Dr. Matt Kloser: Education, Discovered.

0:00:00.0 Matt Kloser: Hot mic. I have a hot mic. Middle C. Middle C.

 

[music]

 

0:00:13.0 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas to the theories and practices behind entire systems. Think education is cool? So do we. So we pair two conversations. Learn about our guests, then learn from our guests. Share your takeaways and come back for more. You're listening to Think.Pair.Share, with me, Audrey Scott.

 

[music]

 

0:00:46.6 AS: Dr. Matt Kloser is the founding director of the Center for STEM Education, and a faculty member and fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. A proud graduate of the ACE program, his research focuses on issues of teaching and learning in science classrooms, with a special focus on biology education, as well as the relationship between core instructional practices and student outcomes. Matt's unrivaled enthusiasm for recording this podcast in person encouraged us to venture into the new Remick Family Hall Studio for our very first face-to-face recording of Think.Pair.Share. So fasten your seat belts. Off we go.

 

0:01:25.2 MK: Oh, look at this.

 

0:01:25.4 AS: Oh. Here he is.

 

0:01:26.1 MK: Wow. I love this. I love this, but...

 

0:01:28.7 AS: Welcome to the first ever live Think.Pair.Share podcast.

 

0:01:33.6 MK: Wait. This is Think.Pair.Share? I thought this was The Only Murders in the Building podcast. Is Martin Short not gonna be here?

 

[chuckle]

 

0:01:41.5 AS: It's an enormous disappointment.

 

0:01:43.6 MK: No, no. Audrey Scott, host of Think.Pair.Share, I am very excited to be part of this critically acclaimed podcast. Although once I'm on, a bunch of people will just be critical of it, I'm sure.

 

0:01:55.4 AS: I love it. No, but in all honesty, thank you very much. This is the first time we're using the Remick Family Hall Studio for this podcast. So this is exciting. Well, we started in a pandemic, so we could do something, and it was always via Zoom, but this... An auspicious day.

 

0:02:09.1 MK: We're gonna go everywhere, right? We're gonna talk about John McEnroe and my time with him. We're gonna talk about playing keyboard for Bruce Springsteen. Which hasn't happened yet but...

 

0:02:19.3 AS: Yes, we are gonna go everywhere because the theme today is grab bag.

 

0:02:23.7 MK: It's not a grab bag when we're going to do all of them.

 

0:02:26.5 AS: If you're up for it, we'll do the whole thing. I know you kinda know the drill, but we do do a little bit of a fun section at the beginning. Fun being relative, I'm sure.

 

0:02:34.5 MK: Well, let's just kind of set some norms and expectations, because you say, "At the beginning." I'm here, I'm here for the banter and the bits. If we have a pie chart, 'cause I'm a STEM guy, so it would be like 90% banter and bits, maybe 10% content on educational issues. Is that...

 

0:02:52.0 AS: I like it, I like it a lot.

 

0:02:52.8 MK: Is that okay with you?

 

0:02:54.7 AS: That's totally good with me. Sorry, listeners, if you wanted a lot of content today, we're just gonna sit down and...

 

0:03:00.8 MK: And do some bits.

 

0:03:00.9 AS: And have fun.

 

0:03:01.1 MK: It's gonna be great. We have an actual bag. Can you put pictures online to show that there's an actual bag happening?

 

0:03:07.9 AS: Grab bag theme. Okay.

 

0:03:09.8 MK: Should read this. Okay. Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin?

 

[vocalization]

 

0:03:16.7 AS: We're starting with the deep ones.

 

0:03:17.1 MK: Wow! This is tough. I feel like there's some redemption in Slytherin. Now, my kids all love Harry Potter, and they have an aunt that they talk through all the Harry Potter books with, so I know all of these houses have traits. And I think Gryffindor is courage, maybe. And Hufflepuff is niceness. I know that's not the actual term, but there's a badger involved. Ravenclaw... I think I wanna go with Gryffindor. Mostly so I can be with the twins, Fred and George, and have access to their joke shop. I do often give 10 points, like if someone does something in class I'll say, "Ten points for Gryffindor," and I used to get real laughs, but now that I realize that the books have been out for 25 years, I get a muffled groan.

 

0:04:16.9 AS: Well, that's what I was a little afraid of with some of these grab bag questions. I'm like, Well, I think we're gonna see if we're even in the same decade as all the other people. [chuckle]

 

0:04:25.8 MK: My wife makes fun of me all the time because she's like, "You only... " And I love music, but she's like, "You only listen to Springsteen, that's it. That's all you listen to. So you can't say you love music." He was like big in the '70s or '80s, I think. So maybe these are right up my alley.

 

0:04:43.3 AS: I'm hoping that they at least touch on a side street or something. Okay, shake, shake, shake. Next one. If you could pass one talent on to your children, what would it be?

 

0:04:53.7 MK: Oh, wow. I don't know. Talent. It's hard to be humble and then say you have this talent. So if I were my dad, I wish he would have been able to pass... We'd have these Kloser family talent shows at Christmas and different things, and he's 92 now, but until for a very long time, he would stand on his head and sing On the Banks of the Wabash. Now, is that not a talent you wouldn't want passed along? The answer is yes.

 

0:05:25.0 AS: Yes, please. [chuckle] Okay, well, that just became the one you're gonna pass on to your children.

