and welcome to another edition of this week in education my guest tonight is robert goodman who is the executive director of the new jersey center for teaching and learning i'd like to thank you for coming on the show today or thank you very much for inviting me yeah can have a nice discussion about education and talk about a lot of things that are going on with the new jersey center for teaching and learning which really the focus on parent teachers teachers to lead a transformation of schools to give all students access to quality education but before we do that i want to talk to you about bob's biography his background so you get to know him in two thousand and six he was the new jersey state teacher of the year as a science chair in the teacher of physics chemistry and environmental science at the bergen county test force on college and career ready this and n e a s commission on effective teachers and teaching a content expert reviewer for achieve a field leader for the united states department cation and a member of the education advisory committee for the liberty science center he received the i can learn the n e a foundation award for teaching excellence in two thousand and seven he's a graduate of mit where he received his batteries of science degree in physics and his undergraduate research was published in an article he coauthored for the journal of applied science he's received his master's from suny stony brook and a doctorate in science education from rutgers so bob it's great having a show and maybe we can start by talking and telling the audience basically  and at the time there was a lot of work in there still was a lot of work on improving education but much of it was being done from policy makers pushing down on teachers and the idea was to but by the engine it was to create a nonprofit charitable foundation that would work at empowering teachers to try to transform education improve education from the bottom up instead of from the top down so that's really where we because that's our overarching mission which is to empower teachers to transform schools and make it better for students and part of the issue there was that the engine is very powerful in terms of work and pensions benefits and wages but as the need for transforming schools calls upon improvements in curriculum assessment pedagogy those were areas that they really weren't didn't have the same power in and they wanted to start a nonprofit foundation that would work on those areas and the center for teaching and learning is really focused on pedagogy curriculum assessment and that drove us into technology and other related areas which is how we're going to improve work with teachers to improve the experience of teaching and learning in classrooms and we started that in two board and we did it from our idea that we all were all volunteers there was no staff in place and we did projects and i will go through all the projects from two thousand and seven to two thousand and nine but then the opportunity came up in two thousand and nine for us to really try to take what the work i had done at bergen tech in teterboro and scale that up so that would be the benefits of what we were accomplishing there which led to me being state teacher of the year could be brought to many other schools and we started doing that in two thousand nine and i could tell you more about what that program is if you'd like and then but once we did that we needed full time staff so i was released from bergen tech in teterboro to become an employee of the new jersey center for teaching learning as director and now as executive director and were now up to about fifty employees ten full time a baby five or six part time and a bunch of hourly people who create for us kindergarten through the course meant to curriculum materials for classroom use that it's free and open source for anyone to use in the world from kindergarten through the first year of college and all of mathematics and all of science and obviates the need for textbooks and changes pedagogy in a dramatic way and i as you as you want to pro different areas it's a very complex problem but we think we've made significant inroads in new jersey and now in africa where we're we're doing the same work we're in africa mostly we've been in the gambia in west africa but we also have a major project with the world bank in lawsuit two which is in southern africa and i just came back last week from nigeria where we just started we trained about one hundred fifty teachers there for a week and this is new jersey which working in new jersey being brought to help other countries and process we've gone through you know what would i do the burgen tech was that i had sort of free reign as a pre engineering manager when i start of the one nine hundred ninety nine and bergen tech could that was the first year in teterboro it was a full time school up to that had been a shared time vocational school right and so i was allowed to do whatever i wanted as a vocational teacher not as an academic teacher for two hours a day with pre engineering students so i created the program which the foundation of which was in the first year students taking forty minutes of algebra based for forty minutes of algebra based physics forty minutes about forty minutes of engineering and so we can use the combination of algebra based physics and there's an algebra to take students who had previously not been that strong in math and science below average eighth grade results in the gap but back then your kids would say ask eight now if we had a below average score and we turned them into the top performing students in the state so  was all built on creating a very rational sequence of science and mathematics that all work together so every year the math that was being used was complemented by the science that was being taught and then each year year after year the vertical alignment led to  foundation for chemistry in tenth grade and chemistry being the foundation with physics biology in eleventh grade and then we put in a similar sequence of with but a p courses so kids would take physics chemistry biology nine ten eleven and then physics chemistry a p chemistry a p biology ten eleven twelve if they so chose and we became the number one school in the state for the percentage of kids taking and passing advanced placement physics even though the the the students as i say when we started at least  were below average get the scores higher minority population and so forth so that's why they made me stay teach for the year then the state was like well can you bring this to other schools and to do that we had to create course materials because all the i wasn't using a textbook i was using materials i wrote and so we started taking all of our course materials and transforming them into smart notebooks so they could be digital files