people I haven't met before. I eat there. I spend the night. I meet some professors. We hang around till about noon the next day. Now it's a 24-hour experience, a two-day experience.

UCLA, four-day experience. If you guys ever heard of Menlo College?

Jon Corippo 30:46 Menlo College is right next to Stanford. It's more expensive than Stanford. Menlo College has a five-day onboarding. Do you know why? They're investing in building culture of the students. They don't want their freshmen going home and saying, "Mom and Dad, I know you spent 80 grand, but I want to come home." They are treating their students like human capital. They want the students to engage. They want to have a network. They want to make them feel comfortable.

What do we do in fourth grade? "Hey, I'm glad you're here because of your zip code. Here's first page. Let's go." We don't onboard them at all. We don't get a chance to know what they like, what they don't like.

And one of the classic mistakes I'm seeing teachers make is they keep trying to talk kids into what they like. You're going to have a hard time talking 30 teachers into "You should like a latte the way I do." And coffee is way simpler than school.

So when I went back to the classroom during COVID, you guys love this.

Jon Corippo 31:54 We did an activity. It's called a Thin Slide: one picture, one word. Okay, it's kind of like a K-W-L, but they have access to the whole internet, not just their brain. One picture, one word. "What do you think the first car your mom and dad will buy you will really look like?" And it was a party, dude. They were laughing. But guess what? The number one vote getter was "llama." All the kids thought that was hilarious. That one kid thought his parents were going to buy him a llama.

Do you know what I did? I did not say, "That's ridiculous. I asked you to talk about cars." I said, "Bro, that is funny stuff." And I went home that night. You know what I watched? I watched Emperor's New Groove because I need a bunch of llama jokes tomorrow. I'm going to vibe with them. I'm going to vibe with them.

I had another group of boys. All they wanted to talk about was Shrek. Let's go. Let's do this report through the voice of Shrek. No problem.

Jon Corippo 33:04 "How would Donkey respond to this character?" I just went for it, right? And I, uh, again, Winston, I really like where you're going with this. I'm into energy matching. If they like Shrek, I like Shrek. If they like Notre Dame, I like Notre Dame. Hint: I don't like Notre Dame, but if they do, I do, because it's so hard to get 30 people on your bias, right? And I'm going to match that energy, and I'm going to get things going.

Another one I hear from teachers is, "These kids, they won't settle down after lunch." So don't try to settle them down. Put them into Gimkit. Do a boss battle.

Here's another fun one. We do a—or zero. Gimkit has a mode called Boss Battle. It's one person against everybody else. I call it Ricky Bobby mode. None of the kids know what it is; they're too young. And I just tell them, "We've been playing this quiz. We played this quiz Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. It's now Thursday. Yesterday, you guys got an 88. You're all proud of yourself."

"Today, you're going to play me. I got a bachelor's degree. If you don't beat me, everybody gets a zero. Let's go." Now, I'm not trying to calm them down. Now I'm playing off the energy that's already there, because guess what else teachers like to say? "Why are you guys so apathetic?" We can't have it both ways. You can't tell the kids to be quiet and then ask them why they're apathetic.

Jon Corippo 34:04 So what I'll do is I'll—and if you know horse talk, I'll launch him a little bit. We'll do two rounds of Boss Battle. I'll make it personal, and then we'll slow it down, because I gave them a chance to reintegrate into the building.

So the protocols—some people look at them and say, "Oh, these are great graphic organizers," but it's really a vibe. It's reading the room. It's feedback, it's energy matching. The protocols themselves are just the tools that allow you to execute, because nobody wants to do a worksheet.

I did again today. Today, we did some 99 Math with some second graders, and we did one round, two rounds, three rounds. I go, and I just went like this, "Who wants to play another round?" Yeah, these kids have just done 900 problems. Let's do 500 more. That's the—once I've got that energy in my classroom, I can quadruple the amount of production. And when I do that, the growth is going to skyrocket.

Jon Corippo 34:40 And you guys don't think it's just me. Now, I have a certain technique for telling bad dad jokes and rolling with llamas and stuff like that. But everything I'm telling you, everything I'm telling you, are techniques I'm using their brains against them. "Let's do this. Let's see what the feedback is. Do you think you could do it better? I think I can. Let's go." So that's that's part of the vibe there: is truly working with the children.