 

0:05:30.6 MK: I don't have... I think I need to build some up. It's a good thing this is a podcast, because if they could see the twig arms I have. He's not getting up on his hands. He's not standing on his head.

 

0:05:41.3 AS: There's actually gonna be a lot of audio daily double situations, where you have an opportunity to... [laughter]

 

0:05:45.7 MK: Okay, alright. Great.

 

0:05:47.6 MK: Show us or let us hear a little something special from you. Okay, wonderful. All right. Back to the bag. Did Adam and Eve have a belly button?

 

0:06:00.2 MK: Great question. This actually comes at the intersection of science and religion, like how we read Genesis. And are we reading it literally as Catholics, or is it this kind of how do we think about it contextually and from where we come? And the belly button question, we can go on and talk about evolution and evolutionary history. I love the question. How much time do we have? And remember, 90% of this is gonna be bits and banter and 10% on educational topics, so we can take this up if you want. I think this is...

 

0:06:36.5 AS: Back to the grab bag.

 

[laughter]

 

0:06:37.7 MK: To the grab bag.

 

0:06:42.3 AS: Let's see. Do you have a signature dance move? [laughter]

 

0:06:46.1 MK: No, I don't. It's just this little back kick that evolved from college as part of the hip band, The Meteors. You could check out... If you check out a 1990... It was just, whatever, a band that stormed the campus in the spring of 1999. You could actually see the cover story on the cover of The Scholastic in... I think it was either February or March, 1999. And it says Meteor Shower, and how this band was taking... We were a drummer-less band. And inside you could actually cut out trading cards of each of the people in the band.

 

0:07:39.5 AS: Collectors' items.

 

0:07:42.3 MK: Yeah. A bunch of Kenan Hall guys. I was the A&R man, widely regarded as the best in the business at the time, and just promoting the work of this great drummer-less band that was singing mostly female '80s power ballads. But we tried to be educative when we performed. Sadly, after a great run, long, several months run, the band broke up because we couldn't agree over the spelling of the word yeah. But that really set the stage for a long romance with music. Apparently, I don't like music 'cause I only listen to Springsteen, but I think in each of us, there's this central core. And so that led, when I was in ACE, to thinking about, Well, could we create an acapella group, Ace of Bass. B-A-S-S. I had the name, I didn't really have anybody else in the group. I thought we'd just do Pinball Wizard, we'd be a one-hit wonder.

 

[vocalization]

 

0:09:01.1 MK: Acapella-wise. And then that led later on to the hit education graduate school band at Stanford University when I was in graduate school, called The Stanford Deviations. And we played some... We had a rooftop concert, kind of like The Beatles. The rooftop at Sera's for school of education end of the year party, where we got Chipotle and sang some songs. I was just more of a guest artist with them. I sang a couple of songs.

 

0:09:33.8 S?: Did they have a drummer?

 

0:09:37.1 MK: They had a drummer. They were a very legitimate drummer-full band. Jon Woliansky, who's a professor there, a great guitarist, and then some other grad students.

 

0:09:48.2 AS: I have to get those albums.

 

0:09:53.0 MK: It's not about the money, Audrey. It's not about the fame. It was about the music, and it was about the fans.

 

0:10:00.9 AS: I love it. A man with principles. [chuckle] What song do you know word for word, and what will you share with us right now? I'm assuming it's a Bruce Springsteen song.

 

[laughter]

 

0:10:11.3 MK: Yeah, well, right. I think one of the greatest songs ever written was Born to Run, but it's not my favorite Bruce song, that's Bobby Jean. But I think if I had to say what song do I know every lyric to, it would be Thunder Road, which I sang with The Stanford Deviations. And then my wife and I saw Bruce in San Jose when I was out at grad school, and then we saw him. He was in Rome on our honeymoon by accident. We just stumbled upon it, and he ended the concert with an acapella version of Thunder Road, just him and his guitar. And it was the last song played at our wedding reception. We just got tickets to... Bruce and the E-Street Band are doing their last tour, so we got tickets in Detroit and Milwaukee. We're very excited for next spring, yeah.

 

0:11:00.6 AS: They probably are already all sold out. I'm gonna have to...

 

0:11:01.9 MK: But I know some A&R men from my Meteors days that I could maybe...

 

0:11:07.2 AS: Industry ties.

 

0:11:08.5 MK: Yeah.

 

0:11:08.9 AS: I appreciate that.

 

0:11:09.5 MK: As long as you know... It's not about you, it's not about me, it's not even about Bruce. It's about the music and the fans.

 

0:11:18.2 AS: Okay. [chuckle] Got it. Back to the grab bag.

 

[laughter]

 

0:11:20.7 S?: We were talking about with the grab bag.

 

0:11:24.7 MK: Remember, 90% bits and banter...

 

0:11:28.0 AS: Is gonna be it.

 

0:11:28.1 MK: 10%.

 

0:11:28.5 AS: If roses are red, why are violets blue? Another sciencey one.

 

0:11:34.7 MK: Well, why we see blue, why the sky is blue, that's yeah, all refraction and light. So we could talk about that. But...

 

0:11:44.5 AS: Or we could show James Will's video asking you, Dr. Kloser the Science Poseur.

