0:00:11.8 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 paired 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]
0:00:40.8 AS: My guest today is Nicole McNeil, a Professor of Psychology serving the Alliance for Catholic Education's Teaching Fellows program, and is the Director of the Education Schooling and Society Supplementary Major in the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. McNeil studies cognitive development with a primary focus on how children think about, learn, communicate and solve math problems. She is the recipient of the 2021 Faculty Award, an honor that singles out faculty members who in the opinion of their colleagues have contributed outstanding service to Notre Dame through leadership activities, mentoring faculty colleagues and exemplary dedication to students. She has done all this and much more, and it's my pleasure to welcome Nicole to Think-Pair-Share. Thank you so much for being here with us today.
0:01:22.9 Nicole McNeil: Thank you for inviting me. Really, it's exciting.
0:01:27.7 AS: How are you this morning?
0:01:27.8 NM: Nervous.
[chuckle]
0:01:31.5 AS: Please don't be.
0:01:32.6 NM: It's so weird because of the pandemic, I feel there hasn't been as many parties or dinner, things, or even really lunch dates as much, so I feel like I'm not in practice of talking casually with people. I'm talking to children all the time.
[laughter]
0:01:52.9 AS: And we are so grateful for that actually. And you do such a wonderful job with everything you do, and we'll get into some of those things, but I understand what you're saying. We don't have as many sort of one-on-one adult conversations these days. People outside of our family may be, and so, I'm looking forward to this one and hearing about all the good things that are going on with you.
0:02:09.2 NM: Oh, me too, and I've loved getting a peek of some of my colleagues, honestly, like, from hearing... You know, I tried to do a little bit of my homework and listen to the past podcasts, [chuckle] and so, I've had them playing in the background, like, if I'm doing dishes or jumping on the trampoline.
[laughter]
0:02:26.7 AS: Do you guys have a trampoline?
0:02:28.8 NM: Just a little one.
0:02:29.5 AS: So fun. And you've got kids, two kids?
0:02:31.7 NM: Yup, two.
0:02:32.0 AS: Oh, that's lovely.
0:02:33.0 NM: Actually should I say three? I'm sorry. We have a dog.
[chuckle]
0:02:37.2 AS: Oh.
0:02:38.6 NM: Which was a pandemic puppy, so, yeah.
[chuckle]
0:02:41.4 AS: Oh, really a pandemic puppy. That's sweet. What's the dog's name? What kinda dog?
0:02:45.7 NM: Otis, Golden doodle.
0:02:47.8 AS: Nice. Does Otis have a meaning behind the name?
0:02:50.6 NM: Oh, my older daughter named the dog, and there's a full name, which now I'm gonna be put on the spot and forget, but it's something like Otis Ravenclaw Troy, the third. That is the full name of the dog.
[laughter]
0:03:05.0 AS: Oh, it sounds like royalty.
0:03:08.6 NM: I mean, I think she was really into Hamilton, so that's where the third comes from. The original name as a puppy that the owners gave him was Troy, so we wanted to make sure that was in there, and then Ravenclaw, because she was a Harry Potter fan at the time.
[laughter]
0:03:23.6 AS: Lots of good reasons. Lots of good reasons. Well, I like it a lot, and we'll just call him Otis for short.
0:03:28.6 NM: That's right. Yeah.
[chuckle]
0:03:29.8 AS: Okay. I wanted to say, first of all, congratulations on the Faculty Award. I mean, receiving an award given by your colleagues, that's gotta feel pretty nice.
[chuckle]
0:03:41.9 NM: Leaves me speechless, honestly. Yeah, I certainly didn't expect that, but it was an incredible honor.
0:03:48.3 AS: Well, good, I'm so glad. Well, it doesn't go unnoticed. And you know what? We're very grateful for all the things that you're spearheading on behalf of education and children. We start out with a little bit of a fun section.
0:03:58.5 NM: I love it, because it's what we tell tutors in TutorND to do with their students at the beginning of every session to sort of warm up, get to know each other a little bit, and it helps make the sessions more productive because of that relationship building that happens at the beginning, so I love it.
