where you're located ok so we started in two thousand and seven were started by the new jersey education association is a charter charitable five hundred one c three where we're located is a good rate question we're actually distributed everywhere all the employees of n j city i work from their homes one of the decisions we made early on reddit two thousand and seven i think sort of a cutting edge decision was that rather than investing in a place and furniture and such  and rather than having to restrict ourselves to people who live within you know twenty or thirty miles of some place in new jersey we decided to just give everyone stipends to buy equipment for their homes and have everyone work from their homes and as a result we can have people who are all over new jersey even out to kansas and michigan and so forth and they all work happily and i see all these green buildings going up but the greenest building is no building at all this go downstairs and work in there or in their home offices and we get together when there's something to do together like when we go to africa or to train in a school we see each other but otherwise we meet on zoom every day and we're constantly sharing documents through google and all the eggs or you lower your carbon footprint on this planet exactly where is the fish and it should be no driving to work in burning fumes or any of that stuff unless we have to but so tell us about the courses that you're offering and this is just for teacher training this is not for kids to learn this is in ninety nine when the school became of time school and we had courses that proved very effective than an approach to pedagogy that was very effective and so two thousand and seven when i joined the board one of the ideas that was there was to take what we've been doing and my school and the department of education also recommended this to us they wanted to see if we could migrate what was working so well in my school where we became the number one school for physics in the state and see if we could bring it to more people more schools and so we developed all the classroom materials to do that and with n j c t o we managed to create all these as a complete courses the teachers could use to teach these in their classrooms so it started actually with classes for students but taught by started scaling this up you know the question is if you have you know we scaled from one classroom my classroom to across my school and we got rid of all tracking and all kids were taking high levels of physics and chemistry and  exams were through the roof and everything was great so we scaled from one room to a school how do you excuse from one school to many schools so you have to take those materials the artifacts you are using to create those courses and make them reproducible so the teachers everywhere can use them so that we enjoy see tail that became one part of our mission and we created the web site the web site now it's got more than a quarter million users and one hundred eighty four countries and all fifty states using these materials that were developed for students but getting back to your other question we started then using those same course materials to teach the subject to teachers so the teachers of any subject could become new physics chemistry or mathematics teachers because if you have all those materials but the school doesn't have a teacher it doesn't work so yeah and there's a shortage of stem teachers right now exactly so we became in two thousand and nine we started using our materials to in the face to face environment to teach physics and how to teach physics to teachers english teachers our teachers special ed teachers became all the disciplinary teachers exactly what education used to be you know back in like the one nine hundred twenty so so we didn't want to compromise what they needed to know and be able to do to be a teacher but we didn't want to it was impractical to think they're going to go back and spend two years studying physics and give up their teaching job in the schools couldn't afford to lose them for two years so we could do it at nights and weekends and summers and we it was a one year program and it made us the number one produce for physics teachers in the united states from the year we started every year through to today we produce hundreds of physics teachers in new jersey over those nine years now these are public school teachers those are all certified to teach in public schools yeah so then we did the same thing for chemistry and now we're doing it for mathematics and then the last couple years we migrated all of our two courses to teach teachers to an online format because just like we didn't want our employees driving all over new jersey we didn't want to tell teachers they had to drive all over new jersey to get the classes and so once we did that enrollment tripled and we've got teachers all over new jersey and now we have some teachers in africa as well as other states taking the same courses so they're taking online courses using the same materials that they're going to turn around to use in their classrooms to teach students and the materials are all free there's a tuition for the courses because we have to have an instructor teach the courses and  we are making some free versions of those courses for students to use just teacher could assign a student to go to the online course and learn material so they can put their classroom so now i'm going to enter the some kind of textbook and then when you come into the classroom and you're doing activities a project and there's no more discussion or explanations or a lecture is there some talk and conversation about what's at hand but there's no lecture in the class and all the lectures happened at home exactly so we can do that we've shut sixteen thousand videos already for teaching physics chemistry mathematics we use them for the online course for teachers but once we take out the assessments and a lot of the teacher interaction piece of it that we use when we're instructing teachers then any teacher can just say to a student you know this is materials you're going to learn tomorrow in class go home what to take watch the videos do the formative assessment questions learn the basic stuff and then tomorrow in class we're going to solve some more challenging problems than we otherwise would be able to get to that's the book classroom but you do you work work on the fun stuff together so but but you know so let's just so let's just take an example there's an english teacher right major perhaps the i mean i met a really wonderful english teacher was a p in in american literature ok so she's teaching high school you're going to turn this p h d english teacher who's you know who might of specialized that i don't know you know some kind of early