Aug. 3, 2025
Episode 331: Erik Parsons
Learning, Agency, and EdTech | Erik Parsons In this episode of My EdTech Life, I reconnect with the brilliant Erik Parsons, better known as The PhDad on TikTok, for a bold conversation on what really matters in education. We dig into behaviorism vs. developmentalism, and how too many classrooms are still operating on compliance over collaboration. From Chromebooks as babysitters to the over-promise of AI-powered personalized learning, we question the transactional mindset that kee...
Learning, Agency, and EdTech | Erik Parsons
In this episode of My EdTech Life, I reconnect with the brilliant Erik Parsons, better known as The PhDad on TikTok, for a bold conversation on what really matters in education. We dig into behaviorism vs. developmentalism, and how too many classrooms are still operating on compliance over collaboration.
From Chromebooks as babysitters to the over-promise of AI-powered personalized learning, we question the transactional mindset that keeps students locked out of agency. Erik shares how improvisational theatre, playground culture, and student discourse can reshape how we think about learning and how the classroom should feel more like a community than a factory.
We also break down the risks of cognitive offload when students rely on AI to do the thinking for them. Are these tools helping or harming? What does it really mean to teach with students, not to them?
Whether you’re a K-12 teacher, higher ed faculty, or policy maker, this episode challenges you to stop, think, and ask yourself: Are we preparing learners or performers?
00:00 – Welcome Back, Erik Parsons: The PhDad Returns
02:45 – The Story Behind "The PhDad" and TikTok Content
06:00 – Behaviorism vs. Developmentalism Explained
12:30 – The Power of Play, Agency, and Classroom Discourse
18:00 – What Developmentalism Looks Like in a Tech-Rich Classroom
24:00 – Are We Managing Students or Empowering Them?
30:00 – When Tech Becomes a Distraction Instead of a Tool
35:15 – Rethinking the Teacher's Role in EdTech
38:30 – Improvisation in Learning: From Theater to Classroom
43:00 – Personalized Learning or Programmed Learning?
48:20 – What Happens When Students Only Care About the Grade
51:00 – The “Banking Model” of Education and Why It Fails
55:00 – The Real Dangers of AI: Cognitive Offload and Student Dependency
01:01:00 – Supporting Neurodivergent Students with Ethical AI
01:05:00 – Final Thoughts: From Performers to Learners
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00:30 - Episode Introduction
06:46 - Developmentalism vs. Behaviorism Explained
15:31 - The Value of Collaborative Learning
31:19 - Transactionalism in Education
56:58 - Technology and Cognitive Offload
01:12:39 - AI in the Classroom
01:23:55 - Final Questions and Closing Thoughts
WEBVTT
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Hello everybody and welcome to another great episode of my EdTech Life.
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Thank you so much for joining me on this wonderful day and, wherever it is that you're joining us from around the world, thank you, as always, for your support.
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We appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows.
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Thank you so much for the feedback and making these wonderful connections.
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It's been wonderful to make many new friends across all social media.
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So thank you for engaging with this content because, as you know and I always tell you, we do what we do for you to bring you some great conversations, great perspectives and a lot of knowledge to help us continue to grow within our space and continue to learn.
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For sure, and I'm really excited because I am welcoming back a guest that I have had.
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It's been a couple of years since he's been on the show, so I'm really excited and a lot has changed.
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But I would love to welcome to the show Eric Parsons, the PH dad to the show.
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So I'm really excited because we're going to have a wonderful conversation, just a lot about education, education theory.
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We're going to be talking about technology.
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We're going to be talking all sorts of wonderful stuff.
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So if you're tuning in, you're definitely tuning in to a wonderful show.
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So, eric, how are you doing today?
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Great.
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It's a little warm and muggy outside, which I live in Chicago, so I can have cool weather and that's not happening right now.
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But that's OK, it'll.
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It'll come back, hopefully Going to soldier on, but it's not too bad it's.
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We had a little bit of a heat wave a little back, but yeah.
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Yeah, don't even worry about it.
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I live in Texas, I live in the southernmost part of Texas, so muggy it's.
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It's really like we have two seasons.