we could post online and teachers anywhere could use where people anywhere could use but so we did that have for the high school sequence we've now migrated that all the way down to kindergarten so now we've got more than one hundred fifty thousand slides to teach everything and it's all articulated from kindergarten all the way up to college and every year all the subjects matching each other so that they all work together creating a sort of a rational sort of world for the kids to live in but then we need a lot more physics teachers because we wanted to go to schools that we were asked by the commissioner lucille davy at the time to go to patterson to work in jersey city to they had very few physics teachers and if you're going to teach everyone physics in one thread you need as many physics teachers as a district would have biology teachers or earth science teachers so we developed a program that was based on the idea of teaching the teachers of anything so they were already teachers they were good teachers but they didn't know physics necessarily we would teach the visits using the exact same materials and pedagogy and assessments everything that we were using with the kids so we would simultaneously teach them physics in a way that we knew was very efficient and teach them how to use these materials to teach students physics so we taught them pedagogy and content at the same time and we got a program approved i won't go through all of the complexities of that it was i think we have to do if you'd like but the net result was that we had one nine hundred ninety two thousand and nine when we launched this we instantly became the number one producer of physics teachers in the united states and have stayed number one every year since number two is like eighteen a year we're producing th fifty seven physics teachers and again this is all that work is all those numbers are just new jersey you say producing them how do you get the place that the various school does well they were initially it was it was relatively easy because it was the destroy the superintendents for the districts set down with the commissioner and us and agreed to do this and they gave us our first forty two candidates they were teachers in those districts and they were given the way it works is they take one hundred twelve hours of instruction in the first year course before they enter the classroom then they teach that first year course but only that first year course during the first year where they cement the knowledge because you don't really know something and so you try to teach it work and at the same time they study that night  wednesday nights and one night every every third saturday through the school year another hundred eighty eight hours they learned advanced placement physics we then extended this by the way to chemistry and now mathematics so they were they were a teacher let's say of english or math or french whatever and we taught them physics they became teachers of physics their practice scores what we did a study with hanover we were very big on studies did a study that in fact the scores are comparable to people who majored in physics who became teachers so there was no decline there but they were already placed so there five years after they have the program started think it's five years after three years after but the i remember the research was done that ninety percent of our teachers were still teaching in the same schools they were in when they started the program which is a very high number for urban districts and in tennessee do you know especially if they specialise of the physics teachers because physics you should get a job anywhere and you know they're diffusing now a little bit because some of the newer teachers become summit teachers and so forth so they they spread out but we produced two hundred seventy new science teachers since we started and when we started there were only three hundred people fishel according to  s o who are sort of out is physics teachers in new jersey there are about six hundred people who are physical science so they could have a physics and chemistry so depending on how you count it there were three to nine hundred people who could teach physics in new jersey we added to that the other two hundred seventy roughly so it's a big effect and where most of these teachers were fifty percent women so it's perfect which wasn't always the case for physics teachers and they're one third black and hispanic which certainly wasn't the case for physics teachers they are now racially diverse gender diverse they're teaching in communities where they've been teaching for years before they begin with a sixty two and they're staying in those communities so students get access to physics and now chemistry and the this year is mathematics where they might have ever had that chance before and i'm a huge believer of you know partly mentioned i went to mit and studied physics there but given time i could i'm sure convince you that physics is the most important subject for people who want to go into any stem career it's required by ninety percent you're looking to go through a catalogue at princeton or rutgers or any university you know look up the stem majors and then see what they require ninety percent of them require you take physics ok but what do we do in most school districts in the united states and certainly high minority high poverty school districts in new jersey we teach everyone environmental science which is not required for any stem career right and then maybe biology which is required by fewer than forty percent or fifty percent and then we don't teach them physics and chemistry but we get all excited we're having all these programs to get kids excited about stem but they go to the university and they find out they don't have any of the background to do stem so they you know if you look at the numbers that half of the people who enter engineering school drop out of engineering majors the first year before they get to their first course because they fail physics chemistry or calculus ok why does the center uses a unique pedagogy no became progressive mathematics initiative it we went to math so we have both of those it's that's more than just the pedagogy because that also involves braces the sequence and all of that and a lot of different pieces but the pedagogy that we use that was very successful for me was like an accident originally which was that when i first showed up at school i showed up a couple days before the students showed up in a day before the faculty showed up this was my first public school teaching job in ninety nine i'd had a twenty year career running audio compan es had been president of j b all that speakers and harmon kardon audio and so do but a bunch of companies but i'd become a public school teacher i got my masters at stony brook and