0:04:15.9 AS: Well, I'm glad and that means a lot coming from you, so we're gonna jump into that. It's hard to believe, you're the second episode of our second season, so I started going with a little bit of a theme idea. You're a professor of Psychology with a particular focus in the realm of math, so we're gonna do a very loose numbers/math theme. First one is, do you have one favorite number and if so, why?
0:04:38.1 NM: Okay, well, you stress this one. For me, it's quite a competition. I've thought about this a lot, again, this is a question that we ask our tutors sometimes who are tutoring math to use as one of the warmups. So for me, it's a tie.
[chuckle]
0:04:56.0 AS: Okay.
0:04:56.5 NM: I know that's kind of... Oh, no, you said one number.
0:04:58.1 AS: No, no.
0:05:00.5 NM: Between three and four. At Notre Dame, we like to say three, right? Father, Son, Holy Spirit. [laughter] But four is gonna come out on top, why? Because one easy answer is, I have four people in my family now, right? Me, my two daughters and my husband, but the four gospels, and in math and in the development of math cognition, four actually has a special significance. So, it is the most that we can hold in mind at once and manipulate. Four is that number, and when children develop an understanding of numbers, they learn one at a time, one, two, three, and when they get to right around four, there's this qualitative shift in their thinking, and then they can understand counting and what it represents. I'm gonna go with four.
[laughter]
0:05:57.3 AS: Okay. I like it. Those are really interesting reasons. Oh my gosh.
0:06:00.7 NM: Are you a fan of Sesame Street?
[laughter]
0:06:04.6 AS: Yes. Hello?
[laughter]
0:06:07.1 NM: So there's a really excellent song by, I believe the singer is Feist, Is that a singer? Okay, I wanna make sure I was pronouncing her name properly because I actually don't know her work outside of Sesame Street. But she sings a song. And it's "One, two, three, four. Monsters walking across the floor. I love counting... " And we have played that so many times with both daughters, and I love that song.
0:06:37.2 AS: That's really sweet, and yeah, she's lovely. Yeah. I haven't seen that, so I'll look at that one.
0:06:42.0 NM: Oh, I'm gonna send it to you. It's amazing. [laughter]
0:06:46.3 AS: Thank you, I look forward to it. And I love that, that you can do that with your kids. That's one of the great things about Sesame Street, it's something for everybody.
0:06:53.6 NM: Absolutely. It has an amazing history, and I'm so grateful that we have Sesame Street in our world.
0:07:00.1 AS: Yes.
0:07:00.2 NM: It made it a better place.
0:07:01.7 AS: Agreed.
0:07:02.2 NM: In our culture, I feel there's a lot of negativity toward screen time. At first, when I was younger, maybe it was television, now it's iPads and there's a lot of media effort around that. There are people who exaggerate claims, research studies, and I always go to Sesame Street. I like to argue sometimes, and [chuckle] I always go right to Sesame Street because there is so much evidence that Sesame Street is a net benefit in the world for children. So, yeah.
0:07:39.2 AS: We may have to have a side podcast on that, so stay tuned.
0:07:42.8 NM: Okay.
[laughter]
0:07:44.8 AS: Well, and the reason that I said "one" is because I don't mind whatever your answer is, but I'm going with a one, two, three, four, five, and that's why. So have you ever studied or wanted to study a second language?
0:07:56.2 NM: I have studied a second language, but only in high school. So it's one of my regrets, honestly. I wish I would have learned it better. [chuckle] And on the way, actually this morning, taking my daughter to school, there was an NPR podcast about somebody just wrote a book on regret. It's like this world survey of what people tend to regret the most, it was fascinating.
0:08:22.1 AS: I'm gonna have to check that one out. Cool. Send me several links, I think you're gonna have... [laughter] Okay, so then back to my very loose numbers theme. Do you prefer The Three Amigos, The Three Stooges or The Three Musketeers?