american novellus right and you're going to teach that teacher how to teach physics but in the state of new jersey you still have to pass the praxis to teach the subjects so how does that fit in so we the teachers go through used to be three hundred hours of face to face instruction where they learn physics for instance or chemistry or math and have a teacher they go through that same thing but the end of the course there by the end of the course they're prepared to sit and take the practice so the teachers at the end of our program take the same practice exams if they were a physics major  chemistry major in college and they do about as well as physics and interested in chemistry majors but they've already the difference is they know the physics or chemistry or math as well but their experience teachers their teachers that they've been teaching english or some art or music or biology for the last ten or something years and so they when they walk into a classroom they were already in the culture they're in the community they're in successful working with kids where not every physics major or chemistry major is necessarily going to be successful if they walk into a classroom for the first time so there's another reason we do it which is there's a huge shortage of physics teachers there's my calculations say that if every student in the united states were to learn physics right now only a third of them do we need about thirty five thousand more physics teachers but there's only about six or seven thousand physics majors in the united states right now so you couldn't get the six majors to become teachers to solve this problem but there's three and a half million teachers we can convert one percent of the engineer and a lot of retired engineers doing what we do is we say ok we're going to go into education because we want to teach the next generation of engineers so he wanted and he was teaching engineering like you said there's a shortage of physics teachers this is a private school all our physics teacher just retired we can't hire anybody else just nobody here to teach it so they got this retired engineer to do physics no training nothing but he took he said i took one physics class in college i don't remember this was almost forty years ago so he started teaching physics and then they said oh another teacher retired we now need you to teach math for his teaching math physics and engineering and he doesn't even have prep time anymore because he's teaching three classes so this is something that i've noticed that is happening not just private schools but in public schools too this seems to be once a teacher retires or having a hard time getting someone else so what's so when how what's your view of what's been happening in the public education system well it's clearly the shortage is sure to mean in the public school they wouldn't be allowed to do that although they might do it anyway if it's the situation with dire enough and that the choice was having no teacher at or discontinue teaching physics or chemistry or mathematics in the school which becomes the alternative of the simply no teacher i would go one step further i mean i went to mit and studied physics so i had a bachelor's degree in physics from mit went to the went  industry in the audio industry for twenty years when i decided to become a teacher i opened up physics books and i couldn't have done any of the first year physics problems it wasn't that i never knew it was so so you don't do physics every day walking around even if you're in an engineering field the chances that you're going to be doing introductory first year physics problems or be familiar with them is remote so you know so i came an alternate route i was a engineer or a physicist before i came for a physics major before i entered the classroom but i needed all of this help i think this is a big you know the same materials that we create that make it easy to teach a teacher an english teacher our teacher any teacher physics also structures the pedagogy and the content so that it's easier for someone with a background in physics to teach so we get teachers who know physics but they're not as certainly going to be strong physics teachers unless they get more assistance than that so we have a pedagogy with very teacher doesn't talk very much is  direct instruction is kept tight and then very quickly it moves to asking students questions to apply what they just heard and they working in groups around the round table and it's very social our materials are all designed so that that happens very naturally so a new teacher if they know physics or don't of physics are going to need teacher is going to have a much easier job they don't have to do we give them a lesson plan we give them all the unit plans classwork homework quizzes tests all the slides they're going to show in the classroom labs lab write ups everything so that any new teacher whether they have a previous background in physics or chemistry or math or they don't is going to have a much easier job so how much do one of your courses cost so  theory courses for teachers for two hundred seventy five dollars a credit which is like a third of what the public universities in new jersey are to do one course might be six credits might be like the two hundred dollars for something for teachers  very often school districts will pay for their teachers we've had some donors offer scholarships that cover up to seventy five percent of the cost it's school district the school district doesn't cover it so we try to do our best to make it affordable for teachers and again we only offer these courses right now for teachers so that's the only cost that matters all the other materials like the unit plans and all that materials i told about that's all free and it's all for get out of the ball so the teacher doesn't like way we did it they can change it  but i would suggest that they try it one way first because there is a progression you know we have materials now for teaching from kindergarten through the first year of college all of math all of science and you want to make sense year to year and it lets you have a perspective of what all the years look like an individual teacher can do more harm than good if they just go off in some random direction and similarly by the way that the math we teach lines up with the math that the students will need that year in their science courses and the science courses are designed to actually use that and use examples from the math so they all sort of work together it creates that wraps it's create sort of a welcoming sort of comforting environment for the teachers and the students too many students are scared of math and science and you know it's about english teachers but it's very smart char belief that math and science and english and art and music