In the recent Educators for Excellence survey of American educators: Voices from the Classroom, an elementary school teacher said: “Too often, educators are handed new materials and told, ‘go ahead and get started,’ without receiving the proper training to leverage their new materials.”

We sat down with co-founder of E4E, Evan Stone, and EdReports executive director Eric Hirsch to talk about the importance of supporting and involving teachers from the beginning when choosing new materials as well as how crucial it is to invest in curriculum-based professional learning and long-term implementation plans. 

Only then can instructional materials make a real difference. Only then can teachers do what they do best: strive to meet the needs of each and every student and inspire a lifelong love of learning. Listen to or watch the full episode below.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jess Barrow  00:00

Hi I’m Jess Barrow, and this is the EdVoices podcast. Today I am thrilled that we are joined with Evan Stone and Eric Hirsch. Evan is the CEO of and co founder of Educators for Excellence, and Eric is the executive director of EdReports, and we’re going to have a great discussion about the importance of educator led selection and implementation practices, and how engaging educators is really central to ensuring materials have an impact on student learning. Part of this discussion is really going to focus on educator for excellences amazing new survey Voices from the Vlassroom. 2024 which focuses on the voices of America’s educators. So before we dive into all the data and the discussion, want to give Evan and Eric a chance to introduce themselves, to talk a little bit about their journey in education and what led them to the work that they’re doing. Evan would love to get started with you.

Evan Stone  01:06

Well, thank you both for having me on and thank you so much Jess for bringing us together for what’s a really important conversation. So my name is Evan stone. I’m one of the co founders at educators for excellence. My professional journey started in the classroom. I was a teacher at PS 86 in the Bronx. I originally came in through Teach for America, stayed well beyond my commitment, fell in love with the act of teaching. But if you really grew out of the lived experiences that me and my colleagues were having, which was this sort of division between what we felt in our classroom, which was deep joy and love for our practice, and then a sense of feeling voiceless in the system outside of our classroom.

Whether you know this was at a time of major shift, the common core standards, the advent of sort of modern teacher evaluation systems, conversations about shifting, how we pay teachers, potential shifts to the way that tenure is awarded. So major changes that would impact me and so many of my colleagues and those things felt like they were happening to us and not with us.

And so we started organizing to say, actually, we should be shaping this as the professionals with you know, relevant lived experience with our students, should have an active voice in designing the policies that impact us and our students. We often say that our goal at E4E is to shift the dynamic of teachers of being subjects of change to having them be agents of change.

And so our work over the last 14 years has been that bringing teachers together to talk about the challenges that they’re facing, come up with productive solutions to those challenges, and then make sure stakeholders hear those and drive changes based on them.

And that’s at the district level, at the state level, within our unions and even at the federal level, we’re now a movement of nearly 40,000 educators across the country who have become members of E4E with six chapters and are continuing to grow so really excited to talk about this, and thanks for giving me a few minutes to talk about myself and the work of E4E.

Jess Barrow  03:12

Eric, how about you?

Eric Hirsch  03:14

Eric Hirsch, Executive Director of EdReports, I took a different route, but I hope doing many of the same things as you, Evan, and have admired your work for as long as it is, existed and before it, I was looking for it. I got certified to teach then ran for the hills, because it made me understand how amazing teachers are and how hard that job is, and moved immediately into policy and research.

So I started at the National Conference of State Legislatures and helping on teaching policy, teaching quality, and I would bring educators in front of legislators, and just watching that disconnect was so hard. So in my next roles, I really wanted to think about what it really meant to elevate teacher voice, but I really love what you’re saying about being an agent.

My journey was about giving educators, from that point on, data and information in the tools they need to become that agent. So I worked at the New Teacher Center, and I spent 10 to 15 years gathering teacher working conditions data, about where teachers worked, down to the school level, about whether they had leadership time, many of the same things I know we’re going to talk about today so that they could have conversations about making their school environments great places, and earlier this month, I celebrated my 10 year anniversary here at EdReports, where our whole rationale is to have educator led reviews so educators are providing information about what are in materials to other educators and to system. Leaders so that we’re getting again better things in teachers hands so they could do the hardest job better and better.