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It's like hot and cool because it doesn't really get that cold down here, so it's always just either um brown and brown.
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We don't see seasons because our grass is always brown all year long.
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But anyway, I can definitely understand and I can definitely relate to that mugginess and all that good stuff well I'm excited, eric, because I know from the last time that you were on the show.
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You know you talk a lot about ed research and one of the things that I do is I followed you on TikTok and, of course, you going through your dissertation and writing your dissertation and me also doing the same thing.
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Obviously, there's definitely some overlap there and the content and I was like, well, this is amazing.
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So now you know, a couple of years later, we're back on the show.
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I know we were just changing a little bit of the name.
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You know now it's the PH Dad, but the content is the same and we're going through those things.
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But now, of course, since 2022, a lot has changed technology.
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Obviously, you know classroom instruction.
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We're going to get into that.
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We're going to talk a little bit about ed tech and all those great things.
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But before we dive in for our audience members who may not be familiar with your content just yet and, by the way, I highly recommend you do follow Eric on TikTok and all socials for ed research but give us a little brief introduction and what your context is within the education space.
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Yeah, that has a lot to do with sort of the name change as Eric the PhD, which was partly when TikTok was going down you know it was going to get closed and all that.
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I wanted to branch out to other spaces like YouTube and Instagram and threads and blue sky and all that stuff.
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And I had already kind of been using as a online moniker the pH dad or pH dad, because I have kids and I'm working on my I'm currently working on my dissertation.
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Last time I was in coursework, the last time we talked and in a lot of what was driving me to do stuff, post stuff was kind of going beyond just like ed research and more into like what it is to live as a parent, as a researcher, as you know, as a teacher and all of these things, and so that kind of brought everything together.
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So a lot of my content is it varies a lot Every day.
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Yesterday I put up just a very silly post about why it's fun to have a handlebar mustache.
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Go check that one out.
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It's about 14 seconds.
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I promise you it's fun.
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And like, a couple days ago I did a bunch of jokes that my kid wrote, you know, posted a hey, two years ago I did this post about, or three years ago I did this post about Betsy DeVos and why the attacks on the Department of Education are really scary.
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This was three years ago and the idea of people getting into school boards specifically for the purpose of undermining public education and pushing forward the privatization of public spaces, you know.
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So, yeah, and you know, and I'll throw up research.
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I've got another post probably going up like today or so.
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That's just a quick thing about how school lunches, the research around school lunches, is that if we make them universal, we know for a fact that students' learning improves and that internal school culture improves and that malnutrition decreases for the cost of feeding children.
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If it's universal, then you get rid of a lot of the stigma of who's on free lunch, who's on reduced lunch, who's paying for their lunch, who's bringing lunch from home, etc.
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Which I will tell you as a kid who dealt with food insecurity and poverty, that sucks.
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So, yeah, that's that's, that's a range of the things just off the top of my head.
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So, yeah, that's that's, that's a range of the things just off the top of my head.
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And I think the biggest thing that I really love and I'd love to invite people to do is I love responding to comments and to questions that come in comments, comments and requests.
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Really, that's what drives me to do stuff.
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I get very excited when somebody is like, well, what do you think about this?
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Or what?
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I read this thing, and?
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But don't you, you know, and even if you disagree, please, I love the disagreement, I love to complicate things, so please bring it.
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I love it.
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And you're absolutely right, eric does a phenomenal job.
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As you see his post.
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He's either posting something and then of course he'll get a comment and he always replies and it's really good natured back and forth and it's learning and that's the best part about it just having that discourse, which is something that I think is so important even in classrooms to be able to have classroom discussions for learning process and everything.
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But we'll get into that a little bit more.
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But, eric, I want to dive in because I know we're going to be covering just a little wide array of topics but to kind of try to interweave them together.
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Little wide array of topics, but they kind of try to interweave them together and I kind of want to start a little bit about talking a lot or talking a little about developmentalism and behaviorism.
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So I want first, before we get into that, just if you can help me and our listeners get a tight understanding about the difference of developmentalism and behaviorism so we can kind of get into the context of this conversation.
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Yeah, so these are two terms that I use.