0:08:36.2 NM: Oh my goodness. I do not know enough about any of those three things to take a strong opinion, however, I will say that when I was younger, I know that my dad loved The Three Stooges. And so, when there was a Christmas or a birthday, there was a shop called Spencer Gifts, I think it was in like every mall when we were kids...
[laughter]
0:09:04.5 AS: '80s.
[laughter]
0:09:04.6 NM: I think so. [laughter] And if I could find a Three Stooges picture or something with The Three Stooges, that was a safe bet.
0:09:14.0 AS: They're sort of a cult favorite, for sure. You sort of alluded to a little of this earlier, I said, name the fourth, Matthew, Mark, Luke and?
0:09:21.1 NM: John.
0:09:22.0 AS: Yay. [chuckle] I say, again, very loose. Okay, so high five or hang ten?
0:09:29.4 NM: I'm gonna go with high fives because they happen a lot in classrooms and in tutoring, a little bit less now that we're in the pandemic. But I do think children are drawn to the high five as a way for good work and congratulations, so you can see them get excited about it, so I'm gonna pick high five.
0:09:50.4 AS: I like that. Okay, well, that's as far as my loose one, two, three, four, five one. But I do have a couple more math questions. What's your favorite pie?
0:10:00.2 NM: [laughter] These are really challenging, I don't like to pick one thing ever. My favorite pie? My grandmother used to make a coconut cream pie that was delicious, and I have not had a coconut cream pie that tastes as good since she passed away, so I'm gonna go with coconut cream and just my memory of my grandmother's.
0:10:22.4 AS: Grandmas make the best things, I do agree. So not 3.14?
0:10:30.2 NM: [laughter] I should have said 3.14, you're right. Darn. Okay, we know how you told me we can say like, "Oh, I said the wrong thing." [chuckle] No, I'm just kidding.
0:10:38.7 AS: That's awesome. Okay, and this one, I don't know. You don't like to pick a favorite, so maybe you like them all, but Circle, square, triangle or rhombus?
0:10:50.0 NM: Ooh, that's so good. Circle, square, triangle or rhombus? I'm gonna pick circle. I'm gonna pick a circle. I think there's more symbolism in a circle. It reminds me of marriage vows and coming full circle, there's a lot of circle analogy in the world. [chuckle]
0:11:14.2 AS: I do love circles, and especially for some of those reasons that you're saying. Is the child... I don't know if it was the creative side of me, I always liked the rhombus because it was just kind of a funny word and a little different. So as a professor of psychology, maybe that says something about me, I don't know, but [laughter] maybe I don't wanna know what it says about me. But on that score, growing up, were you intrigued by the why of things? What drew you to study psychology? And given that, how did you come to focus in the realm of math? Those two don't necessarily connect in my mind, but can you share a little bit about that?
0:11:50.5 NM: Sure. So, I knew nothing about psychology. And I'm from a small town, I don't even think we had psychology as a subject in our school. I was really into science and how things work. I liked Math, I liked Chemistry. Maybe the only reason I like Math and Chemistry was because I was kind of good at them, and they seemed like things that other people weren't that good at. So I went to Carnegie Mellon and I majored in Chemistry.
0:12:25.8 AS: Wow! [chuckle] That's wow, that's interesting.
0:12:30.0 NM: So there's something you didn't know about me.
0:12:32.1 AS: And there, there you go.
0:12:33.3 NM: And I had to take a general education requirement, and I took Intro Psych. Carnegie Mellon is very known for cognitive science. My professor of Intro Psych was a student, I think, of Herb Simon, famous psychologist. I actually think he might be a political scientist or economist, but he was in the psychology department studying cognitive science, Nobel Laureate, and the only thing that I ever knew about psychology was my grandparents watching The Bob Newhart Show, and so I thought of counseling, that was my schema for what a psychologist was, I was not really interested in that at all, but when I took this intro psych class that was taught by a cognitive scientist, it just dramatically changed what I knew of psychology. Psychologists study how people learn language. Psychologists study how we problem solve and where new knowledge comes from, and it just dramatically changed my opinion of it, and I was like, "Oh, I think I wanna know more." So I was gonna take another psychology class, then I went in to double major in psychology, and of course, my plan from the beginning as somebody from a small town who was pretty good at math and science was I was gonna go to medical school. That's what you do. What else was I gonna do? Of course. [chuckle]
0:13:58.8 AS: Yeah.