Jess Barrow  05:08

Thanks so much. It’s great to hear more about each of your journeys. I feel like even though our organizations do different things, central to both of them is our educators. Is teacher voice, and that’s what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today as we’re as we kind of dive in. I would love Evan to talk a little bit more about your 2024 survey of American educators voices from the classroom. One quote that really struck me was from a teacher in Connecticut, an elementary school teacher in Connecticut, who said, you know, too often educators are handed new materials and told, Go ahead, get started without receiving the proper training to leverage their new materials. Would love to hear first a little bit about this survey and who you’re talking to and what you’re hoping to sort of show and convey through the survey. But also, then maybe we can talk a little bit about this quote in particular, and what you think it says about how materials are getting into the classroom.

Evan Stone  06:14

I love that quote too. And I think zooming out, this is one of the largest national surveys of teachers. It’s our seventh year conducting it, so we have great longitudinal data. I’m sure this podcast has a bunch of data wonks out there. So just just for those people, this is a survey of 1000 educators. They are not E4E members. Well, some of them might be by chance, but as a representative sample of educators, and we also do an oversample of an additional 300 educators of color, because we have seen, over the last six years prior to this, a growing divergence in terms of perspectives on key issues among teachers of color compared to our national sample. If you want to learn more about it, you can find it on our website@efre.org backslash teacher survey.

So that’s where it lives, and you can see all of the years of the data. But I will say what this survey was really about for us, was asking the question, okay, we have supposedly, quote, unquote, returned to normal after the pandemic. How are teachers doing and how are they feeling? And there was this promise that technology was going to radically improve both the quality of instruction and teachers lives. Has that happened and if and if so, how? And I think the overwhelming answer to this is that it hasn’t, and teachers are really struggling, and they believe their students are really struggling. So before I get to that quote, because I think you know, the implementation of high quality instructional materials is part of this, the stat that has me most struck from this survey is that 70% of teachers report that their students are further behind than they were before the pandemic.

So only 30% of teachers think their kids have caught up to where they were before, and 64% report that their students mental well being is also worse. So teachers are telling us the system as designed is not working for their students, and they haven’t gotten them back to the baseline of pre pandemic. And we knew that wasn’t good enough even then. And then the other thing I think a lot about is only 16% of teachers say they’d recommend the profession to others. So we have a net promoter score that’s in the low negative 40s. So negative 48 and last year was negative 51 so we saw a small uptick, but, but overall, teachers are really discontented with the conditions of their profession.

And what this means to me is the profession’s not working for teachers. I mean, schools aren’t working for students or for teachers the way they’re currently designed. And I think part of the reason, although not all of it, is the quote that you just shared, that oftentimes we promise teachers we have something new and better for you. It’s going to make your students do better. It’s going to support your instruction, and we just drop it off at their doorstep. I can remember showing up in my third year of teaching and having a new stack of science books in my classroom that I had no idea were coming, that we were changing how we were doing instruction.

And I feel like that’s the lived experience of so many teachers that they show up and there’s something new, they maybe have a day or two with the publisher to walk them through it, and then they’re sort of patted on the back and say, you know, to deliver this. And I think that’s a huge challenge, because it means we didn’t involve them in the decision. And even if it’s the right and the best materials that are top of the line that I you know, all the things that EdReports would tell us we should be using, nobody likes something that is forced on them that they’re not a part of, of choosing.

So I think part of this is how it’s selected, and then nobody is going to change their practice on their own overnight, without a lot of time, a lot of support and a lot of investment. So. How we give them the professional support to do this is equally important. So I’ll stop there, because I’ve talked a lot that’s, that’s, that’s sort of the survey. And Eric, I’d love your reactions to any of that data.

