 We're going to turn to the world of education. And I'm going to be talking with two innovators in cities that struck me as Stamps-Fallows was speaking this morning about some of the cities where things are really popping up. There's new, an undercurrent of energy. There's a lot of new excitement. The cities that we'll be talking about, and the schools in these cities we're talking about, I think match that. And that's Lansing, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But before I get to introducing our great panelists here, let me just quickly introduce myself. My name is Lisa Guernsey. And I direct the Early Education Initiative at New America. It's within the Education Policy Program, which is a thriving program at New America. We're about 20 people strong now, directed by Kevin Carey. And you'll hear from Kevin after this panel as well. The Early Education Initiative focuses on scaling up great learning environments for kids ages birth through eight, or birth through the third grade. So often people will think early ed, and they may just think preschool. But we are very intentional about ensuring that we're talking about that full continuum of those early childhood years. And from science, we know that extends until about seven or eight, or even nine years old. So we'll be talking about the little ones here today, and our young students. And we'll also be talking a little bit about technology, and where it fits when we talk about our younger students. And often that is a combination, talking about young children and technology that gets people a little uncomfortable, not so sure what that really means, or should we be talking about technology when we're talking about young children? And that's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about as well in my work at New America and in some writing I've done over the years. So I'm looking forward to untangling some of these knots as we talk. So to my left, we have Yvonne Camau-Cannuel, who is the superintendent of the Lansing Public Schools in Lansing, Michigan. And I'm gonna be probing a little bit about what's going on in Lansing. There's been some really interesting reform happening in Lansing that's flying under the radar. And then to her left is Ila Norbash, who is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and who is also the founder of a really interesting place called the Create Lab. And I'll have Ila tell us a little bit about that, but it's part of Carnegie Mellon, but it's also having some real impact throughout the city of Pittsburgh and in the schools there. So what I wanna do is start by giving us a little kind of preface to what I've learned over my years of research about the work that you two are doing. And to ask you kind of what got it started, how did it come to be? So for you Yvonne, we came across the Lansing Public Schools because we were looking for elementary schools that were recognizing that we can't just start at kindergarten. That's too late. And that we need to start recognizing that the quality interactions in the classroom matter and that the continuity from the pre-K year to the kindergarten year to the first grade year, et cetera, that that really has a huge impact on children's achievement and success and feeling of well-being. So we came across you guys out there and Lansing, Michigan because you're using some new tools to do this work. So first give us a quick kind of synopsis of what you're doing and then what sparked it for you. Okay. Well thank you, Lisa. And I'm just so honored to be here, west of the Alleghenies where we are. And I invite all of you to move to Michigan. We've got plenty of space on the roads. They're in bad shape, but a lot of space. So in 2012, well first of all, let me backtrack this a little bit. I'm old and I've been doing this work in education as a professional educator for about 41 years. So I was nicely ensconced at Michigan State University working on a very cerebral, non-vortex driven project and a board of education in Lansing School District came to ask me if I would come and implement a dramatic turnaround plan in a district that was facing a $13 million operational deficit with several priority schools that had been identified as underperforming and decided that maybe I would love to take that challenge. So in 2012, I returned to a district I had been working in, I had worked in previously for a number of years and I think my mic went out maybe. No, you're good. Okay, and they gave me 82 days to turn the district around and there had been fits and starts with reform in the district and prior administrations but they had all been bricks and mortar changes of closing buildings and neighborhood schools and things like that. And as a result of an epiphany that I had, so you're asking for the spark, I had this epiphany in the middle of the winter which is a great time for an epiphany because there's very little else you can do. In a car with Dr. Sharon Ritchie from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, driving up to the trout fishing capital of the world, Kalkaska, Michigan. I said to Sharon, I was working on a project at Michigan State called First School and Sharon is the developer of an instrument, a classroom observation instrument called the Snapshot and it codifies the child's experience in the classroom and I could go on for hours but I don't need to because I have brochures for you. And I had this epiphany and I said to Sharon from the backseat of the car, Sharon, I just want you to know that this instrument can revolutionize the way we think about instruction, much in the same way that Madeline Hunter revolutionized the way we teach about 35 years ago. And it was that realization that this particular instrument could change the way teachers have conversations about their practice to move it towards what they're doing in the classroom vis-a-vis the child's experience as opposed to high stakes testing a year later and analyzing