became public school teacher ninety nine so when i showed up in my classroom there were no we were just computer desks along with the perimeter of the room facing at the walls so as a teacher of if i stood there no one would see me they were just off their backs to me and i think the original vision of the people who'd hired me was that they were going to do computer cad programming all day or something you know two hours a day of just sitting doing cad but as my perkins board advised me and i knew myself that if you're going to be an engineer you can't just learn some engineering stuff student some science and some math so that's why i came up with the solution i did but they wouldn't i needed tables and so i walked around the school and i found in the faculty room that they had these four six foot diameter round tables with folding legs and i was the only one of the buildings so i just rolled them down the hallway and put them in my classroom went to the cafeteria grabbed the cafeteria chairs founded custodian who found me a rolling black there was no blackboard in my room or whiteboard so i found a  blackboard on wheels and rolled it into my room and i created a social construct of this learning environment without without that intention but it worked great kids the first day walking to school they're sitting around around tables feels a little bit more like being at starbucks the being in a classroom and i didn't and i could never stand i'm talking a lot now but when i'm teaching i do i like lecturing very long so what i would do is try to keep my my little lecture segments just teach them something new in five or six minutes fast and then give them problems to work on and then they'd sit around those tables working on problems and that became of the social the social constructivist sort of interweaving a direct instruction with social constructivism so that give a little piece of new information given problems they couldn't solve without the new piece of information so they had to sort of build a mental model of how to use it or do it by talking to their friends so my classes were seventy percent of the time the kids talking to each other talking very little and the kids loved it i mean there was the only class in the school where the teacher was telling them to talk more and other classes they were all telling them to keep quiet and so these kids were never really like math and science that much became really enjoyed a lot and part of scaling up when we wanted to go to other schools and do more this is that we actually captured that pedagogy within the smart know pokes by creating like seven six or seven slides of direct instruction and then six formative assessment questions which were written to work with  responders and polling software so the kids would put their answers in and you stop the question and it would show the results what the class thinks the answer is but it wouldn't show them which one is the right answer so if they're split like half between two answers you say find someone with a different answer and convince them they're wrong ok and you get these loud argue heated discussions in the classroom and suddenly physics and then later math and biology chemistry become these sort of exciting passionate subjects for the kids where they really enjoy going to class and which there was just a pre engineering kids doing this but the word spread to the school that the most fun class in the school was physics so we wanted to physics and that's why the by two thousand and three so four years later everyone of the school was taking physics in one thing that chemistry in tenth biology that's that's why we became the leader of the state even though it was a traditional vocational school and these were kids who were doing coloring cosmetology and welding and fashion design and then taking physics and have performing schools everywhere in the state in terms of the percentage of kids taking and passing physics i won't name any schools but schools even around here don't have to really the percentage of kids taking and passing a p physics is this traditional technology book tech school and it wasn't because we made them do it it wasn't because they you know the striving kids who were spending all their time working on this stuff it was just the most fun thing they were doing and kids love learning and they and you just take videotapes interviews with these kids and they just say over and over they feel so smart that they can do physics know how do you really work to you know minimize the equity gap you know has the myth that would you work for students who would have meant to have a strong academic background and come from you know that was that was my life when i began this program  multiple of that location so how do you reach reach those historically as you're going to so there's two pieces to that yeah i was going to answer the first question that i heard but by i like the second question too so i do both of the first bush questions how do you get kids who don't know anything about this i want to take it and that turned out to not be that difficult kids don't know anything first of all about what they're supposed to take a ninth grader so we've had schools who switched to this and they were like how are we going to announce how we just make the course physics instead of environmental science and the kids will show up and take it is pulled from advanced placement physics we just do it with that we take out the trigonometry just make it out your birth so that they're really focused on the algebra skills for algebra one while they're using them you don't need trig to do a lot of good physics you know we go through quantum nuclear quantum physics nuclear physics electrostatics magnetism simple harmonic motion dynamics kinematic we just don't do projectile motion at the beginning which is what knocks everyone out of the course to begin with because they don't know trick so anyway so that's one thing so we can lower the barrier social and physics and the reason they did that was because algebra one was a senior year course and in the eight hundred ninety s and they thought you needed algebra to do physics math drove down so that algebra became eighth or ninth grade course but the sciences stayed in the wrong order the reason they wrote the order was because you needed the you needed algebra to do physics in eight hundred ninety s quantum physics hadn't been invented yet so people didn't understand that the six was the foundation of chemistry but ten everyone knew that you couldn't really understand chemistry without understanding physics you needed to understand quantum nuclear and electrostatics to understand chemistry otherwise what you do in chemistry is you memorize terms some of the kids i met would say i'm not good at science because i don't have a good memory i've never met a