Eric Hirsch  10:09

Oh, it. first of all, the data is just so helpful, and the fact that you can look back see some of the influence of the pandemic, and actually see how students and teachers are still struggling. And it’s I. I always love it when it comes out. I feel like a Data Wonk kid in a candy store when you can go in and be like, what’s really different, and what are some of the endemic problems we’ve seen time and time again over those seven years, and we know some of those same challenges will be there around time and materials.

And it’s so interesting to put that longitudinal data with our own data about what we know about the instructional materials marketplace, so we find more and more there are more quality options and HQIM can address so many of those challenges, right? If we’re giving teachers resources they need to scaffold instruction and help kids who are off grade level, if it has some of the content they need, so that educators can really go in, use that scope and sequence and adapt and figure it out.

And there are more and more of those options. When we started, there were one out of 19 things we looked at were aligned in math, and now about half in both math and ELA, of the materials we’ve reviewed meet criteria to be the kinds of things that will save teachers those seven to 12 hours that will ideally not just be dumped on the doorstep, but while about half the materials we’ve reviewed now have those quality ingredients to support kids, only about a third are used regularly, for example, in ELA, in the classroom, right? And regularly, by the way, is once a week when we look at some of the RAND data, which completely aligns and supports with so much of the E for E data, and it all gets to exactly what you said. How do people change practice? How do people change behavior? Right? There’s a reason we have book clubs and reading in community, right? As well as just read a book. It can help, but it’s really making meaning, working on practice and changing together.

Nobody changes instructional practice because you dumped a book on their doorstep or a logging code. So not only do they need to be engaged, they need to and through that understanding, what are the elements of quality, why this can help them, and then working together to utilize it skillfully. Because one of the other pieces of data we have in our state of the market report is even if the materials are aligned and they’re really, really good, only one out of five teachers say I use the lesson regularly as designed.

In fact, over a third say I modify more than half the lesson, which has the challenge of, oh my goodness, that’s both a great thing, because teachers teach kids, not materials, but oh my gosh, you may be taking these great things in the materials and doing all the work over and over again. So how can we help teachers actually understand what they’re getting and to work together to get the most out of curriculum, understanding how it’s used, and how vital the role of teachers are in delivering the content?

Evan Stone  13:35

Yeah. I mean, all that data resonates from our experience, and just to think about like, you know, New York City has been on the front page of many, many newspapers or websites talking about NYC reads, And NYC solves two massive curricular shifts that are happening. And our members fought for a lot of these changes to occur. And then, when I think about in NYC reads, the rollout of new literacy curriculum for all elementary schools. In the phase one, the decision was made almost right before purchasing needed to happen, and so superintendents made those choices for their local community school districts.

In phase two, though, we were able to organize dozens and dozens of focus groups of teachers to look at the options, discuss them, used EdReports resources to think about how to unpack them. We had town halls where those teachers then met with their superintendents to talk about it. Here the superintendent’s perspective, had dozens and dozens of teachers to do individual meetings with those superintendents to advocate for the choices that they want, and we saw a lot more diversity of selection.

So in the first time, most of the districts had chosen HMH, and the second one, we had half the districts choose HMH, a quarter of them choose el and a quarter of them choose wit and wisdom. And to me, what that showed me is like there isn’t a singular answer to this question. In fact, there are probably multiple products that are really high quality that teachers could be using, and your data shows us that.

But the important part is teachers doing some ownership of this shift, because both they did the work to help understand what the curriculum was, and I think implementation will be better as a result of that. So that’s those are the kinds of stories we want to see more of.

Eric Hirsch  15:20

Yeah and it’s so right, Evan, in that, so each of the materials you named are green, and if people dig into the reports and look at the indicators and evidence, no curriculum that we have reviewed or will ever exist is going to be perfect, perfect for every teacher and every kid.