world as human accomplishments and  humans can do with them and the idea that there are math people and english people and so forth isn't really borne out by anything we've ever seen but it is you know there was a long time there that women weren't taught math or science because they felt they couldn't do it and the minute they it just like english is the amount only the idea that we think that you need to be special or smarter or different in some way to do physics or chemistry or math is creating a problem for the united states which isn't so much the case like in japan or other countries where they think that if you work hard you should be able to do any of these things and you know it's interesting that you bring up africa because i went to a conference in germany and i met the the chairs of the aims which is the african mathematics mathematics initiative and they were telling me that the children there walk for miles to get to school miles and they'll take multiple buses that don't seem very safe they will find all sorts of ways to get to school to learn math and in here in new jersey from what our standards about seventy percent of new jersey high schoolers are not proficient in math i mean what are the numbers for for mathematics here in new jersey  proficiency use the park is a judgement i think it's i think only twenty something percent or passing the park exam of that's what i recall anyway i'm not sure that's right but that would be you know more than seventy percent proficient right then the numbers are getting better yeah so where is this week this coming from well you know i think it's partly it's the way we've taught math it's a circular sort of bootstrap problem and i think part of the solution we have with bringing teachers from other disciplines into teaching math and physics and chemistry may be part of the solution to that some of the people who self selected as the quote unquote good at math like the fact that it's hard you know they'll say that they don't but in fact they're kind of proud of the fact that i'm a physics teacher i'm a math teacher i can do really hard stuff and they almost want to keep it hard and you know we were big believers that everyone should take the six night greater eighth grade physics and chemistry and  that's discomforting to a lot of physics teachers because they think that only the best and the brightest kids are very often should the ones who qualify should be able to take the six and eleven through twelfth grade and we're opening it up to every kid in my school we don't even have tracking and so kids that are majoring in cullen are you know food preparation cutting hair all of those major fashion design there in the same physics classes with people who literally go into mit and they all learn together and they enjoy it and it's fun but that's you need a friendly welcoming pedagogy to do that and very often math classes kids are in isolation because math is so sequence show if i miss something in fourth grade it has ripple effects right through college i may never understand how fractions work because i didn't understand fourth grade and now i'm isolated in the classroom i'm barest teacher keeps going on doing stuff doing stuff on the board that i can't follow because this hole in my knowledge there's no way to fill that hole because i'm not going to ask a question you know i'm going to ask raise my hand to be the one who doesn't know something from fourth grade here i'm a night grade but we put kids around around tables that's a solution to that because they can talk to each other and the kids can you know they'll be very straightforward with each the flipped classroom environment because without you know they can just go home they don't even need to be enrolled in a course they can just sit for no charge listen to the direct instruction b s formative assessment questions put in the answer and if they were the asked if they want to go to a video to see someone solve that problem and then they could really just they could go really fast through the stuff they know but they couldn't just sit down and study carefully the stuff they don't know but i think i think that's a big issue i think  i've heard parents in meetings to the parent will say well i'm not a math person either and the kid gets the idea that there are people who can't do math and maybe they're one of those people but it's again we we teach  kids in our school without tracking physics chemistry biology and all the advanced placements are open to everyone more than half the kids take a pizza xox and you know these are kids now at this point the schools become more selective because that's become very successful but when we started you know anyone who wanted to go there went there and they were successful and they didn't have to work that hard right so i take it it was a lot of projects in the in the classroom a lot i would i would say i would i sort of push back against project believe it or not i would say this more problems more problems and the difference is sometimes there's a theory out there and sometimes i think stem the acronym stands for science technology engineering math by the almost becomes the enemy of science and mathematics people say oh we're going to build a roller coaster or we're going to you know do some project and somehow or other they sit there with a piece of paper and they say because they're doing this project that satisfies all these different standards i tend to be very skeptical that i think that there is a great this very strong sequencing that what you have to learn in the way you have to learn it the order in which you learn it but partly why i think you have to learn physics and chemistry them biology but even within those subjects and and the alignment of the math it's very complicated and to do it through a set of interesting problems and instruction that teaches kids how to work on those problems and sets them up gives them the background they need that's very successful to have them when you find the most so there's this whole cause of s geo which is you know you have teachers who are high performing low performing ok performing you know this three categories from your perspective which is you have a flip possibly work with technical schools you work with lots of kids of this one a lot of teachers what makes a teacher effective ok so answer two questions there first of all the when i was teacher as teacher of the year i also had  talk to i didn't have to i joined talking with a lot of new perspective teachers and schools of education and so forth and i was a big believer that empathy is the most important last aspect of a teacher  teachers have to love their kids literally they have to really care about them think about them that has to keep them up at night to make sure what can i do to make every