0:14:00.9 NM: And the double major in Psychology, sort of pushed me just a little bit... Well, now I'll be a psychiatrist. That's what I thought I would do. And one of my professors said, "You know, it would look really good on your med school application if you got some research experience, and I know a new assistant professor in psychology who studies cognitive development, and she's looking for an undergraduate research assistant. Here's her name. You should go talk to her." Okay, it will look good on my med school application, I better do it. [chuckle] I mean, so I often, actually just a little aside, I often have colleagues who are kind of strict about when they're bringing people into the lab and they wanna make sure did they read my work and did they do... And I'm like, I don't know, the reason that I ever got interested in this was because somebody told me it would look good on my med school application, so [chuckle] let's keep the opportunity open. [chuckle]
0:14:56.8 AS: That's a good point. Yeah.
0:14:58.1 NM: So I went to... This was Professor Martha Alibali, and she talked to me about her research, which was on the development of math cognition and how gesture plays a role in our understanding of problems, in our solving of problems, and she showed me a video of an elementary school child solving a math problem, like the one that you know very well from our videos, like a three plus four equals three plus blank.
0:15:24.0 AS: Yeah.
0:15:25.6 NM: Here I am as a college student watching this video looking like, "Okay, this is a very simple problem, this looks like a fourth grader." And then I watch her and she adds all the numbers, and I was like, "What is going on, did she just pick this video to illustrate something?" And then she tells me, Well, actually, this is how most children solve these problems, and from that moment, I became absolutely fascinated with, what are children thinking? Why are they thinking that? Really the rest is history. Working with Professor Alibali, just transformed my life and my trajectory.
0:16:00.7 AS: Notre Dame brings so many wonderful people from all over the world to this currently snowy corner of Indiana, and I'm always interested in the path that led them here. I'd love to hear about yours.
0:16:12.7 NM: So I should first say that I grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, where Notre Dame, if you get into Harvard and Notre Dame, they want you to go to Notre Dame. [chuckle] My grandparents, my dad's family owned a bar and restaurant called The Shamrock, and it was painted green on the outside, and they actually did have, [chuckle] one of their friends paint the Notre Dame leprechaun on the sign outside of their bar and restaurant. [chuckle] So I grew up with a family, Irish catholic, loving Notre Dame. And when I was younger, actually, this is so funny too, Audrey, because Jerome Bettis is now here getting his degree, finishing it, and I don't remember exactly how old I was when they brought me to the game, maybe I was in middle school. They brought me to a Notre Dame football game, and Jerome Bettis was the running back.
0:17:17.2 AS: Oh my gosh.
0:17:17.6 NM: And I got Jerome Bettis's autograph as a kid at Notre Dame. And I lost it, I'm so sorry. I'll just say that.
0:17:29.8 AS: Maybe you could speak into the class and ask them one more time.
0:17:32.8 NM: That's so funny. But they really love Notre Dame. And so I always had it in my head that Notre Dame was a great place. And when I was applying to grad school, I applied to Notre Dame [chuckle] even though my advisor at the time was like, Notre Dame for graduate school in Psychology. Sorry to say, I think you could do better. [chuckle]
0:17:57.6 AS: Nooo.
0:18:00.1 NM: So anyway, I did apply here, but what happened was Mike Pressley was here at the time, and I did not apply to work with him. I studied how kids learn math, he studied how kids learn to read, and so it really wasn't a match, but he found my application. I guess maybe he noticed that I was from Pittsburgh, I don't know exactly what it was, but he called me and said that he really wanted me to come to Notre Dame for grad school. And I was like, "Oh Notre Dame." I was so excited about it. And I came and I visited and it was wonderful, but I didn't ultimately come to Notre Dame, even though I really did like Mike a lot and felt we could do good work together, and he introduced me to the Alliance for Catholic Education. I thought that was, it was a lot newer then.