So really gets to how are you utilizing this resource of core curriculum to really convey and get kids grade level content so that they can succeed. And each of those choices has different things in implementation and ongoing support, you may need to focus on whether it includes foundational skills elements or not, whether or not certain components and certain texts are there, and we go back to the amount of adapting, as we just talked about, that’s there, making that choice, engaging educators in the choice, and realizing every choice, no matter what materials you pick, is going to need ongoing, customized implementation and professional learning for teachers to use it skillfully and implement it with integrity and to not make it a burden on teachers, but the resource that high quality instructional materials are meant to be so regardless of any of those three choices.

We don’t make recommendations here, we just put the information out and hope it empowers within that local context. But what you’re saying is what needs to happen, because each choice has ramifications on implementation and support, let alone the buy in of educators to understand why it’s worth transitioning and changing their practice in the first place.

Jess Barrow  17:02

I mean, Evan, you gave such a great example of here’s how the selection was done, here without teacher input. And this is a different example where teachers were involved. Eric, I know at Ed reports, we have, you know, years of experience working with different states and districts as they conduct their adoption processes. Is there anything you’d want to add about sort of the importance of how materials are selected in conjunction with involving educators at every step that we haven’t fully covered?

Eric Hirsch  17:39

Fully covered? Oh my goodness, I think you can hear Evan and I go on for a long time. Since it’s 2024 we’re recording this right? Like with all kinds of election coverage, I’m going to give you my stump speech as if I’m campaigning. How you choose matters to whether it’s used, right? I see the bumper sticker, I see the campaign. We actually know that from our own experience in districts and states, right? If you are not centering students with teachers at the heart of that and actually saying, how are the materials that we have been using? Have we been using anything? How are they doing? What’s our vision for instruction? What’s the capacity of our teaching core?

Like Evan, I’d love to hear more your thoughts from the New York chapter and other chapters in your own members, because I know you’ve talked about this, not just in New York, in LA and others, but just what their readiness is for different types of material and how districts are engaging them. In New York, right? We have the district and down to the school level choice and both NYC reads and solves has been a very different approach in terms of how curriculum had been selected in the first place.

But if you are not working with educators, thinking about what the vision is for success, educator knowledge and capacity, looking at these materials deeply, and then when the book is on your doorstep, you’re actually again getting the candy store. You’re there like, oh, I piloted this. I understand it. I know how this can help me with my kids. And I also understand that this is not meant to constrain my practice lock step. It’s meant to unlock my expertise as a teacher to use these materials well with my kids. But again, while materials can help support that, it’s really the ongoing professional learning, support and implementation that has to occur on go all the time for this to really make a difference.

Evan Stone  20:00

Well, I would vote for that, that bumper sticker, Eric, I think that’s a great place to me. It’s like, I mean, we might not get that many votes outside of the listeners of this podcast, but I feel like this is the right place.

Eric Hirsch  20:19

Double digits, 40,000 members.

Evan Stone  20:26

There we go, exactly. But for me, what you’re saying is, like, this is about the why, and helping teachers realize, like, why. Why do we want to shift materials to begin with? Like, frankly, it’s because the many of the materials many schools are using, and this has changed dramatically. And I can give you some data on how much it’s changed. But like, and you know, this is but, like, and you know this as well as anybody, but we’re changing because we had materials that we’re not aligned with, just to take reading which we’re not aligned with, what we know the science of reading is and what we know kids need to really be able to develop the fundamental skills that are necessary for success.

And so, like, to me, that’s the why we’re changing, because we need to do better on behalf of kids, and we’re changing also because we’ve set many teachers up to struggle, because even if they work really hard and deliver the material just the way it’s been designed, and those things are not grounded in what it takes for kids to learn to read, they will have a subsection of their students that will not access the materials regardless of how effective their instruction is.

So that’s why we’re needing to change. I think that was the first thing we tried to do in talking to teachers about across the country on this issue, and the change is happening like in this survey, two thirds of teachers said that their districts implemented new curricular materials aligned to the science of reading in the past three years.