Jon Corippo 35:06 You guys, I have no interest in being a college professor or impersonating one, but we have a lot of friends who think they are because maybe they don't have another context, or maybe that's their self-image. But the question I have to ask you is, do you go into the lunchroom and tell everybody hilarious stories about the wonderful stories your kids are writing? Do you go into the lunchroom and tell all your friends about the amazing, cool projects they're doing? Do you go into the lunchroom and say, "Oh my gosh, we grew 40 points this week?" If you're not doing that, then you need to look at what your effort is pursuing.

Paul Beckermann 35:06 All right, you're giving us a ton to chew on here, Jon, so I'm going to open the window even wider here for this last question before we jump into the toolkit. What has been on your mind lately regarding K-12 education? What have you been pondering? I mean, this is a wide-open window question.

Jon Corippo 35:24 So, understand that I got all that Willy Wonka going on in my head already. Here's my big—here's my big new one. And I think this might bring some relief to your listeners.

The response to AI by educators has been fairly binary: yes, yes, yes, never, right? Yes or never. And I think that that perspective is based on a flawed idea of what AI represents in the classroom. So let me just say this: for people who are worried about AI in the classroom, I am not giving kids ChatGPT to write their essay. That is not what I'm talking about.

I'm going to use tools like I already mentioned, Snorkel, Class Companion. Heck, even Padlet has a tool now where you can create AI images. And I'm going to let those kids create AI images, and they'll be excited to write a sentence about them and who's winning.

I will use tools like in Snorkel. I can give kids a chunk of text and say, "Highlight the thesis. Highlight two supporting facts. Write three sentences about your opinion." They can't copy/paste. They're in my world now.

The AI is for me. The AI is not for the kids as much. Class Companion, same thing. I can give kids—instead of giving them an essay—I can give them 1.1 point a, one point b, one point c, one point D. It's all chunked out. So they have a rubric for the first paragraph, a rubric for the second paragraph. They can submit up to six times, and once they hit submit, it'll give them feedback on grammar and conventions. Did they answer the question? Is it creative? Does it hit hard? Is it in the right genre? And they can then take that immediate feedback and feed it back.

But you guys know, copy/paste, because this is what teachers forget: when you ban AI, it's on their phone, so you can ban it on the school network all you want. You ain't banning nothing.

And we've already been through this with calculators. Remember when teachers said, "You won't always have a calculator"? Hello, 1974. I knew. And then they—and then they retreated to "You won't always have a TI-84." Hello. TI-84 emulator. So when we draw those kinds of lines, we don't look highly skilled to our customers.

So what I'm looking at is these tools, and I'll rename them: Class Companion, Snorkel.app, Padlet has AI features, Curipod. You know, you guys have probably heard of a bunch of those.

So kind of wrap that up. I think if you think that kids getting a cruddy prompt made by AI that I send them, and then that they're going to write a cruddy essay the AI grades, and you think that's education—that's not where we're going, right? And I'm trying to not throw the names of a couple of tools under the bus on that one, but people are overusing them, and it just turns into Turnitin from 1999, where kids would just change one word until it went through the filter. That's not good teaching, bro, that's not good teaching.

So that's my take on AI. I think that a lot of people are misjudging what it is. It's not a binary system. It's not AI or block. What it is is, what tools can I use to make my feedback immediate, to make my kids enjoy the classroom more? So that's my take on. That's my big thing I'm really processing right now.

Paul Beckermann 39:14 I hear you, you know, that's that's great, and you know, it's a perfect invitation for us to jump into our toolkit.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 39:20 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 39:31 So toolkit time, Jon, we're going to invite you in too, but we're going to take a stab at this first, and then give you a second to ponder what else you might want to drop in. Rena, what would you like to put in the toolkit today?

Rena Clark 39:44 You know, Jon alluded to this, and I've been working with teachers, but using AI for feedback, but being really intentional about that, but the ability to ask for, you know, targeted, timely, specific, actionable feedback.

And I've gotten into some arguments, because grading is not feedback. When you give a grade with some comments, that is not feedback. It's turned in, it's done. That's not feedback. They can't do anything with that. So, no, I'm talking about feedback.

And when you, especially if you have like, 190 students, AI really does allow you to be, you know, back to this like, working smarter, being able to be faster, but that ability to give feedback. And then, and the thing is, you can actually use your own rubrics and upload your own things into it to give that more targeted feedback with your examples for kids and being transparent with kids.