 

[laughter]

 

0:11:51.5 MK: Wow, during the pandemic there was a time... I think it started maybe slightly before, where James Will, son of Tim and Lindsey Will, awesome teachers in themselves, ACE teachers, he would have these great questions. And so I'd get these little video chats of, Uncle Matt, why is the sky blue? Or... And so then we tried to put together a little video, had its own little jingle at the start; Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt Kloser the science poseur, and we'd just try and figure out together, well, why is the science blue? And so we had these back and forth videos. Yeah.

 

0:12:29.7 AS: They're so cute. They're so cute. And honestly, that... We will get into that, is that you are able to make science relatable and fun for kids or just adults that maybe don't find that to be their niche. So I really admire that about you, and I love seeing those videos and I love talking about that kind of stuff, 'cause I think that's one of the things that gets people excited about science. And just learning because they don't see it as a barrier.

 

0:12:55.7 MK: Well, in all seriousness, we don't need bits and banter to make science fun and interesting. It's not something we have to artificially inflate, because the world is fascinating and kids are curious and adults are curious, but we have to allow them to be and kind of reframe science as, Yes, there are these core ideas and they're important, and that helps us move along our understanding of the world. But also there's more to position young people as doers of science and wonder and do the figuring out for themselves, and make sense of it for themselves, that in the doing of that it becomes fun.

 

0:13:36.0 AS: Alright. Well, we'll chat a little bit more about that. I don't know how many more grab bags we have, but we'll go for a few more. Okay, how many more do we have, do you think?

 

0:13:43.1 MK: Let's see. Oh, there's just one.

 

0:13:46.3 AS: I have one more over here. What business pitch would you make if you were on Shark Tank?

 

0:13:51.3 MK: Okay, so I have been known... This is uncanny that this is actually the question. Listeners of Think.Pair.Share, this is not a plant. I would probably pitch... Restauranteering is, I hear, a very difficult life. But I was at our wedding, married to a lovely English teacher at Saint Joe High School. At our wedding we didn't have cake, Lauren doesn't really care for cake, and so... But we both love smores. So we had smores. And so I feel like... I don't drink coffee.

 

0:14:27.6 AS: Really?

 

0:14:28.4 MK: I know, right? And so that's awkward. And so I get very nervous going into Starbucks 'cause they're like, Do you want a tall venti grande? I'm like, medium and venti. Just give me a medium. I don't know. I don't understand. I don't have the Starbucks schema. People are like, "Oh, let's go grab coffee," professionally. And then I have to kinda say, Okay. And then we get there and I order the hot chocolate like I'm 12, because I don't drink coffee. And then they ask, Do you want whipped cream? And I say, Yes, of course. So I wanna start a place that embraces... So it's called, Smore Than Coffee. And they do serve coffee, but smore than that. Each table has a small, little wood-burning fire, with little mesh over it, and you can order smores. So that you don't have to drink coffee if you're going on a date, or a professional thing, you can just... There's a third space to focus on, the making of the smore. And there's like... You could get Rolos or Peanut Butter Cups or Andes Mints or York Peppermint Patties as part of your... That's a premium smore. Or if you order a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate, it automatically comes with a complementary, regular-sized Jet-Puffed Marshmallow that you can roast.

 

0:15:46.0 AS: Nice.

 

0:15:46.6 MK: But then you can order the family basket of smores, or the smore the size of your head. Like a huge marshmallow. And then in the back, there'd be the serpentine bar. So they'd actually... They'd serve alcohol, but then you don't wanna have alcohol too close to the fire.

 

0:16:04.7 AS: Sure.

 

0:16:05.5 MK: So the fire there would be well recessed, and you'd have these telescoping forks where you could roast your marshmallow smore than coffee. Yeah.

 

0:16:15.3 AS: Now all I need to do is book you a spot on Shark Tank.

 

0:16:18.6 MK: The model is solid, I think it's unique, I think it's got a great name. The name actually on all of these things, just like Ace of Bass, the name always comes first, then the idea. Which is probably not how business is supposed to work.

 

0:16:32.5 AS: But it's much more fun, I think. I like it. It's a spot to jump off from for all your idea generation. Okay, I couldn't let you go without asking you a Star Wars trivia question or two. Rumor has it that you are quite the fan. I am... I like Star Wars, but I don't know much about it. So these are probably relatively easy, 'cause I'm going with the core Star Wars movies. Not all of the 20,000 that have come afterwards. Okay, so I don't know. What were Luke's aunt and uncle's jobs on Tatooine?

 

0:17:05.3 MK: They were moisture farmers.

 

0:17:07.8 AS: Shoot. He got it.

 

0:17:09.2 MK: Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen, right? Yeah.

 

0:17:11.9 AS: That's true.

 

0:17:13.4 MK: Yes, 'cause they're in the desert of Tatooine and so that's a high commodity is moisture farming.

 

0:17:18.2 AS: See, so you are good. Given that, if you lived on Tatooine, what line of work would you be in?

 

0:17:22.8 MK: I'd probably just waste time, have fun wasting time, trying to hit womp rats. They're no more than two meters. That's a line from the movie. If you didn't know that. Yeah.

 

0:17:37.3 AS: I thought you were gonna say for a quick second that you would waste time at... Who's cantina? What's the real name of the cantina?

 

0:17:44.8 MK: The real name of the cantina, I think you... At Mos Eisley?

 

0:17:47.6 AS: Yeah.