scientist with a good memory scientists have terrible i had a terrible memory and the only reason i excelled later on when i took physics was that i had a good reason through everything i could read derive everything if i needed to under take physics and without that we're doing in that order you memorize stuff in biology you memorize stuff in chemistry and then you drop out because you're bored you never get to physics or physics is the foundation of chemistry if you don't know physics you're not going to understand chemistry we're going to be memorizing what's the difference between a compound and a mixture how many deca leaders and of what it's all just a lot of facts the reasoning is diminished similarly biology we're here in princeton princeton university  this may have changed i shouldn't say it on the air but at the last time i looked they had a major and molecular biology that was in the major in biology so molecular biology is where all the action is in biology right now and that didn't start until the one nine hundred fifty s that could  little bit wrong but anyway d n a was discovered in the one nine hundred fifty s and that sort of led to this revolution we're in a biotechnology right now biotechnology can't do biotechnology without physics and chemistry so if you want to be a biologist you need physics right if you going to be a physicist you don't need biology it's very it's very clear there's lots of good studies on it just look at textbooks and the allies the prerequisite knowledge within each book within biology there isn't a best amount of prerequisite knowledge from physics and chemistry within chemistry there's a vast amount of prerequisite knowledge from physics in a physics book there's no prerequisite knowledge required from physics or chemistry within biology or chemistry so if you teach it from the ground up first you learn physics then you learn chemistry then you learn biology are you don't have to reteach over and over some people say oh you have to you know for taking a test at the end that includes physics and chemistry biology do you have to like review all the physics again we say no because every time you're teaching chemistry or you're reviewing physics again because physics is within that right and so so that structural change is very very important and it's united states got it wrong years ago i mean a lot of countries in europe they do all the same time i think i've had arguments with people there about that i still think it's better to do it in the sequence we do you can you could actually call our course is science one science two science three three where the first year science is almost all physics the second year of science is almost all chemistry and the third years biology but that would actually make sense maybe more people to how do you convince communities of this i mean the problem is you and i are probably similar age i didn't take physics or chemistry in high school my job acted dancer as you mature me so when live in a small percentage twenty thirty five percent thirty percent of kids took to six at all i didn't take it high school when i was of n y u as an english major when i accidently took a physics course and fell in love with it yeah and the next year i took five physics and five math and transferred to mit and became a physics major but high schools didn't tell me even what physics was so somebody administrators school administrators leaders don't have never took it or age right never took those x and their children don't know they're supposed to take physics and if  you're a minority kids if you're living in newark let's say chances are your parents if they went to high school or college they might not have taken physics they are either had to get the message them out it's a big problem i was at colorado school of mines and they were have  they have a problem there with lack of diversity their diversity person reports the present that there's that you're basically we have white boys from jefferson county ca to the school it would have trouble getting girls have trouble getting african americans  that and i said you know what the problem is that if they're not seeking the right courses in high school then they can't decide that senior year of high school to go to school of mines because everyone at school of mines is doing physics chemistry and calculus the first year of school and if you've never seen those before and that this this diversity person said the same thing to me she said to parents show up and they say how do i how do i get my child in the school of mines which sort of like the mit of colorado and they say well backs four years ago they should have done these things but it's too late  same thing with kids in newark in paterson jersey city camden yeah they're not offered the but you know every kid in trenton now takes physics at st louis but we give them physics courses every kid in camp and they'll take physics in one state every kid in trenton takes physics in  thread many kids in irvington east orange these are high minority high poverty places where the kids are getting a chance where previously they would not have had a chance even if they graduated from school very successfully with good averages when they show up a college they wouldn't be prepared to take courses that could lead to being a doctor or an engineer scientist computer scientist because all of those require these subjects which weren't being offered in their school they will have a thirty seconds left time flies so basically less question to ask you any tips for today's teachers and help and how to help their students to succeed it is sites that you can share navigating the world if to have education after all these years in the field so  social constructivism to me is the big thing if you despite the evidence of this interview if you if the teachers talk less write the students talk more the it solves a problem that otherwise is unsolvable which if you have a kid who doesn't understand fractions well you know if the number one set of mistakes people make in calculus courses go back to pre algebra so if you if you're if you have thirty kids sitting in rows in front of you and you're trying to teach them something right every one of those kids will have some reason they're misunderstanding you that's different than the kid next to them so you can address them sort but if you have them talk to each other and work together on solving problems they will actually repair each other's knowledge and they'll fill in the gaps and that's my biggest advice let the kids do more the work and you do less of the work well robert good to thank you so much for coming on the show today keep up the good work at the new jersey center for teaching and learning i hope everything goes good in the in the years to come thank you very much for having me i appreciate it tha