0:18:50.9 AS: Sure.
0:18:52.0 NM: And I thought it was a wonderful community, but I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and here's the other weird thing about this, I wrote up my senior honors thesis for publication. I submitted it to the Journal of Educational Psychology, which is the top journal in my field. Mike Pressley was the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Educational Psychology at the time. [chuckle]
0:19:20.9 AS: Comes full circle.
0:19:22.7 NM: Circle, it goes with the podcast. This is like when we used to send things through the mail, so I get back my draft with Mike Pressley's handwriting all over it about what I need to do to... I mean, he took a very directed interest in the work and making it better, and ultimately, it did get published. And Why would he do that? I chose not to go to grad school with him, still I don't know why. [chuckle]
0:19:58.1 AS: That's so nice. Well, he definitely saw something, and rightfully so.
0:20:01.8 NM: Audrey, you're not gonna believe it. I mean, it's Providence because I haven't even gotten all the way there, and I'm sorry, this story is quite long, but okay, fast forward, I'm at Yale doing a postdoc, and I'm applying to jobs, and okay, actually, I have to tell you this part, one of the places that we were considering was Michigan State, where Mike Pressley was, then at the time, [laughter] so he was no longer at Notre Dame, he was at Michigan State trying to recruit me to a position at Michigan State. It sort of became clear, we weren't gonna go to Michigan State. In the end, it came down to Oregon and Notre Dame. Mike Pressley emails me and says, "You have to call me, I'm up very late at night, so I really wanna talk to you about this". Okay, and so I'm gonna call him, and he proceeded to tell me why I had to go to Notre Dame, even though he was at Michigan State. He cared a lot about me coming to Notre Dame, and he felt it was the right place for me. Anyway, you just asked a very simple question about how did you go, how did you come to Notre Dame? I guess it was providence, we always talk about that in ACE. So many things throughout my life were pointing me to this place, and from Father Lu's podcast sort of like, "Don't just be bop. Don't just be bop through your life, you gotta think like, where are the fingerprints of God? You've got to stand back and reflect." And I think this is one of those things where you just see a thread throughout.
0:21:47.4 AS: I like that a lot, you're absolutely right. And I think paths are very rarely in a straight line, they like to take lots of twists and turns, and we are glad that you ended up choosing Notre Dame, and apparently we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Pressley.
0:22:02.4 NM: Really. Yes.
0:22:04.3 AS: For sure. So for those as not as familiar with ACE, which is the Alliance for Catholic Education, can you help us to understand your role within the organization? You do so many things.
0:22:17.2 NM: For ACE specifically, I do teach the ACE Teaching Fellows. Another role in ACE is that TutorND also now has tutors working with the children in classrooms of ACE Teaching Fellows, so I would say specific to ACE, those would be the two things that I am most closely involved with.
0:22:43.4 AS: I know that you have a great impact on the Teaching Fellows, and those are the graduate students, correct? For people who don't know about ACE, help me understand how you interface with them and why that matters to you?
0:22:55.7 NM: Well, they're going to be working with children, so I feel that if I can play a small role in helping them work with children in a way that might help the children, I want to do that, but they're all just wonderful people, I like working with them because they are fun to be in a classroom with. I learn a lot from the ACE Teaching Fellows, they're so engaged, they want to help children, they wanna learn everything they can, especially when I get to work with them after their first year of teaching in the summer, after they've taught for a whole year, they come back just hungry for anything that can help them be better teachers, and I just love that, love, love. It's so fun to teach people who really wanna learn. [laughter] One thing that I do think is really important for all educators, and this is something that I really try to do in both of my classes, is to help teachers be better consumers of media and business who are out there trying to make money and profit, and sell them things, because they want to help, they want to help children.