 

0:17:48.3 MK: I mean, that's the...

 

0:17:49.9 AS: I think that is.

 

0:17:51.0 MK: That's the city.

 

0:17:51.8 AS: But apparently there is some other guy. The establishment's alternate name is Chalmun's Cantina. Apparently that was the... He was a wookie that owned it.

 

0:18:00.0 MK: Oh, okay. Interesting.

 

0:18:03.2 AS: Who knew? Who knew?

 

0:18:03.5 MK: I did not know that.

 

0:18:03.7 AS: Okay. Well, thank you for playing along with all those. Oh, I do have one more. Sorry, one more. Do you know the name of the song that's playing when they first walk in, and can you hum us a few of the notes?

 

0:18:13.0 MK: In the canteen?

 

0:18:13.2 AS: Mm-hmm.

 

0:18:15.3 MK: You're really putting all your eggs... You watched seven minutes of the video just to get all your questions.

 

[vocalization]

 

0:18:26.9 AS: Nice.

 

[vocalization]

 

0:18:30.3 AS: Perfect.

 

[vocalization]

 

0:18:34.9 AS: [chuckle] It's not a very original name. Cantina Band Song.

 

0:18:36.4 MK: I was gonna just say it's the Cantina Band, but...

 

0:18:40.9 AS: Great, thank you very much. That was awesome. I do appreciate all those... Your sense of humor and your playing along with the first ever grab bag, so.

 

0:18:49.2 MK: Well, it's not about me, Audrey. It's about the music and the fans, right?

 

0:18:53.4 AS: Should I just comment on fans or should I go ahead and try for the music part too? Is it too much? I'm not sure. Okay. Well, we'll work on it, we'll work on it. Oftentimes, I ask people how they kinda came here to Notre Dame, and I know that you were here and then you went away and then you came back. But can you kind of walk us through a little bit of that journey for you, I guess, and then we can tie other things to that?

 

0:19:15.6 MK: So I'm from Warsaw, Indiana. It's very important to put the Indiana part because I worked with someone here, Anna, for several years and I had talked about Warsaw and she thought it was Warsaw, Poland, for a very long time, and then eventually asked me like, "So when did you come to the United States?" Or something. And I was like, "Oh." So it's a very small town in Northern Indiana. There's a lot of town... There are a lot of towns in Indiana named... There's Mexico, Peru, Warsaw. So I guess it's a thing we do here. So went to Warsaw High School and then came to Notre Dame. I was very fortunate to be able to come to Notre Dame, it was kind of always a dream. And got to live out that dream, and it did not disappoint. But wanted to give back. I was kinda destined for medical school, and had applied and gotten into medical schools and then deferred to do ACE, because I was so thankful for the education that Notre Dame had given me. And was placed in Birmingham, Alabama on Wonder Lane. So we used to do little voice-overs of like The Wonder Years and everything since we were on Wonder Lane. It was great.

 

0:20:21.4 MK: Taught Math and Science at Holy Family High School. And finished teaching. Again, was ready to go to med school and just felt like there was some unfinished business, that I still had questions in the back of my mind, and I had the great opportunity to work with Doctwell, who had been a mentor, and is just kind of one of the smartest but also kindest man I've ever met. And so he allowed me really to come work with him for several years on the academic side and then the pastoral side with John Staud. And that really cemented, why do I keep putting off medical school? Which is a great profession, an honorable profession, and I've many friends who do it. And I think I would have enjoyed it, but there was still something that just kept asking questions about education and science education and so I finally realized like, well, maybe that's how I can kind of live the vocation and be engaged in schools and educational research and at the intersection of research and practice. So went to graduate school out in California and then came back in 2012.

 

0:21:32.5 AS: Stanford, did you like it out there?

 

0:21:34.7 MK: Oh, 72 degrees and sunny every day. I love the weather, I loved Stanford. I had some unbelievable faculty mentors in Bryan Brown and Rich Shavelson, and Jonathan Osborne, Hilda Borko, Pam Grossman, they were just all phenomenal and very supportive in the cohort and community I had. They really kind of pushed my thinking and helped move me forward.

 

0:22:02.8 AS: We're very glad that you came back this way. When you were in the classroom with ACE, was there stuff that you started to say, hey, these students need...

 

0:22:10.5 MK: A better teacher? I looked at me and I was like, "What they really need is a better teacher, right? And how do I get better? And how do I think about getting better?" I was obviously trying and doing the best I could, but thinking about, "Well, what does good teaching look like? That goes beyond just having good, high quality, teacher-student relationships." Which that I think I was able to foster, but it didn't matter kind of what context they were in, it was more the milieu of like, "How do we think what schooling means and how does school science look and is that different from doing regular science?" And it is in a way, but also we don't wanna totally close off that we can't, as I mentioned earlier, position young people as doers of science. And that doesn't mean just kind of open discovery, but how can we think about the world, how can we see phenomena and help... Have kids do the talking and thinking around things they see in their world? How can we help them figure out and make sense of specific instances that they could then generalize and abstract to and have a greater kind of understanding of these major accounts of the world?