So I’m sure you’ve had other people talk about how many state laws have been passed, but this is changing. But the outcome we want from it of different instruction and different outcomes we aren’t seeing yet. I mean, only 31% of teachers of elementary school, teachers who are most impacted by this say that as a that report that they have a new curriculum, are saying that they’ve actually change their practice significantly as a result of this? So to me, it’s this question of, okay, most districts and states are beginning to change, but most teachers haven’t actually shifted what they’re doing. And you’ve listed a lot of why? Maybe they’re not actually using the materials, or they’re using them, you know, on an irregular basis. They’re supplementing it with things that aren’t aligned. They’re bringing back some of their old lessons that they really love to teach but may, you know, may break up the scope and sequence or the flow of their of their core curriculum.

So there’s all of these problems with the implementation side, and I think part of that’s because we didn’t, we didn’t have the conversation at scale about why we needed to make this shift, get teachers excited and build buy in for a change that’s going to happen. But we do this all the time in education. We’re really bad at change management. We’re really good at solutions that we just kick out into the system. So I do think some of the work that you all are leading is helping to shift that, to have the conversation both about what is great, what a teacher think is great, and why, but also, fundamentally, why is this a necessary part of delivering the education system our kids deserve?

Eric Hirsch  23:07

Yeah, you’re making me think about so many different things. Evan, right, like so, part of it is professional learning, for example, in this case, around the science of reading, um, because we can’t assume what they had in teacher prep really prepared them to understand what it means to have materials that have systematic and explicit instruction of of foundational skills and some of the other aspects so one is just getting them to have the skill and the will, the heart and the mindset to really be able to look at some of the new curriculum that is aligned with the science of reading and be like, I understand why this is really important, but then to have the curriculum based professional learning to actually directly apply to maybe these three choices in NYC reads or In other communities across the board, because we’ve reviewed hundreds of series of instructional materials to say, How can I apply some of that knowledge specific around how to adapt, how to implement, how to understand.

And one of the things I think, when you kind of level up and look at a lot of our ELA reviews, is the amount of bloat in virtually all ELA materials, right whether? And this is in part because once you’ve attained the copyrights for some of these materials and texts and for kids to read, it’s so much easier to add than to take away, and so oftentimes, then it’s on the backs of teachers if there are extra units, and the positive of that is there’s more diversity of things teachers can use with kids, but then understanding that pathway to again, skillfully utilize the materials and pick and keep some of the things that may them, high quality is a real challenge if you’re just doing generic professional learning, which may be necessary to help folks understand the materials, but really or the why behind the materials, but really getting into the curriculum based professional learning and some of the data we see in the RAND American School teacher panel, which echoes a lot of what you’re saying is there’s a huge proportion of teachers. One out of five get no time, no professional learning on their curriculum, and it’s really rare to get more than a couple of hours that are really specific around how can I teach this unit, this lesson, this text with kids.

Jess Barrow  25:42

Yeah, Evan, and I know that you’re the voices from the classroom also has a big focus on curriculum based professional learning, and what what educators are saying about what they have access to. Is there anything you’d want to highlight from from that. I mean, you both have already spoken so eloquently about why this is important. But what are, what are you all seeing through your survey?

Evan Stone  26:08

So, I mean, Eric made me think about a lot of things, because he brought up teacher prep, and then he brought up professional learning. I think so I think the core of this, what we’ve I think what we’ve talked about is there’s lots of great options, and choosing, having teachers be involved in in selecting them, will help. I think even more important, though, is giving teachers the sort of time and space to implement them, and we know what it takes to do professional learning well. We have tons of research on this that teachers need the release time to really dig into this.

They need great coaches that are selected and compensated effectively so that they can deliver the coaching and support. We need not only release time for that coaching to happen, we need regular follow up conversations. We need the professional learning to be grounded in the actual curriculum that they are using. So those are just some of the core things that we know are essential, and most schools are not designed for that to happen.