0:24:20.4 NM: And so we sometimes see publishing companies, we see entrepreneurs who create these slick materials to try to say like, if you do this, then you're gonna be able to fix X, Y, Z problem, and a lot of it is just based on pseudo science, and it's not effective and we get trends in education where everybody's doing something that has absolutely no evidence behind it at all, and so I feel that part of my role is to help the teachers gain an appreciation. Science isn't the only thing we use when making decisions, I don't wanna make that claim, but it should be one of the things that we use, and so I do see that as my role a little bit with the ACE Teaching Fellows, to help them be able to understand what is the role of science, what is the role of evidence in the kinds of things that we do and that we teach, why is that important, and how might it help save money, and protect against doing interventions, or curricula, or strategies that aren't helpful?
0:25:37.3 AS: That's a critical point. Do you have anything specific in mind that might be an example of that?
0:25:43.5 NM: There are children who aren't learning how to read at all, because in our society, we tend to force people to pick camps, and either you're in favor of rich knowledge and motivation and culturally rich materials, or you're in favor of phonics. And you can't be both. And so out in the world, people feel they have to pick a side there, and it isn't as simple as, "Oh, it's both. It's balanced literacy". No. Actually, we know that that's not true either. It has to be a very specific combination, we actually do know how to teach children to read, but a lot of teachers aren't being taught the ways to teach children how to read, and right now it's extremely problematic with the pandemic especially, but we now have third, fourth, fifth graders, I'm not exaggerating when I say this, Audrey, it's gonna sound like an exaggeration, but if you write C-A-T on the paper, they cannot read that. They cannot read A-N-D, third, fourth, fifth graders, I'm not exaggerating. We're in a society right now where everything is like falling down and crumbling, our democracy is in peril. So I feel like it sounds like I'm being like that. But this is absolute truth.
0:27:09.1 NM: We have children who are not learning how to read, and they are brilliant children, they have everything they need to be able to learn how to read, but they are not getting the instruction, they need to be taught how to read. It is not like when we were talking earlier, it's not immersion like language, because you can't just magically pick up how the sounds that you're hearing map on to the written letters on the page, there's about 10-15% of children who will pick that up just by being read to. That's it, it's that small of a number. Everybody else needs to be explicitly taught.
0:27:56.2 AS: Oh my gosh.
0:27:57.7 NM: I'm sorry.
0:27:58.1 AS: No, no, no.
0:27:58.5 NM: It's like a really big deal to me, and I study how children learn math, so it's weird that like I can get on a very... I just am very passionate about this right now because I'm seeing it. I mean, I'm working with a child in fourth grade and I see how brilliant he is, and so it's something that I care so much about right now, and honestly, it started with Notre Dame students before the pandemic even, the Notre Dame students in my lab. Before we had TutorND, we as a lab, the Cognition Learning and Development Lab would go out. I had partnership with one of the Southern Schools, and the principal at the time asked me to send some students to help with math, so Notre Dame students from my lab, and actually from the business school as well, working with Professor Albany, would go over to the school and help with math, and my students, my Notre Dame students were coming back to me and they were saying, "I'm working with this child and boy, she's just really picking up on the math when I read the problems to her, she's got it, but she can't read the word problem, so I don't know what I should do, should I start instructing her in how to read? Because I feel like she could pick up on the math very quickly if she knew how to read the word problem".
0:29:18.7 AS: Sure.
0:29:18.8 NM: And that was like the first taste of it, that was sort of my first, "Hmm, maybe we should start looking into this a little bit more".
0:29:26.1 AS: 'Cause I'd like to follow up on this, but I'm gonna try to hit a few things for the folks who are listening, tell me a little bit about ESS. I know you're the director of it and you're doing wonderful things there, another congratulations is in order for that, as you help lead it to become a supplementary major this past year, can you talk to me about that and share the good news?
0:29:46.2 NM: Sure, Education Schooling in Society is a program that was founded by Stuart Greene and Julie Turner, and that was in 2002, and their goal was to provide Notre Dame undergraduate students with the opportunity to gain diverse perspectives on the remarkable human accomplishments of education. And they said that they wanted to, I'm gonna say the quote here, "Introduce Notre Dame students to the idea that education isn't as accessible for everyone as they think." And so the ESS program was founded originally as an interdisciplinary supplementary minor, it draws on the tools of the liberal arts and social sciences to give the students different lenses for examining big questions in education, the goal is not to train teachers at all, it is to introduce students to the big questions in education. What is the purpose of education? What kinds of factors affect children's educational attainment? What role does education play in the development of a just society? Those sorts of questions. It's not at all, it's very specifically not about training teachers per se.