student in my class successful they should be really focused on that and they have to listen to their kids to know the answer that they have to ask them questions and then try to understand what this what what does this look like from the student's eyes what does a student want this course for where does this leading them why do they care and then move the kids around in their groups if the group doesn't seem function you can't do any of that without strong but the and i don't know if you can teach empathy that's one of the reasons why i think that i don't know if i could take someone who's really bad teacher and turn them into a great teacher because when i was in business we had sales people  was the same thing i don't know if i could take a bad sales person good sales person also just as i haven't thought through that the look in the eyes of the customer and figure out what's motivating them what they want how can they provide something that the customer needs same thing with the teacher with their students that's why if you've got someone who had skill you could teach them physics and they'll be a great physics teacher like some of our many of our best teachers when we make them physics teachers or special ed teachers because a lot of special ed teachers have that empathy someone is going to stand at the front of the room and just talk and not make eye contact with the kids not really see what's going on inside their head to me is never going to be a great teacher and so we we work at the thing that skill but it's easier if the district sends a someone with that skill and we just have to teach them physics because we've proven we could teach anyone greater physics why can't we teach any english teacher physics that's that's that's one thing s g o's is a whole different thing by the way this can't avoid the opportunity to say that such a terrible idea the the notion that as i understand the structure that the teachers give an assessment at the beginning of the year and if it's if the teacher smart about it they make it that every student fails the assessment because because that's going to set the benchmark so it was a result every student comes into school the first week of school and fails the test in every one of their subjects which doesn't seem like a great way to start a school year and then they teach in a way they might have normally taught and then they give the test to later on and hopefully the kids all did better me kind of crazy since the teacher is designing the test that's going to be given in both places what a waste of time i would like to see the state have  some more better quicker assessments that were state wide people that hate that could be used to assess whether students are learning but even beyond that if its students not learning we know with that teacher you know there's so evils if what's the prior learning is if it's a physics class what's their previous experience with mathematics their previous experience with biology is not going to predict anything in physics it's going to be their experience with math but does anyone correlate that and it's a very complicated thing to do teacher assessment so i think i would really rather that that was done more the way i talked about working with students principals should be working with teachers the same way which is looking into the eyes of their teachers and seeing how that and going to the classes and seeing what the interactions are and making a judgment about whether this teacher is getting the most from this class that's going to be much it's scary because it's qualitative not quantitative but you know i'm a physics engineering type guy you have in the you've got to know one quantitative that's misplaced gathering data that's not meaningful when using it this and the high stakes way to affect you know it's the same as teachers who are not to have nothing to do with you know efficacy evaluations they were equally effective the graduation rates were the same everything was the same so what was the point of that huge amount of energy spent when you got the same results as not having spent it well look at the portion we're spending on reforming math science and wishing science and every year the nape comes out and then you know it's a little bit better a little bit worse but it's not really moving the needle so i think that the current solutions aren't effective and spending more and more time on quantitative analysis and trying to inappropriate uses is not going to be the answer the answer is really going to be creating schools that are functioning learning communities with leadership that the principal an assistant principal and curriculum level that permeates the whole school and makes and and leads teachers to leading their classrooms in that same way and it can be done but it's not it's not as easy and cut and dried as people would like it to be as on thing in our school we did it we went from school no one wanted to go to and i think we're ranked in one of the top thirty high schools out of fourteen thousand in the united states now so and it was done just that way and because we had great leadership at the central office and so forth and it all has to make sense for instance if you teach in the wrong sequence if you don't teach physics before you teach chemistry before you teach biology teachers can work very hard but they're never going to be the never going to accomplish what they should be accomplishing than if they thought in the right sequence you know it's funny because you know when i was in high school way back when it was biology chemistry physics well that's the standard yeah but look at doesn't make any sense biology doesn't do anything to prepare you for chemistry and  chemistry doesn't prepare you to do anything in physics so but on the other hand physics is the foundation for chemistry quantum electrostatics and so forth and physics and chemistry explain modern biology doing the right order it's a story that makes sense to the teachers and to the students and the community you do in the wrong order you just having kids now mariah's blindly year after year after year and they're bored and frustrated they think science is memorization and turbo on it doesn't get anywhere so it's lots of pain but a lot of outcome better solutions would result in more pleasure and more results so thank you very much for coming in today we have dr bob goodman of n j c t l thank you for watching and i hope you have a really great day today has been snowing it's been miserable and right before i got here i lost my makeup bag so i've been running around trying to figure out how to get makeup on so thank you toni morrison of the trish mcevoy makeup company who was a blue mercury thank you for a putting my face together for me today thank you for watching thank you very much