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I actually push hard against bifurcation, the idea that things are always one way or the other, but generally I find that there are areas where it's like when there are things that are distinctly different in terms of why you do them and therefore what the impetus and purpose of them is.
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And to clarify, like, I think, the one that behaviorism if you've ever heard of behavioral therapy, if you hear about behavior treatment plans, you know all these sort of behavior adjustment things, behavior charts, all of these things, the idea of we're going to solicit and get students to behave in the ways that we see are what we believe educational and productive, and I think capital B productive, because I think that's one of the biggest things is there's this expectation of we have to get students to produce work by doing X, y and Z.
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So it's very much.
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You know, the like, do it the way I told you, because this is the way to do it.
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And then it's also, you need to behave in these ways in order to get along in my class.
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You know, and, and, and, so that's, you know.
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Behaviorism will always be there, the, the.
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You know what Skinner found with the ideas of, like you know, reinforcement and those rules and positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, all of these things around those mechanisms are genuinely hardwired into us.
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But we have to think about how and why we are purposes in manipulating those mechanisms right Around, soliciting certain behaviors from people right, are we soliciting a behavior because it's genuinely beneficial to the individual or are we soliciting a behavior because it matches an expectation of what we want to see from an individual or a group, etc.
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Like classroom management?
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Now, developmentalism follows along, kind of comes from.
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My view comes primarily from Vygotskyan approaches to education and learning.
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And Vygotsky says that all learning is social and that the primary mechanism of learning is through interaction and play.
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And through, the primary mechanism of learning is through interaction and play and through the imaginative process.
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And the idea that we're always going from a place of uncertainty to better knowledge, understanding, Right, and a lot of people keep hearing this zone of proximal development Right, and this is where this comes from.
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Is this idea of learning only have?
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Learning best happens when you are in the place where you have what you need to move forward, but can't just move forward without someone there in some way to assist you, the what we call the more knowledgeable, other right.
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So we have to find somebody who finds something, or something that provides us with more information than we currently have in order to pursue something we know.
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Anyway, developmentalism also sees the individual as fully idiosyncratic.
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Your learning, fonz, is different than my learning and my experience.
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There's literally no way for us both to have the exact same understanding of something.
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We can come to agreement absolutely, and we only do that through speech, right, but we understand that every single person's actual learning, actual development, is their own right and, more importantly, that the learning belongs to them, right.
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So who's doing the work?
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Okay, well, why are they doing the work?
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Is it for their learning or is it for them to perform in a certain way?
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And it's not that both of those things are.
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Those things are not entirely bad, but one of the things that happens, though, is we strongly externalize the process of learning when it becomes about repeat after me or do this?
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Show me now that you can do this, as opposed to a view of learning that it's fundamentally about, like your personal experience and the idea that, like you, are the very nature of development, the nature of becoming right, is based on this idea that you are always learning and development never, ever stops.
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Right, because learning never stops, and with that in mind, with it being socially mediated, that learning becomes deeply about connection with self and connection with others.
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And from a developmentalist standpoint, that means that we're also looking at things as highly collaborative.
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Right, because we learn with and not just because.
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And so this is where I put myself very much on the developmentalist end of the world, because I thoroughly believe in the need to see every individual as having absolute value, basic human value and a deserved basic human agency.
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Right, meaning some sense of self-control, self-purpose, sense of the ability to make choices.
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Right, agency means having the ability to make choices.
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It's what we often talk about when we talk about freedom.
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Right, and my problem with the way in which we currently structure most of our curriculum is that it is inherently behaviorist.
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It is about managing what students do and so what it then becomes.
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It's about making kids comply over, collaborating with them to actually learn.
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I love it.
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No, no, no.
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And this really what you explained is you know and I guess I just want to add to this coming into education from the outside world, you know, coming in from marketing and advertisement, learning a lot, marketing and sales and customer service and all of that, and then coming into education and seeing to me, you know treating it kind of as a business and understanding that not every student is going to learn the same way.
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And going back to a little bit about what you said, that every student or every participant in the learning has value and of course, at the end of the day, my goal is I want to sell them on the subject, but at the same time, I know that not every student is going to learn the exact same way.