0:31:07.5 AS: Thank you for that clarification. That's a big one. Help us understand what the benefit of it becoming a supplementary major is?
0:31:15.6 NM: Well, yeah, maybe I'll mention, when they first started the minor, there were only 11 students in it. Well, I guess maybe you would say the first year 11 students, that's a lot. Now we're well over 100, and we do a survey every year. An anonymous senior exit survey, we kept hearing, why isn't this a major? And we kept seeing in our students data that they're taking many more classes than the requirements for the minor, and so we had it on our radar for a little while. It kept coming up again and again, and the leadership team were behind it, the faculty wanted it, the students wanted it. So I was like, "Okay, let's make this happen". [chuckle] It was a goal of the original founders as well, and that's really exciting because Stuart Greene is still in our community as an emeritus faculty member and also on the Board of the South Bend School District, and so I interact with him regularly on the Restorative Justice and Education Committee, and so I got to share that news with Stuart that, "We've got the supplementary major," and he was very excited. So that was wonderful.
0:32:29.4 AS: I'm so glad that he got to see that actually, for the students why is that such a meaningful shift?
0:32:36.4 NM: Why is it such a meaningful shift to be able to move from a minor to a major?
0:32:41.6 AS: Mm-hmm.
0:32:41.9 NM: That's a great question that we should ask the students. I don't know, I don't think that I have a deep answer to that, I haven't thought about it much, I just wanted to help people get what they wanted. One thing that I think is really powerful, or because I like to think about ideas a lot, education as a thing is this weird construct in our world, and people talk about education a lot as a life changer, right? It has this power to change people's lives, if we help that child learn how to read C-A-T, that's gonna change the trajectory of the child's life. So education at the same time, both has this life-changing aspect to it, and it does that a lot of the time. But at the same time, we as a society seem to constantly structure it and create it in ways that prevent it from doing that, that we structure it in a way that makes it really, really hard for people who haven't historically accessed it or have the access to it, from using it in that way that it has so much potential to do. And I think that duality about education, that it can change lives, but it also holds people back because of the way that it's structured as well is a challenging thing that I think our students grapple with. And actually, I feel every person in our world would be better if they grappled with that a little bit more.
0:34:23.3 AS: I agree wholeheartedly. The pandemic brought many challenges to education and the world as a whole, one of the incredible things that grew out of that need was TutorND in my opinion, could you tell us sort of how that came about and what TutorND is and how that's going? It's a big question again.
0:34:40.5 NM: Oh Audrey, this is a big question again. We had a COVID working group on campus that I think the provost had put together at the time, the provost, Miranda, and they were surveying employees asking about the pandemic situation and what could be helpful or not, this was in the early phases, right in that spring, what was coming back to them was, this is really, really hard for people who have children in school, and I think the provost wanted to do something to help and reached out to John Staud at the time, because he was the acting director. And so I think John just reached out to as many people as he thought might be able to help with this, and we were all coming together thinking of ideas and strategies, and it went from there, what I was hearing was something like, let's put some Notre Dame students in a call center for homework help. I know that the evidence suggests that kind of thing is going to not really make a difference in children's learning, and at the time we were working in a local school, I had a kind of a tutoring set up, we actually had a community-based learning course starting in the fall that I had already designed, working with that same school for teaching reading and math remotely.
0:36:02.9 AS: Yeah.