And then, as we know, with other with kids too, then they can also then work in environments where they can get their own feedback as well to improve. So I just think it really is a valuable tool, and there's a lot of different tools you can do it with, so not going to name any specific ones, but just AI in general.

Paul Beckermann 40:54 Yeah, for sure. Winston, how about you? What do you think about?

Winston Benjamin 40:58 I'm really into this idea of giving them everything. So starting where the students' knowledge is based on, right? If you find out what they know, then you're able to lead them through their misunderstandings and misconceptions, and you can adjust based on your feedback and knowledge of the students.

But if you just start dumping information into their brains, they're going to have a misconception from when they came in, plus trying to fit into what you're telling them. So they have to do two with that misunderstanding. So I think starting from where students are gives you the ability to adjust their misunderstanding, rather than giving them new ones. So I like that idea.

Paul Beckermann 41:42 You know, I could go a lot of different directions here, too. I mean, I'm really tuned into almost anything AI right now, just to see what the possibilities are. I think we got to be careful not to close the door on these things and be afraid of them. I think we need to let opportunity drive it more than the fear of it.

Jon, you mentioned a bunch of the AI tools that are out there. I think if we engage our students with these tools and then let them have that conversation with us, let's figure it out with them a little bit. And like you said, with the sports analogy, with the self-feedback, well, that can happen with AI, too. And you know, we can collaboratively figure this thing out. Because, let's be honest, nobody really has it figured out yet. It's still in its infancy. We're learning some tricks, but there's still a long way to go on this thing. So let's do it together.

Jon Corippo 42:35 Yeah, and I've got a little, I've got a little non-AI add-on for that. Most of us have under four weeks left to go in the year. Right? The classic teacher approach to this is, "Well, I'm going to start buckling everything up, and I got to come up with some activities for these kids to do."

The last four weeks of school are what I call Me Time. I'm going to crank up all the tools that I was too busy to use all year. I'm going to try all the crazy techniques so that the first day of school I'm rocking. So like I mentioned a couple like Class Companion or Snorkel or Learning Genie, it's Me Time, you guys, and I'll just come into a group of sophomores. I go, "Hey, Corippo's learning a new tool. Let's let her rip."

And it's to what you were saying: is, I'm going to be honest, I've never used this tool, but my trick to it, you guys—the non-AI part—is, I'll give kids a prompt like, "Do you want a yacht or a private island? Three sentences. Go." Because all I'm trying to see is, what's the kid energy? What's the tool work like? What other ways can I use this?

So I love doing a lot of little quick things, because, like, sometimes teachers will try a new tool, and they get too grandiose in their schemes, and then it gets—it gets unfun, and it gets weighty, and then I have a bad association.

So what I'll do is I'll tell kids, "Hey, we got eight minutes till recess. Let's see what this Gimkit mode is all about." And then I'm very carefully watching, how are the kids liking it? Are they digging it? Are they not digging it? Is it academic? What's my feedback like? And I will launch dozens of these experiments.

And almost everything you guys are hearing are things that I figured out in the last four weeks of school. What I do the other 32 weeks of school is perfect what I figured out last spring, but that means day one, I'm like, "Hey guys, Jimmy's got a new tool. Let's go." And I'll use them in a low—a low-risk way for the kids, and I keep them quick.

Two things. Go one picture, funny statement. Go load up a meme, or GIF, tell me why I picked it. Go. So it's quick turnaround, and that made a huge difference in my career. And it makes it so much safer feeling as the teacher to tell the kids right up front, "I don't know how this is going to go. I don't know. Help me out," and it's really fun for them.

Paul Beckermann 45:00 They like that honesty. I mean, they eat that up, don't they? That way.

Jon Corippo 45:03 They love it. They love it. Yes, they love it.

Rena Clark 45:07 Absolutely. Well, that kind of leads us into our next section. It's time for that one thing.

Transition Music 45:21 That one thing.

Rena Clark 45:23 We have lots of things we could take away, but what's that one thing that we're either still thinking about or that we took away from today? So who would like to start us off today?