 

0:23:21.6 MK: But not only that, how do we come to know what we know in science? And that sounds like highfalutin, but if we are doing science and engaging in the practices of science, it really is coming to know, what are these big ideas and how have we come to know them? Some of my work more recently has looked at adapting primary journal articles and that are developmentally beyond what high school or middle school students can do, but they really, if we can make them developmentally appropriate, open a world to like, "Oh, these are the many methods and the creative ways in which scientists engage the world." And we have this idea of the scientific method, it doesn't exist. There are many methods, and so for young people to see like, "Here are ways in which we can question the world." That opens up new ways for themselves to ask questions and investigate and explore the world around them, and then create these explanations that are really meaningful and transferable over time.

 

0:24:19.3 AS: Okay. Thank you. Did you say, "Children as doers of science?"

 

0:24:23.8 MK: Right. So imagine a 1950s' industrial model, where you have 30 or 40 kids in a room and they're lined up in rows and the teacher is opening their head and thinking, "I'm stuffing knowledge in." And we've had kind of a revolution in cognitive science to know that that doesn't work, that's not helpful. And it's not that we have to... Students have to be doing science fair projects. We can talk about that a separate time and my feelings about science fair and what they do to kids. But we do want to position them as question askers. Like, how do we get them to ask questions? But then actually address content and ideas for which they're asking questions, that's really important. And how do we put them in a position to investigate the world and think about, "How would I investigate this? What kind of claims would I make? How could I construct explanations and arguments that can be communicated to others?" That's what I mean by being doers of science, that they're working together and collaboratively toward kinda building knowledge about the world around them.

 

0:25:30.9 AS: Okay, touching on the science teaching practice, so then a continuous improvement cycle, is that to better inform the practice?

 

0:25:36.4 MK: We're working at this intersection, this like, an academic would use the term nexus to make it sound really important probably, but we're working at the intersection of... That we think research is important, to have an empirical basis for the types of claims we wanna make. So like, what do we see as high leverage or core instructional science practices? By that, which things can teachers do, team and skills and how they interact with students, what are those practices that teachers do that make the biggest impact on student interest, learning, and ability to engage in science? So we don't wanna just kind of guess, we wanna have empirical basis for this. So there in the research helps discover and identify things like core practices, as well as teacher education pedagogies. How do we best teach these things to teachers, or how do we help in-service teachers with professional development or professional learning opportunities?

 

0:26:32.4 MK: So we're amassing all of this empirical data, but it's also informed by the wisdom of practice and experience. We don't wanna be blind too, these are systems and they have many variables, so we might be able to control variables in these studies, which is really important. But then also, what does it look like in classrooms with teachers, and how does the wisdom of practice and the experience of others relate to asking new questions and getting new empirical data, and they're kind of always informing each other back and forth.

 

0:27:04.9 AS: You're back here as the director for the Center for STEM Education and as that, are there things you want to accomplish?

 

0:27:12.0 MK: Yeah, I think of my center hat, directing the center as separate from my individual research hat, which, you know, that research focuses on teacher education, co-instructional teaching practices, as well as biology education, and some recent work on thinking about narratives and the narrative effect and how that helps us come to understand science ideas and more about science. So that's kind of like Matt Kloser the faculty member, and then those things feed into the goals for the center. But we really see ourselves at the intersection of research and practice that where all of the work we're doing is not just kind of in the ivory tower... And there's wonderful researchers who don't just focus on the ivory tower, don't get me wrong there, but we're just making an explicit attempt to do research that also then draws on classroom engagement and then feeds back into what happens in classrooms. So as a center, as a whole we're in a... Existing at that intersection of research and the professional formations of teachers. So we really focus on teacher as the mediating variable, that's kind of our center-wide focus, so that we can have this exponential impact over time since we can't get into... We are a small center and we can't get into every classroom and work with students individually, and we learned so much from teachers and they're so powerful and amazing that that's like the mediating variable we wanna work with.

 

0:28:38.8 MK: So it's kind of working with the professional formation of teachers and doing that through research and programs, and we have several programs that do that, but also then this final element of how do we think about it in light of the university's mission. And it's probably been said too many times, but how do we make STEM education a force for good, so that it's not just this value-neutral proposition, but we take teaching science, technology, engineering, mathematics, integrated STEM, all of this as a meaningful opportunity to help young people flourish and to acknowledge their dignity. And it's an act of equity and so how do we bring out the best in young people to explore this world around them, the mathematical world, the scientific world, to construct solutions that are meaningful and kinda move away from the egg drop or the balsa wood bridge that are often content lean, not only content lean, but also like, I don't often find myself really perplexed by getting an egg not to drop or break when I drop it from my ladder, right? That's not super meaningful. Let's put them in a meaningful context because young people can be powerful and we can help shape them in ways that they give back later on and see how these disciplines can be used for good.

 

0:30:04.7 AS: Okay, great, thank you. You helped teach the ACE Teaching Fellows. Why is that work important for you to do, and what value do you find in that?

 

0:30:13.8 MK: That's one of the... It's the busiest time in the summer because we have our center STEM teaching fellows program, where we bring cohorts from all over the United States, which is an amazing experience to engage with them and learn with them. But it happens to overlap with the ACE Teaching Fellows Program and so getting to teach the middle school and high school teachers. And they're also a phenomenal pre-service group that they are bringing creativity and great content knowledge and helping shape that of like how do we harness all of this into a model or a framework that is effective and has been proven by research to be effective. And so we use Mark Windschitl's ambitious science teaching framework, and we adapt it and make it useful to teachers. That's the reason why we're here, right? Is to help support and develop great STEM teachers, and so working with those science teachers. I got the opportunity to teach for just a short three-day workshop, the elementary science teachers, and that was so much fun this summer. It was the first time I got to do it, and just seeing them evolve. As you had mentioned, some people have a fear of science or mathematics and Patrick Kirkland does a great job with the mathematics piece.