0:36:03.3 NM: And so I had already designed this course and it was gonna be in person, but then we were gonna make it online, and it just fit, so it was pretty easy to take it pretty easy. It was something that I had already done some work on and could feel that I could bring some level of expertise to help elevate and make the program make a difference, and so that's where it went, it's definitely not just me by any means, I don't wanna suggest that, I could name so many names. The Robinson Center was absolutely key. So many people in the IEI and ACE all were so, so helpful, and I would name them all. But one interesting thing in the very early phases because, as you know, we're in the classrooms of ACE Teaching Fellows as well, working with some of the students across the country. But I think the reason that that happened is because Kati Macaluso has children, and she was a Notre Dame employee who was dealing with this situation that all of us parents were dealing with, and she signed her children up for TutorND. And so she got to experience as a parent and feel what that was like, and the difference that it could make, and for that reason, I think she thought, "Oh, our children in the ACE schools across the country, they could really benefit from this".
0:37:37.9 NM: And I think Matt Kloser and I think Kati as well, were on the IEI's COVID Working Group, which is a completely different COVID working group, but they were hearing from principles things that kind of aligned in the same way that our provost was hearing from our faculty that they needed some extra help with the e-learning, and they could see that this was a challenging space and the children may not be learning as much as they had been when they were in person, and so I think that's how it sort of grew.
0:38:06.7 AS: Great. And I appreciate that connection actually too, because at first it was an internal Notre Dame piece, but now you are trying to help a wider group beyond Notre Dame employee children.
0:38:17.6 NM: Yes. And honestly, I had a deep commitment to still helping the small number of children we were helping in the South Bend schools. And so really, I don't think I could keep doing this, I could not keep doing it if we couldn't expand in that way. It wouldn't feel right to me because honestly, in that first iteration, it goes back to what we were saying about the big ideas in education, we were helping people, and I do like to help the Notre Dame family, but in that situation, we're contributing to an opportunity gap. When our employee children have access to these evidence-based programs that are gonna help them grow in their knowledge, in reading, in math, they're gonna have a sort of a mentorship experience with a Notre Dame student as a tutor, it's wonderful. Those relationships are beautiful, I love that we can help those people, but we're then contributing to the opportunity gap when there are children right here in South Bend who didn't have access to those, who weren't logging on to e-learning, and so it presents this challenge.
0:39:38.7 NM: I wanna do this, I love helping children learn, I learn a lot from the children, I'm just super fascinated in what children think, I love the relationships the Notre Dame students build, but at the same time, I would feel guilty and I just wouldn't feel it was right to be taking all of my energy away from the small pockets where I feel I can help in the community, because we're all part of the South Bend community too.
0:40:04.9 AS: Very true. I so appreciate your deep commitment to all children, and I almost feel that you wanna be able to help each and every one of them personally, I hope that people will hear this and know how valuable this program is, not just for the Notre Dame community, but for the South Bend community and actually communities all over the country that ACE is serving.
0:40:24.4 NM: I just wanna illustrate. I know, actually, I need to leave to go to tutor, but two things I wanna say, one of our students in an ACE Teaching Fellows school, came to us in an at-risk scoring on a national assessment for early reading skills, one of the very lower scores that we had, and over the course of working with our program, it's an evidence-based program, it's not my program, it's Sound Partners, and over the course of one semester, they now test out of our early reading program that helps them be able to decode the words from the page, and they've moved up to our higher level literacy program. So didn't know yet how to read the words off the page, and that's a problem, if you don't know how to read the words off the page, it's a problem, and through one semester, now knows how to read the words off the page really well and is gonna be doing more advanced literacy work. I saw it and I really don't expect it in one semester, usually it does take longer than one semester, just to be honest with everybody out there, those are the things that even though it's really, really hard, when I see that it just, "Okay, I guess I'm all in. I'm gonna keep trying". [laughter]
0:41:49.3 AS: See, now that is very hopeful, and we end on a hopeful note.
0:41:53.5 NM: Thank you.
0:41:55.0 AS: It's such a pleasure, Nicole. Thank you so much.
0:41:56.9 NM: Oh, this was so fun.
0:41:58.7 AS: I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thanks, Nicole.
0:42:01.0 NM: Okay, bye, Audrey.
0:42:01.9 AS: Bye bye.
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0:42:03.6 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 @ iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening, and for now, off we go.