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And so, going back to what you're saying, as far as behaviorism, one of the things that has really shocked me and it still shocks me to this day.
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And I know I'm in education and I know I'm in a certain role where I see things, but I always see things different and I always feel like an outsider.
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Know, I'm in a certain role where I see things, but I always see things different and I always feel like an outsider, because I'm thinking to myself this should be more social.
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But, like you said, the focus more is on behavior.
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This is the behavior you need to behave because not because it benefits you, but because I, as a teacher, get the benefit of just going through my lessons and uninterrupted, and I don't have to worry about you at all whatsoever.
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So if there's an issue and things aren't going the way that I want them to do, then I'm going to put you on a behavior plan, because these are the best behaviors for you to be able to be successful.
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Well, is that?
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Is that?
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To me, it just seems more like you're pushing more rules on the student just so they can be successful in your class, but really it's just that behavior.
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And so one of the things that I wanted to add to that is, in my experience, is coming into the classroom and I don't know if you've heard this before, maybe from other teachers or educators, but there was always.
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You know, if we work in a pod, you know there was three teachers, including myself, so it was actually all three of us.
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So it was weird that they would always say like, oh my gosh, mr Mendoza, man, this student is just, you know, he is off the walls, he is doing this, he is doing that, he can't sit, still, he, you know, do you have those problems in your class?
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I'm like, no, actually I don't.
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I don't no-transcript the fact that my class was very much social, where there was a lot of interaction, a lot of discourse, I found that I had very little behavior issues.
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So, in that sense, you know, being able to give them that agency, being able to allow them to speak, to talk and say, hey, mr Mendoza, you know what?
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Like I'm really not understanding this.
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Can you know, either try it a different way, or then, all of a sudden, I'd have a student that's like, hey, don't worry, let me help you.
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Like this is the way I learned it and explained it in their own way.
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I'm just thinking to myself this is, I don't know.
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Sometimes I feel that we overcomplicate the classroom and it goes back to what you said.
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It's like this is the way we've always done it.
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And if you see, this is the way we've always done, it leads to your frustration and leads to the students' frustration.
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So isn't it about time we kind of think about this a little?
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And so I was recently started reading a book that's called Free to Learn, where it talks about recess and how students go out and how they learn and they have fun and they're able to cope and build communication, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills, because they have that time to play discourse.
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They're doing all of those things and now it's like no more recess, you can't have recess.
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So it's like what are we doing?
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From a developmentalist standpoint it is.
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So it is completely backwards, right, because we take the thing that is most natural to human experience, which is learning through interaction and play, and we start to say, well, now you have to get serious about learning which the thing is is play is serious, because play is important, right?
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It's why you see kids get into so much discourse and you know, like about like, well, we're gonna play it this way.
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I don't want to play this way and this, that, that and the other Giving them.
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You know, when they have that agency, they will discover that they would rather play than argue.
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It doesn't seem like it, but it's true.
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They actually would rather play than sitting around and argue, because if they're sitting around arguing then they're not playing.
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So it becomes everybody's responsibility to create the space of developing the activity that's happening now and that everybody is a participant, because they all want to move forward together.
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Is that easy?
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No, is that simple?
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No?
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Will there inevitably be interactions and situations that are informed by lots of things from outside of that that will hamper and cause complications and conflict and problems?
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Yes, but does that mean we shouldn't promote that process of learning how to interact and work together towards creating something, and I love that you mentioned that, because at the foundation of my dissertation research I'm working around the interaction of improvisational theater and educational theory and curriculum.
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What a lot of people in the United States well, almost nobody in the United States knows is that what we think of as improvisation in this country, in the US, is built off of the work of Viola Spolin, who literally wrote the book Improvisation for the Theater, right.
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Well, she developed all the games, all of her process, her entire philosophy of improvisation, which is actually a philosophy of learning, at Hull House, which was a social settlement project on the south side of Chicago, which was the epicenter of much of the progressive education movement, meaning, and particularly the democratic progressive education movement started by Jane Addams.
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Well, there, as a young person I think she was like 18 initially she worked with Neva Boyd, who is among the early social workers, and Neva Boyd was one of the big proponents of playgrounds, the idea that there should be spaces set aside specifically for children to play, at the beginning of the 20th century, and she also wrote a book capturing all of the children's games that she could find, actually recording.