benchmark data to change their instructional practice. And I thought to myself, first I need to find a restaurant pretty quickly sitting in the back of the car but secondly, if I ever get the opportunity to be in a district where I could implement full-scale, large-scale, district-wide a la Richard Elmore reform idea I'm gonna do it and there I was. So and just so everyone understands this observation tool is something that just in terms of what happens on the ground, someone comes into the classroom and is watching minute by minute by minute what children are doing, whether they're having an opportunity to speak out loud, express themselves, right? Whether they're someone kind of answering their own questions, elaborating. And this is something. The activity setting that they're in, whether it's whole group, small group, center, the transition period, how much time are there, is there no instruction going on? They're sitting, putting their coats on, lining up for the bathrooms, lunch, et cetera. And it is done in percentages, so each percentage is four minutes. So we got data in our first go round on this and an aggregate, we do it at the classroom, grade level, school and district level, 400 and some classrooms every fall. And we were in 20% transition time with no instruction. 20%, one percent's four minutes. So we were losing quality instructional time and we didn't even know it. So when teachers look at the data, they say, oh, okay, yeah, all right, I need to do something during those minutes. That's just a high level view of the snapshot. And so you've had this chance, you've got to be superintendent of a district and to make this happen, but didn't this also change the elementary schools? So instead of cherry picking buildings, we're gonna close this neighborhood school because of enrollment, et cetera, which is a typical way large urban districts will make those decisions. I just thought about a long-term vision for our students and for our community and decided to build the whole district around a pre-K three core. And three being third grade for those. The third grade, yeah, sorry. Yes, pre-K through third grade, yeah. The lexicon of education. Yeah, too many. And so we converted our 27 schools into 12 pre-K third grade centers for six middle years. We have pre-K eight specialty schools like Montessori and Visual Performing Arts and seven, 12 high schools. The whole district was converted. We moved classrooms, teachers, and we did that over a period of about four months. And it has been a joy. Three years later. So I will get to some more questions on what it really does for schools and teachers, for kids and teachers, but thank you for the introduction. So, Eli, you also have been working with children in this age range, but it's not at all like connect the dots for us here. You're a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. So how did you get to found this lab? What sparked that for you and why young kids? Well, when we started the Create Lab, we had posed this question, which is robotic technology is incredible. We use it all over the world today, and yet we don't often focus specifically on socially positive outcomes. We don't think about social problems that society has and think about taking robotic technology and not using it for war or transportation, faster airplanes, but rather solving specific cultural, social, ethnographically important problems. And as a group, we wanted to do this and there was a lot of us. We as mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, visual artists, former school teachers, and we were lucky to get funding, gift funding from corporations, from Google and Intel and other corporations that allowed us to suddenly do something that a lab inside a research institute can't usually do. The spark that came that got us down to the pre-K level and pre-K through about three level really came out of a foundation director who told us, Eli, we want you to put some technology in pre-K. And I'm looking at him and I had a pre-K child at the time and I'm saying, no, Max, that sounds exactly like what I don't wanna do. I want human interaction in pre-K. He said, no, no, no, we'll fund you. We'll give you money if you can do it. So we're thinking, is there anything useful we can do? Okay. Or are we just walking down a path that would be embarrassed about? And so we did a couple of things. One is we started asking some educators, what's missing? What is difficult that technology might be able to in some way help about? And the other thing we did is ethnography. We looked at some pre-K classrooms and tried to understand what's happening in them. So for the what needs fixed, as we say, in Pittsburgh problem, I actually turned to my mom who does a lot of pre-K classroom evaluation and certification for the state of California. So she knows all about pre-K. I used to be her assistant for her classrooms when she was a teacher. And she said that actually transitions, the thing you wrote eloquently about in the program and what you just talked about eloquently, transitions are a major issue. But transitions extending not just within the classroom but to home. We have homeschool inconsistency at a massive level. Parents don't know what's happening at school because they just pull up with the SUV and the shell gets deposited in the back seat. So they can't have a dinner conversation. They can't support what's happening at school and be a real team member with the educator. So we looked at this problem of basically a lack of communication. And then we went to schools to see what schools are doing about it. And we went to one pre-K classroom where the teacher was putting the kids in front of a computer that was reading Dr. Seuss to them, the computer. So the teacher could have time during the day to go over to the other computer and email the parents. This has a triple problem, right? One, you got the kids in passive intake mode only, completely