 

0:31:31.6 MK: So many of them were like, "Yeah, I don't know. I can't remember learning science in the elementary level, and I'm kind of nervous about it." So then as we see from the national data, it just gets pushed away. So just how can we get teachers to embrace it, that we don't have to have all the answers, and we don't have all the answers to teach elementary science, but we can help raise questions and focus on some of these big core ideas and engage in the practices together with our students to come to a better understanding of the world.

 

0:32:05.0 AS: I love how your eyes light up. Yes, I think... Do you miss being in the classroom at all on a more regular basis?

 

0:32:10.9 MK: I do. Teaching is a lot about decision-making. Oh, I hear that from a student, so what decision... How will I change the question I'm about to ask or how will the lesson plan be affected? It's just different from analyzing and learning from video, so I think both are really helpful and important.

 

0:32:27.0 AS: Yeah, that's great. Well, I hope you get to do both. In this age of social media, we hear a lot about influencers, what has been maybe a couple of the things that have been the biggest influence on you?

 

0:32:37.8 MK: I don't understand the influencers thing. So I had told you I had just listened to Bruce Springsteen, so I know that people are paid, or I know that YouTube influencers or something. So I don't know what they're doing.

 

0:32:50.5 AS: You could be an influencer, I think.

 

0:32:53.4 MK: It's not so much about me. It's about the music and the fans really, yeah.

 

[laughter]

 

[background conversation]

 

0:33:00.7 AS: Is this your John McEnroe story time?

 

0:33:03.4 MK: We didn't even get to John. That was crazy.

 

0:33:05.3 S?: It got weird.

 

0:33:06.5 MK: Well, it was just, if I had a grab bag slipped, that's like, okay, talk about your jobs growing up. My first job was at an ice cream shop, The Flag Pole. Mr. Rowe, our neighbor, they had bought it in Warsaw, Indiana. They made the best ice cream. We made all our own ice cream. It was a great experience. Then I said, I worked at pizza Hut. I worked some landscaping, all of them, I guess, an influencer, Mr. Rowe, he gave me all my jobs, so thank you. But then in college, a member of the lead singer of the hit band, The Meteors, which was on the cover of the Scholastic, Eric Robin, we call him Howie. Howie had this great job. You may have heard of a little broadcasting company called NBC. They do the Notre Dame football games while apparently, and this may be apocryphal. I don't know.

 

0:33:50.2 MK: Apparently, back in the day when NBC first came to do Notre Dame games, they needed runners. Student runners to pick people up at the airport, get sandwiches, carry the camera men's accoutrement, and do just all the things. So there was someone who worked in the athletic department as a student worker. And I think it was Hip, who was also in the Hip and The Meteors. He was in charge of vocal percussion. I think it was his older brother or something worked there and they said, oh, we need some students. And he was, well, I'll do it. So game day he would work for NBC sports. And then he lived in Keenan Hall, where I lived, he passed that job down and it got to Howie, my RA, who then passed the job down to me.

 

0:34:39.8 MK: So for a couple years, I'd be on the sidelines of Notre Dame football games, watching it right there while holding the cameraman's things, but then at the end of my first year, I said, "I really love doing this. Do you have any summer sporting events where you need runners?" "We don't have that, but we need some people for the French open in Wimbledon." I was like, "Yes." So at the first one, it's a lot of running, same thing, getting sandwiches, but then at the French, I had an opportunity to do a little research. So all those kinda wacky facts where it's like, this is the first left hander over six foot two who had three aces on a Tuesday when the temperature was above 67 degrees, it was fun. And then I really loved that, so I was hoping, maybe I'll get to do a little more of that at Wimbledon. And the French it's laid back, you could go anywhere, there's baguettes everywhere and pain au chocolat, eating every morning. That's the only French I know.

 

0:35:41.0 AS: Do they have s'mores?

 

0:35:44.5 MK: That'd be a great expansion idea, for s'more than coffee. And then we get to Wimbledon and it's very, dun dun, dun, dun, it's very, there are places you can go places you can't with your pass. And it's much more stiff and upright. So I was hoping I'd get to do some research, but then I drew the... Since this is gonna be publicly available, I guess the long end of the straw where I had to be John McEnroe's assistant for the two weeks. Now, John McEnroe was an amazing player. And I think the best tennis broadcaster there is because he calls it how it is. He knows tennis, he loves tennis, between shoots, he would just go out to the practice courts. And I remember him hitting with Andy Roddick when Andy Roddick was a teen and just always wanting to play tennis, but he has this bad boy personality, no rules.

 

0:36:35.5 MK: And he was a God at Wimbledon. So when he walked places, these hillside, which would stop and applaud and he'd wave to him, he's very nice to them and everything, but he just had a different way, like he couldn't be contained, right? So when you have to be in a booth at a certain time, in a certain place with certain clothes on, NBC just needed that to happen and so they needed someone to remind him, "Okay, you can't be playing tennis or getting a massage. You need to put a tie on and be in the booth in five minutes." And then you'd get there and you'd be amazing, right? He liked things a certain way. And so I literally had to follow, but not like too closely. So he knew I was assigned to him, but because he could go anywhere, he could just go in the player's locker room, which I had no access too...