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These are the games that children play and when you go through there you see so many of the same sort of things that you just learned as a kid because kids were playing them.
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You know, like without anybody going.
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Well, here's how you play the game.
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They teach each other.
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You know it's.
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You know the kids who are in fifth grade one year then teach the fourth graders the game they played last year and you know forever and ever, a hundred years later, they're all still playing some of the same games.
00:22:00.460 --> 00:22:20.628
But this comes back to this idea that at the foundation of the progressive education movement, which is also developmentalist in that the idea of progression is you come in with this amount of experience, you come in with these educative experiences, things that you've held on to and reviewed and gone yeah, I want to remember that that's important.
00:22:20.628 --> 00:22:24.084
And then you have another experience and you're building upon that.
00:22:24.084 --> 00:22:30.694
You are progressing forward, much in the way that Vygotsky and others would say that you're developing throughout life.
00:22:30.694 --> 00:22:37.633
So, yeah, yeah, and so a lot of what you're talking about really really just resonates with all of that.
00:22:38.279 --> 00:22:49.248
Yeah, and you know, and that's something now that I want to ask you because, as you know, you know, after, even slightly before COVID, but after COVID I mean it's just screen time like crazy.
00:22:49.248 --> 00:22:51.011
You know, it's like it just seems.
00:22:51.011 --> 00:23:14.670
Now it's it's students are there's a Chromebook open or some kind of device open at all times during at the desk for all subjects, like all day long, and I just feel like sometimes it's like, well, you know, it's like like it is, you know, as the learning engineers or teachers that we are, I mean, I understand you know there is that teaching component, but does everything have to be done on screen?
00:23:14.670 --> 00:23:19.647
So I want to ask you, you know, if you can paint me a picture of what we're just talking about.
00:23:19.647 --> 00:23:29.450
What does developmentalism look like and feel like in a tech rich classroom and what might be some of the things that students are doing differently?
00:24:01.111 --> 00:24:13.144
So when this is a thing like, it requires a lot of it requires a lot of work to rewrite what is what we call the hidden curriculum of the like.
00:24:13.144 --> 00:24:29.715
Do things in these ways right, such that we give ownership over the experience of being in the classroom to the student, right, they are not in my class, they are in class with me.
00:24:29.715 --> 00:24:48.239
That is an important distinction, and so what that means is when I come to a student working the way that I do, who's on a computer or device of any sort and we have a bit of content that we're engaged in, right, that we've all agreed.
00:24:48.239 --> 00:25:06.427
Today we're looking at World War, I, you know whatever the topic is, I will come to them and I will say is this technology actually helping you better understand what we're on about here?
00:25:06.427 --> 00:25:19.251
Is the way that you're using this technology actually helping you gain a better understanding and develop your sense of the concepts here?
00:25:19.251 --> 00:25:29.741
Is the way that you are using and interacting with technology assistive to our collective goals and to your goals?
00:25:29.741 --> 00:25:30.906
Hopefully, as a learner.
00:25:30.967 --> 00:26:03.750
You're in here because I don't want I tell students all the time I'm like, if you're just doing something because I said so, that's actually a waste of your time and mine, because I want you to actually be engaged in learning, right, and so the you know it's a lot of the relationship with the technology is kind of fraught, because it's you're only going to use technology in this way that I tell you now and that at no point will you ever work in the other way.
00:26:03.871 --> 00:26:25.780
And of course, especially you know, I work primarily with high schoolers who are naturally rebellious, so of course it's going to be like well, whenever I can find a game that's like rebellious, so of course it's going to be like well, whenever I can find a game that's like you know, not that I can get through the school firewall, then that's what I'm going to do to just be able to say I have some control over my life, even for two minutes, right.
00:26:25.780 --> 00:26:42.163
But when we frame it in this, like this is your time in your space to do your work, and I'm here to help you to do your work, and I'm here to help you, well, as a teacher, I am there to occasionally be the more knowledgeable other.
00:26:42.163 --> 00:26:44.350
I cannot always be the more knowledgeable other because I can't be in your head.