Paul Beckermann 45:35 I'm kind of chewing on when Jon was talking about, you don't just put one Marzano in the Cyber Sandwich. You pack more Marzano in the Cyber Sandwich. But we can do lots of good, effective, research-based strategies in compact, economically delivered techniques. It doesn't have to be just one thing, not one Hattie strategy, one Marzano. We can package these things by using best practices and really impact kids in lots of different ways. So that seems to be one thing that goes back to that first quote: is, you know, we're not working harder, but we're getting better impact because we're packaging it better.

Winston Benjamin 46:17 So Paul, you kind of took a little bit of what I was going to say in terms of the like, strategies of action. For me, the thing that's sticking with me is, "That's not my style," right? Like, hey, guess what? This works. This best practice works. Do this because we know it works. I don't care about your style.

If we were doing it about schools or sports or anything like that, Fortune 500 companies, they all copy each other on what actually is effective, so they want product success. So I just think I'm keeping—nobody's running the wishbone in the NFL for a reason, because it no longer works, right? So what are the 70s and 80s practices that we have that we need to catch up with? Catch up with it. So...

Jon Corippo 47:06 It doesn't work, but we keep doing it. It's in with a funny little analogy for you guys. If anybody's old enough to remember the movie Joe Dirt, there's a part where he meets this guy at a firework stand, and Joe Dirt says, "How's your sales?" And he says, "I'm not selling anything." And Joe Dirt says, "Why not?" And he says, "Well, I like snakes and sparklers." And Joe Dirt—so he's in, he's, you know, he's like, "What? What about these? What about M80s? What about buzz bombs, Terry?" You know, he's listing off all these different kind of fireworks. And the firework salesman says, "Well, I don't sell those because they're not what I like." And Joe Dirt says, "It's not about you, it's about the consumer."

So I just have to ask this question for anybody that's listening, and it still might be thinking, "That's not my style." Is your style student growth, or is your style teaching how you want? That's the conversation you got to have with yourself.

Rena Clark 48:05 Yeah. And that kind of leads into mine, which I appreciate that whole idea of energy matching. Like, yeah, is it about your energy, or is it really about the kids in the room? And so I appreciate that. And then I also appreciated, beyond what you all said, is this idea of work-life fusion. It's not about separation, but balance of fusion. So I appreciated that as well.

Jon Corippo 48:35 Yeah, like, I can see if you're a stockbroker and it's kind of a not very human business, and you need to run away from it. I get that. You guys were surrounded by lovely people doing lovely people things, watching kids grow up. Why would I want to run away from that? Do I need to have a vacation? Yes. Do I need to have the—I need to be able to say, "Jon, it's Saturday. I stopped working." Yeah, but I don't—I think that the work-life balance thing, I think that we overplayed that in some areas. I think it's okay to love your love your career and love your lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that.

You need to have boundaries. You need to be able to say, I—this is my teaching safe word: worksheet. So if you hear that, I'm taking a few minutes, but man, it's okay to love what you do. I just think the reason some people struggle is they've put so much of their own money and their own time into it, and their own love, and they're not seeing results, and that's very frustrating. So part of our idea was, let's change our technique so that my love can equal the academic results that I'm looking for.

Winston Benjamin 49:50 And see, with that, that's the best way to close out our session. I thank you so much, Jon, for bringing in our conversation on how to think about education in a way that fits the needs of our students as they prepare for their future, because what we did in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s is not going to be valuable in 30 years, because the 90s was 30 years ago. Can't believe that. That's wild to me.

But if anyone of our listeners wants to check out, you could go to www.eduprotocols.com.

Winston Benjamin 49:24 Check it out. Run into it. Jon, I really want to say thank you so much for helping us think through ways of pushing our students to be great.

Jon Corippo 50:11 Yeah. And I want to add on one tiny thing. We have a Facebook group with 22,000 teachers in it. So if I'm not your cup of tea, drop in there and see 22,000 other people getting massive numbers.

And one fun trivia item, our most likely person who is a user of EduProtocols right now is over 45 years old. Do you know why? They tell us over and over again, "They tried everything, dude. This is the only thing that works. This is the only thing that's going to save me for the next 12 years," and that's why they love it.

Winston Benjamin 50:44 What's the name of the Facebook group?

Jon Corippo 50:46 It's called the EduProtocols Community. Amazingly enough. There you go.

Rena Clark 50:51 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 50:54 We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 51:06 We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 51:11 And remember, "Go forth and be awesome."

Winston Benjamin 51:15 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 51:17 You make a difference.