 

0:37:27.0 MK: He could go in the Royals box, I'm sure if he wanted to. So he would make it a profession to lose me. And then there's all these tunnels everywhere. And so I'm like, I'm bribing all of the guards with sandwiches and pins and just being like, "I know you can't let me in but when I come by, just tell me, is he in there? Is he not in there?" And 'cause he just wanted to be free and go play tennis. And so, I made friends with all the guards and my first task for him, which I later found out was a total hoax, and he was like... It's like, "Okay, Mr. McEnroe. I'm assigned to you, I'm gonna keep my distance but if you need anything, I'm here." He's like, "Yeah, I need peanut M&M's but only the green and mint wax dental floss before we go on air." It was like an hour like, "Okay, I got it." So I'm like sorting out the green M&M's and mint wax dental floss, you cannot find easily in the village of Wimbledon.

 

0:38:27.8 MK: And so, he was totally just messing with me. I got it though. I got it there. But it ended up with, there was a rain delay. It was a Sampras' final Wimbledon Victory, he was playing Patrick Rafter I remember it very clearly. And he went in the player's lounge to hang out with them during the whole rain delay. And then they're like, okay, we're coming back on in 20 minutes. We're gonna do some pre-game. It looks like weather's clearing up. So go get John. It's like, I'll give him a few more minutes, and then I'll go get him. I had finally made friends with the guard. He's like just go in, there's only two players left, it's the last day. So I go in, he is on the massage table.

 

[laughter]

 

0:39:08.8 MK: Passed out getting a massage. Good for him. We are in this long rain delay and I'm like, "Mr. McEnroe, we're gonna start in 10 minutes." He like, grunts, and like, Oh... But he was very nice. And then hops off.

 

0:39:27.4 AS: Really? Okay.

 

0:39:28.3 MK: Drops the towel, throws his suit on, pulls his tie out of his... And then got in the booth and he was amazing. And so I got to watch the final from center court booth, in the back, back, background, but I was there and watching it and it was just phenomenal. And he was very, very kind. He might have been aloof, but I can't blame him 'cause people were just always following him.

 

0:39:48.4 AS: Yeah, if people are always all over you... And it sounds like he had a good relationship with you.

 

0:39:52.7 MK: Yeah, so I get a Christmas card from him every... No, not at all. No, no. [laughter] I don't think he ever knew my name, but that's probably for the better.

 

0:40:00.2 AS: Well, that's cool though. That's really good. And to hear you say that he was nice so many times, I don't know, I think that might break a stereotype for Mr. Mac.

 

0:40:09.2 MK: When his kid showed up... So he was married to a rock... Literally a rockstar, Patty Smyth. Yeah. His kids would show up, and he would... He was kind of curmudgeonly aloof, like I said. And then his kids would show up and he was just the nicest, most outgoing person; his kids, he would interact with them. So, it was very stressful.

 

0:40:27.0 AS: I'm sure it was.

 

0:40:27.8 MK: But it was great.

 

0:40:30.6 AS: But worth it in the end, I hope.

 

0:40:31.1 MK: Yes.

 

0:40:31.5 AS: A character builder?

 

0:40:31.7 MK: Yes.

 

0:40:33.4 AS: Okay. Okay, good. So tell me about what you're working on now. What's something new you guys are working on?

 

0:40:38.1 MK: So taking off the center hat Matt, directing the center, and then thinking about my own research and work. Has a couple of lines I mentioned, like teacher education, and I have great collaborators; there are many people thinking about high quality teacher education, as well as core practice work, that's always been there. But I also have this line that I keep alive and really enjoy in biology education. And over the last four or five years, it really started with my dissertation and thinking about science is rich and full of text. If you look at scientists and how they spend their time, they spend much more time reading and talking about journal articles than actually running experiments. But how are texts used in classrooms?

 

0:41:23.0 MK: And if you look at the traditional textbook, these thousand-page tomes, especially biology, that are expository and vocabulary-laden and really lexically dense, hard to get through, and it should just be a tool. I'm not saying get rid of textbooks, but they can be a tool that teachers can use to provide knowledge when needed, and they provide this kind of final form knowledge. But recently, we've been thinking about narrative, and how we're primed as young people, as young as three, four, five, to understand narrative arcs and story. And there's a great scientist who turned movie producer, you probably know him, Audrey Scott, host of Think.Pair.Share, who talks about how we shouldn't be homo sapiens, we should be homo narrans. We live and make meaning of our life through stories and narratives, and yet we don't often think about the story of science. And so there's one way curricular-ly where we can create these kind of stories of science and narrative arcs and story lines, which is a lot of the current work in science education, but also there are these actual stories of science.

 

0:42:34.4 MK: I loved the movie Hidden Figures and the story of you learn some science ideas but also about science and its affordances and huge constraints and inequities and things. But what are those stories? And each time we build new knowledge in science, there's a story behind how did that scientist... How did she come to ask that question, how did she and her grad students and other scientists come to explore those ideas? What's the story behind that? And they're really found in journal articles, but hidden in this guise of, well, this is fact, and we knew it all along and there was no hesitancy, but it's this ebbs and flows. So that's a long way of getting to this idea of, how could we bring some of these narratives into science classrooms? And if we are more interested in stories, and if we have a schema for learning through stories, might there not be opportunities at the middle and high school level where we don't think about narrative and story to complement and supplement many of these expository type and informational texts, that are still non-fiction but have a more narrative arc.