We think a lot of that lives in teachers contracts, where there’s sort of restrictions on the release time, restrictions on the release time, restrictions on compensation, and we think there’s an opportunity to really radically rethink how the school day functions to ensure that teachers have the coaching and the follow up meetings that the that the professional learning is grounded in the subjects and in the content that they are using, because right now, only 35% of teachers say that they have built in follow up meetings after they get observed.

So you often have this happen. Is what most teachers will tell us. Somebody came in and observed me. Maybe they wrote something down that I got in my email or was left but I didn’t have a conversation about it. So I don’t know. I didn’t you know, the worst type of coach is the one that evaluates you and doesn’t tell you anything about that evaluation or give you any feedback on it. Only 38% only 38% say that their professional learning, that they received professional learning that’s subject based so in their core subject, and fewer than half received curriculum based professional learning.

So I just think we have this huge challenge where most districts were not set up to give the type of support that teachers need to do this effectively. They’re used to these one and done fly by professional development sessions, and the districts that were on the cutting edge were like, You know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna let teachers choose their professional learning.

So we have a day and they can go to different schools and choose the one that feels most relevant. So then at least teachers have some ownership of it. But none of that is actually coming in and observing the process of teachers, teaching, giving them feedback, and so all the feedback that happens in most cases is in an evaluative sense. It feels punitive.

It doesn’t build the culture of effective practice that we want to do. So I just think we have this massive challenge to improve the coaching and feedback, and there are great providers out there working to change this, but we also need to fundamentally change the infrastructure and how schools function to allow for it to occur the way we know that research tells us it’s best constructed.

Jess Barrow  29:09

No, I think that’s such a good point. And I think you, you and Eric have both highlighted things that are very important for districts to do, in terms of setting up systems to help teachers be successful, and ultimately for students to learn. I wonder if you know, as districts are striving to support student literacy, but also really student learning across the board, are there other specific calls to action that you’d want to highlight from from your learnings, from your different organizations that have some overlap, but also are doing are sort of a trying to address these from different areas. What are Are there other calls to action that you think are important for districts to really consider that we might not have fully touched on yet?

Eric Hirsch  29:59

What do you think Evan. Want to go first, or you want to, want me to jump in?

Evan Stone  30:02

Yeah, maybe we can bounce back and forth. There’s so many things. And you know, the worst, the worst type of call to action is to have 10 of them, because then nobody does anything, because they can say, Oh, that’s so much. So I was just trying to hone in on, like, what, what matters most. I mean, because this is already happening, my first call to action would be to involve teachers in this, in this process.

But I think, like in many cases, it’s somewhat too late for that, because many districts across the country have already selected a curriculum, but so my biggest call to action is you’re investing hundreds of 1000s or millions of dollars in this curricular shift. It will not work if you don’t invest in the paid time for teachers to get into, unpack and understand this curriculum and the paid, effective coaching that has the release time for teachers to continually develop their practice around this curriculum.

So you are wasting millions of dollars to just have a bumper sticker about the selection of something that you’ve made that is better, but won’t have the impact that you want for students or for teachers without the support. And you know it will pay off, because it will also drive up your retention of teachers in your district. If they actually have the time and space to feel like they are growing improving, they will be happier and more sustained and more effective, and you will have this virtuous flywheel. But if you don’t invest the money in the professional learning, in the compensation and in the time for teachers to do that, then, then you are wasting money by choosing new materials.

Eric Hirsch  31:33

I’m working on my bumper sticker as Evan had. I’m going to go almost a Hamilton reference, picking is hard, supporting is harder, right? Like we really need to understand. So I would say policy makers, when you are thinking about materials, we can talk between OER and the cost of materials, and they range dramatically, but we need to have folks budget for and plan for and so really thinking about school board members, thinking about school districts for support and implementation at the same time as purchase part of the selection process? Absolutely. Evan’s right on. We need to put teachers at the heart so we can get change instructional practice.