00:26:44.350 --> 00:26:53.515
So, like when I ask you, as my student funds, if I come up to you and I say is the program you know, is the thing that you're doing now?
00:26:53.515 --> 00:26:58.924
Is this helpful to you for what we are studying in this class?
00:27:01.211 --> 00:27:01.653
I don't know.
00:27:02.537 --> 00:27:09.640
Okay, well then let's figure that out.
00:27:09.640 --> 00:27:21.102
You know, off-brand, browser-based Minecraft is actually going to help you get an understanding of what the causalities of history are, right?
00:27:21.102 --> 00:27:29.674
So how can we do that Like, is there anything on this device that's going to help you with that?
00:27:29.674 --> 00:27:35.816
Right now, are you able to use that device in a way that's going to be helpful?
00:27:35.816 --> 00:27:36.960
Because that's the other thing.
00:27:36.960 --> 00:27:39.337
Sometimes that's literally not the case.
00:27:39.337 --> 00:27:44.377
You know, and that's where we kind of step into the.
00:27:44.377 --> 00:27:45.981
We provide structure.
00:27:45.981 --> 00:28:03.874
Right, it's not that we don't have rules, but we provide structure in the form of saying you know, being able to provide evidence and say well, when I came by earlier, you were doing, you were watching YouTube shorts and none of those seem to be anything about what we're studying.
00:28:03.874 --> 00:28:06.500
I bet there's some that do that are.
00:28:06.500 --> 00:28:08.471
So if you're going to do that, I need you to.
00:28:08.471 --> 00:28:11.898
Can you show me five that actually inform this?
00:28:11.898 --> 00:28:15.978
And can you find, can you cross-reference, some resources for that?
00:28:15.978 --> 00:28:19.737
And that's harder usually than what we've already asked them to do.
00:28:19.737 --> 00:28:20.692
So they got to go.
00:28:20.692 --> 00:28:36.773
Oh wait, yes, maybe I'll just do it the other way, you know, but like it has to me, it is so important that it become about.
00:28:37.635 --> 00:28:42.565
How are you, the individual, this student, interacting with the technology?
00:28:42.565 --> 00:28:59.234
And is that technology assistive or is it I don't want to even just say distracting, but it serving a you know, from a behavior standpoint a maladaptive purpose, right?
00:28:59.234 --> 00:29:04.444
Is it serving a place that it is me, because we do things to meet needs.
00:29:04.444 --> 00:29:05.994
This is where we get to be anger, is it right?
00:29:05.994 --> 00:29:08.330
It's not like we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
00:29:08.330 --> 00:29:14.199
We do things to, to get things to, to see.
00:29:14.199 --> 00:29:38.192
So a lot of times the way kids interact with screens and stuff, a lot of that is, like, you know, them trying to deal with the world and it's a way of controlling stimulus for them, and that isn't always the best way to do that, but if it's the way that they know, then that's what they're going to go with, right?
00:29:38.192 --> 00:29:43.461
That sort of self-soothing kind of aspect, yeah.
00:29:44.202 --> 00:30:03.198
I was going to just add, going along with what you said, especially when you're putting in the tech, I know oftentimes, going back to the behaviorism in the sense of you know, there are certain programs it's like, oh, you got to do 30 minutes per day per week per subject and all this other stuff, and then so it just becomes like do, click, repeat and reward.
00:30:03.198 --> 00:30:08.583
You know, just because you did your, you know 90 problems or 90 additional problems for practice.
00:30:08.583 --> 00:30:21.059
So you get your little certificate there that's digital and so it still goes, goes along, I understand, with supplementing that learning, but is it truly the way that the student is needing to learn?
00:30:21.059 --> 00:30:25.916
Because oftentimes I see it that students will just go in, they just click, click, click, click.
00:30:25.916 --> 00:30:36.291
They get their time in, they do the problems that they need to do and there really is no teacher in the loop in the sense of hey, let me go in and see are, are there any issues, are there any troubles?