 

0:43:49.2 MK: So we're running a whole slew of qualitative and quantitative studies and experiments, where we're having students engage with expository 15-minute videos on certain topics, and then other students are randomized into conditions with narrative, stories that have the same kind of ideas and topics and then we give them a battery of tests, like which one do you find more interesting and engaging? And we have reliable scales, but then also comprehension questions and this idea... So if these ideas, these expository declarative ideas, are embedded and wrapped in a narrative, the actual story of how the scientist came to understand this, are they better able to piece together those ideas and use them more? And so we're finding out some... We're still in process, but finding out some interesting things of how could we create suites of texts and genres exposing students that might work more in terms of engagement and interest, but also have cognitive affordances as well to pair with many of these other informational texts. So it's been a lot of fun working with Mike Szopiak and Catherine Wagner through all this. So yeah.

 

0:45:01.8 AS: I love stories and I think stories, as you said, help people connect and learn and remember and have an impact. So I hope to hear the follow-up on that. I often ask if people are hopeful. We joke that it's an exciting time for science, but I don't know if hope is necessarily the right word in this context, but you also talked about work at Notre Dame being a force for good in the world. Is there hope for you in that?

 

0:45:27.2 MK: I'm so fortunate to work here because of the community and the people and people who want to work together on this shared mission. So in that sense, yes, I think there's a hope. The hope being, How can we create more specific and concrete ways for schools to see STEM as a force for good that if you break that down, and we've done this before for some professional development in our Excellence in Teaching Conference, all the parts of STEM as a force for good have to be there. You can't be content lean, it has to be faithful and have integrity to science content, math content, engineering practices. And then a force is like, how do we position young people to be people of change, that they can be influencers in their classroom, but also in their own minds and change and grow. And then for good, what are the goods? How do we impact our community? And so that... It's one thing to say this conceptual framework to teachers and you're like, Yes, I wanna buy into this. What does it look like? What models exist that are out there? How can we chart those and find those and decompose those key elements so that other teachers can apply those in their own context, but also then how can we create opportunities for teacher training and here's where all the pieces intersect of teacher formation and pre-service teacher training to position them to be able to do this well and have identifiable pieces.

 

0:46:54.3 MK: But ultimately, although the teacher is a mediating variable, always keeping sight on young people that they can explore the world, that they feel they have agency and can ask questions of the world around them, they see themselves more as more than test takers or a cog in a potential economic chain of, We need more STEM careers. If that's where you think you wanna flourish, great, but there's more to it than that. And so if we can engage young people in asking questions and pursuing answers and thinking deeply together about the world around them and that they can be this force, this agent of change using the STEM disciplines plus the other content areas, then I think we have started to make a contribution to STEM education more broadly.

 

0:47:45.9 AS: Is there an element of either Catholic social teaching or human flourishing that enters into that?

 

0:47:50.9 MK: When we talk about equity and we talk about a force for good, we have drawn on and we're continuing to elaborate on a framework that stems from Catholic social teaching, really recognizing these two prime tenets of respecting the dignity of every individual, and that Catholic social teaching is how we relate to others socially. So that we're also promoting the common good, so from those two tenets fall all of these other pieces related to having rights and responsibilities, empowering the marginalized and vulnerable, and those are pieces that we now see curricular ways and instructional ways that we can live out this "STEM as a force for good" mantra. But what we think is exciting and hopeful for all sectors is these might have different languages, or our foundation might be in Catholic social teaching for these principles, and that resonates so strongly for Catholic schools, but it also does service to public and charter context as well as we think about the dignity of the individual and promoting the common good, that they could see that as an on-ramp to doing some of this work as well. A really action-oriented equity framework in STEM education.

 

0:49:09.5 AS: Thank you. Thank you so much. I wanna say thank you so much for your time and your generosity and all the smiles.

 

0:49:17.6 MK: Thank you.

 

0:49:17.8 MK: How did it feel being in person? Harder? Easier?

 

0:49:23.1 AS: It was fun to be in person.

 

0:49:23.5 MK: Yes. I loved it. Loved it. We have about five more bits.

 

[laughter]

 

0:49:30.6 AS: But thank you so much for everything, Matt.

 

0:49:32.1 MK: Thank you.

 

0:49:32.9 MK: Thank you. It's been a ton of fun. Thanks.

 

0:49:35.5 MK: Thank you. Thank you.

 

0:49:36.3 AS: It's all about the bits and the what?

 

0:49:38.4 MK: The banter.

 

0:49:39.5 AS: The bits and the banter.

 

0:49:40.1 MK: The bits and the banter.

 

0:49:40.8 AS: And then it's really just about the music...

 

0:49:42.8 MK: The music and the fans.

 

0:49:44.2 AS: Okay. Thanks. Alright, bye.

 

[music]

 

0:49:51.5 AS: And thank you all for joining us for Think.Pair.Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate and leave a review, it's very much appreciated. Check out our website at iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening, and for now, off we go.