And it may be too late. It is not too late to rethink budgets and to really think about making sure there are resources, and resources are not just money, but, as Evan was saying some of the time, and the support. So that was my first and it was almost bumper sticker like, I think my second is, more is not always better. So I think one of the things, like, as we really think about the literacy and science of reading, focus from NYC reads, which is where we’ve talked with E4E, and thinking about NYC solves, and some of the lessons we’re seeing from New York in implementing math. But I think in ELA in particular, when we work with large districts, I think there’s always a thought that I must supplement.

So if I have my LA materials, which may already have an unteachable amount of content to begin with, I now need to supplement my foundational skills with a foundational skills supplement. And then there are supplements to the foundational skills supplement to go deeper in phonics. And I think the question is, why?

And if you have a why, going back to Evan, maybe that’s okay, but in some of the districts we’ve talked to, it’s throwing resources at the problem, and that lands on the back of teachers to make sense of how to piece different things together when there’s already a lot to start with, and they hadn’t gone into their ED report review or looked at their core materials to see what’s working and what’s not before adding more and more. So also, more is not always better.

Eric Hirsch  34:09

That totally resonates. I mean, you Evan, that’s like four people. Can remember four, like intro psych, wasn’t it five plus or minus two or something of the number of things, like the brain?

Evan Stone  34:16

Yeah, I think that’s right. But I am imagining the back of your car right now, and I think that you’ve been to too many now. Many national parks, and you probably have stickers all over the place, yeah, I’ll just say I totally agree with I mean, you go on to some of these, not to name any specific curriculums, but I just think you go on to their resource hubs on their websites, and if you’re overwhelmed there, and you’re right. I mean, I was sitting with a teacher the other day who was like, Yeah, I have fundations, I have Haggerty, I have a core curriculum, and I have these, like, three other assessments that I need to be using, and I’m trying to, like, just map out when am I going to do all of this stuff. And each of those tools might be great in and of itself, but often we make these decisions without actually thinking about, okay, you have a maybe you have a 90 minute literacy block in your elementary classroom. Like, how does this all happen in that time?

Jess Barrow  35:05

Well, you both shared so much expertise and experiences, I just want to give an opportunity. If there’s anything I didn’t ask about, or any closing thoughts around the survey, or just larger issues in general that you’d want to kind of end on.

Evan Stone  35:25

I’m an organizer at my core, so I do have one more ask of the sector of our listeners, to use this call to action, and I think we also have this potential, I think, to see a radical change that comes because of technology. So I do think, whether it’s advent of AI or all of the other tools that are being used being built, that I do think can make the teaching profession more sustainable and more effective.

But I don’t think anybody is thinking deeply about the connection of high quality instructional materials and online professional learning, the influx of new technological tools and the structure of the day and the profession in and of itself, because I worry that this is just going to be another thing that teachers need to figure out and are trying to apply to an already major shift that we’re seeing in instructional practice.

So my push for the sector, for district, is to think about, if we actually want teachers to do things differently, how do we restructure their role the time the day in a way that enables them to do that effectively. There are no other professions that I know of where you are performing the whole time and don’t have the time to plan and practice and prepare the way.

We ask teachers to do that, and now we’re asking them to do that with radically new tools that are coming that we haven’t seen how they will be implemented on top of radically new tools in their instruction, instructional materials that they just received. So that sort of triangle is one that I hope we think about. How do we bring it together in a meaningful way for teachers?

Eric Hirsch  36:55

Yeah, I so appreciate that Evan and as we’ve continued to try to track and learn and apply AI and look out for how materials are going to be changing as they’re generative, as their prompts, as they can an LLM potentially, if we’re talking about having too much material to begin with in traditional materials, what happens when the entire internet is available through these llms.

And so how can we continue to think one about teacher time and capacity to focus on kids? And absolutely, I love what you’re saying about making a job that’s already so hard, less hard. But I think there’s also a piece around instructional coherence that we really need to keep our eye on. So it’s not just the time and what is, what is AI promising, and what might it bring in but if you are piecing together and using AI in different ways with these materials, how are we creating an instructionally coherent experience for kids, and making sure that AI is actually the time saver, it is being purported, and not something that is an add on and taken away.