00:30:36.291 --> 00:31:03.978
And it's usually just so automated where it's almost like there's no teacher overseeing or overseeing, like, hey, do I need to stop here and say let's go ahead and talk as a class and do a reteach or maybe a specific group, because it just seems like we're moving so fast that you feel and I get it, you know, with teachers feeling overwhelmed, it's like well, the program will do it and if that's what they got, that's what they got.
00:31:03.978 --> 00:31:08.994
But I feel like kind of what you said is like hey, is this really helping you?
00:31:08.994 --> 00:31:13.141
And if it's not, like maybe let's see if we can figure out a different way.
00:31:13.141 --> 00:31:18.629
I love what you said, you know, especially if they're just like into YouTube and stuff like that, it's like hey, all right, let's see.
00:31:18.629 --> 00:31:22.124
You want to research this, let's go ahead and let's do research this way.
00:31:22.124 --> 00:31:25.634
But I need these citations, I need this rubric, I need this.
00:31:25.634 --> 00:31:29.823
And, mind you, this was something that I was doing, you know.
00:31:29.823 --> 00:31:39.125
This will be probably maybe like eight, nine, ten, maybe eleven years ago, when I was still in the classroom and I was doing it with fifth graders where I never gave tests.
00:31:39.125 --> 00:31:40.608
I never gave tests.
00:31:40.829 --> 00:31:54.046
I would be there, as a, like my friend Kevin Doherty calls, says, learning engineer, you know, being in the front sort of engineering, that initial teach and saying, ok, guys, here is what I expect at the end.
00:31:54.046 --> 00:31:59.756
Teach and saying, okay, guys, here is what I expect at the end.
00:31:59.756 --> 00:32:03.249
And now I get to see the progress because we know that there's going to be a product at the end, and usually it's the teachers.
00:32:03.249 --> 00:32:06.377
It's like here's the product, okay, but what was the process?
00:32:06.377 --> 00:32:16.023
We don't focus on that process and here, in seeing them work together in groups or individually with that expectation of this, is this this is what I need.
00:32:17.252 --> 00:32:22.969
I like the kids were, they were on it and I got to see so many different ways of thinking.
00:32:22.969 --> 00:32:39.942
I got to learn new things that I got to share with my other students in the other classes, and when I would introduce something, especially tech related uh, maybe I would just teach them the little that I knew, they went off and then after that they would say, oh, mr Mendoza, look what I learned.
00:32:39.942 --> 00:32:51.160
So when they taught me that by the end of the day I look like an expert because I already knew how to troubleshoot everything for the other students, so kind of, and that's the way that it worked for me.
00:32:51.160 --> 00:32:59.297
But I wanted what I loved about it is that they felt they had control over their learning, which they really did.
00:32:59.357 --> 00:33:09.432
I just said here's my expectation at the end, but for me, visibly being able to see the process, I can initially go back right away and say, okay, hey, let's talk about this.
00:33:09.432 --> 00:33:10.335
Is this correct?
00:33:10.335 --> 00:33:11.458
What are your thoughts on this?
00:33:11.458 --> 00:33:12.581
Could we add this?
00:33:12.581 --> 00:33:22.491
Might we remove this and be able to do that, so that by the time they got the finished product, it's like they already knew that they were going to do well, but the learning took place.
00:33:22.491 --> 00:33:59.538
Socially, yes, and that's something that I loved about that, you know, and so I see that the tech being beneficial in that sense where it it almost takes not necessarily center stage, but when the learning takes center stage and the tech falls, you know, kind of on the side as a supplement, then I think that that's a really sweet spot there, where it's not just the screen in front 30 problems, 30 minutes per day, per subject, do click, you know, finish, reward and then do the same thing and just drone on through, and I think that that's something that yeah, no, you're absolutely on point, and it's.
00:34:00.125 --> 00:34:03.968
I have so many different things that I want to touch on, but I want to be succinct.
00:34:04.667 --> 00:34:10.072
I think what you're really pointing at is, and that I think we're both very much in the same place.
00:34:10.072 --> 00:34:29.195
Lot of the ed tech that's being produced is there, and this goes back before even the Internet.
00:34:29.195 --> 00:34:41.211
There has been this belief that somehow you can build a teacherless curriculum Right, in which is what any that any Yahoo off the street.
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