And again, one more thing to piece together that’s on the back of teachers to figure out when they already, unless we’re going to make the school year 783 days per year, they’re not going to get through it. And I’m pretty sure that can’t happen. Pretty sure. Yeah, that’s chat GPT four. It’ll tell me it’s all

Evan Stone  38:36

That would lose your campaign. I think if you, if you tried to make schools that long, you would certainly lose the 40,000 teacher vote that we were promising before. But I feel like one area we didn’t give the time that it probably deserves is, I know Ed reports is thinking about this deeply, but how do we also make sure that the materials that we have. How do we define quality as both excellent in terms of the rigor and the effectiveness of it, and also in terms of it being culturally and linguistically sustaining for students? This is something we hear from teachers everywhere, and what a lot of our teachers are pushing for.

And how do we put pressure on publishers to keep improving the quality of their materials, even if they are already good? How do we make them great in this way? And so I think that that broader definition is something that we’re also hearing is really important to teachers, because if it’s not, they see, they see the challenge, and their students connecting with what they’re reading, connected with the materials, and that, you know, leads to a lower doesn’t have the outcomes that we saw. So I just wanted to name that as an area that I I know you all are thinking a ton about a line, and then I think we should, we should raise up to the top.

Eric Hirsch  39:45

Absolutely. And we hope by we understand what we review makes a difference, given a decade of success in how publishers look and design material. Goals, and I think for us, thank you for the push as we are working on revising our tools at this time, because again, we learn more from research. We learn more from the field. We learn more from our educator, reviewers and educators generally about what they need to be successful with kids, particularly when we think where you started us off today, Evan, with the pandemic, and where kids are now in 2024 compared to when you’ve started the work.

And so we’ve thought about, how do we even define culturally responsive and sustaining practices, and what it looks like in materials? We put out a primer, we put out tools, but we are looking and thinking about, what more can we do in our reviews than we’re doing now? Because again, more information in the hands of educators will help them make better choices, and from those choices, then they can make hard decisions and right decisions for them, their students in their community about what they’re going to utilize from those materials to ensure it’s engaging, affirming.

And kids are really going in because one of the things we hear, the reason teachers adapt and supplement the most, is because they don’t think the materials are engaging. And when we really unpack what engaging means, it’s right where you’re leading us at it for sure, I will say one other thing, Jess, you didn’t get to, which is just a huge thank you, and shout out to Evan and Avery like, there’s no mandate you have to do, to survey year in and year out, and providing the data, providing not only educator voice qualitatively and in your chapters, and preparing educators to really have the hard conversation to make the system better is amazing, but you bring into quantitative data on top of it, and pulling all these things together to tell the story you tell about the profession and about teachers lives, we’re just grateful we learn a ton from it every time, and we’re just tremendous gratitude that you do it well.

Evan Stone  42:05

Thank you. And I deserve very little credit. We have a national teacher leader council that works to develop the survey each year thinking about classrooms. So I mean, I will take the credit, since I’m on the podcast with you, but they really deserve it. They, you know, they’re coming out after their day in the classroom to think about what are the questions we wish family was asking us, and what do we want to know that our colleagues are struggling with across the country. So they drive this work, they release it on the Hill every year, and make sure that I think our leaders across the country are thinking deeply about this, and I do think we’re seeing change, so I appreciate that, and I and deep gratitude for you and for your work, we have seen a radical shift in how people think about the instructional materials, and that’s in large part due to you pushing the conversation and EdReports, pushing the conversation based on teachers input about what we need in our classrooms to better serve our students. So so thank you as well.

Jess Barrow  43:02

Thank you both. It sounds like there are more conversations to be had in the future. I just want to thank you for all your time and say hope to see you back again soon.