non-interactive listening to a Dr. Seuss story on a computer screen which is a disaster. Number two, the teacher's not with them and she's off at a computer emailing the parents. And number three, half the parents don't have email because all the blue color and lower income parents don't do email. So you're only reaching the wealthiest parents who are in fact the ones least apt to not be able to carve out time because they're working one job. Whereas the two job parents, you really want their time to be extremely high quality with their child. The other thing we saw was Legos, a whole lot of Legos and a whole lot of Lego contests who can make the tallest structure. And we interviewed the kids about this and half the kids, and by the way, most of the girls, they didn't want to make the tallest structure. And when we asked them about Legos, they said, but Legos are ugly. And so that made us realize that we have technologies inventing technologies that nobody needs and hammering away at found nails because they don't design the technologies with a school of education, with a teacher and with a parent in hand. They didn't do participatory design. So that's when the CREATE Lab really became a center. And tell us what CREATE stands for. Sure. Because I think that's helpful, that acronym. That helps. Community robotics, education, and technology empowerment. So every project CREATE does takes gift funding from corporations and mates it with schools of education where pre-service teachers are trained. And then we pilot the work by actually designing new technologies from the ground up with the pre-service curriculum designers and pre-service educators and in-service teachers. And give us, I know of one of these, a project, a piece of technology called Message From Me. So just to plant in our audience has had what this could look like. Tell us what Message From Me is. And that's a nice example. That's actually interesting. That was very much for this homeschool consistency problem. It's a kiosk. It's see-through so you can see all the electronics within it. And there's a little digital camera on it. And the children during the day walk up to it and take the camera. And they take a picture of whatever they're working on in the classroom. And as they walk back to the kiosk, the picture's already on the big screen of the kiosk. And there's a wall with pictures of all their parents on the wall. And they pick all of the pictures of all the parents they want to send a message to. And they put it on the kiosk. And they magically get transferred to the kiosk. And then there's a big microphone. And they talk. And they hit send. And that audio message and the images they took get MMS encoded into an SMS text message and sent to your cell phone. Which works for all blue collar parents and all white collar parents. What's interesting about that project is we started seeing children helping one another. We saw one child with another child go up, take pictures of themselves together, then pick the other child's parents, put them on there and say, hi, Ms. Smith, you don't know me. I'm Bobby's friend and we want a play date. So the children are using it as a communication tool to other people's parents. And that's become so successful we're actually implementing it in every Head Start program in all of Elginie County. So every single pre-K and K classroom will have it. And I think what that shows too is the capacity that young children have. So we're talking four-year-olds in this case, but having the ability to construct those messages, put things together, figure out who they're sending to, understand audience, understand authorship at this level at age four. And it brings me to another question I wanna ask both of you, which is zooming outward for a moment here and recognizing that we're talking about young children from what we know from brain science, their, the interactions that they're having every single day, every single hour with other adults or with other children are having a huge impact on the pathways that they'll create for learning to learn later for really becoming what they can be to filling the potential as learners and succeeding in school. And if those are really pretty shoddy interactions day after day, after day, after day, well then those kids just aren't able to develop the way that they'll need to to be learners. Tell me about what you understand about young children and what maybe the rest of the world hasn't quite absorbed yet that needs to be better understood so that we start recognizing the importance of these years in kids' lives. And it could be just even from a moment from being in a school or just some other larger kind of myth out there about what young kids can do. So from the education world, I think what we have come to learn from this experience that we've been doing in Lansing is that teachers have a tendency to talk about children as they transition from one grade to the next about individual proclivities that children have, how they dress, who their parents are, what their behavior is. But they're really not having vertical and horizontal conversations about a child experiencing the life of his or her life in that school over the trajectory of their educational career. So I think what I would say is that in the educational community, the conversations we have among our staff have traditionally been not related to whether or not the child's experience is seamless from grade to grade or from activity setting to activity setting. For example, high levels of center-based activity and pre-K, no center-based activity in kindergarten, cold shower for a kid who goes from pre-K to kindergarten. People aren't talking about that seamless transition. And that's the one thing that I think we're doing that has really enlightened our staff so that they're looking at the child's experience over their trajectory as opposed to their experience with the children over that trajectory. And for those who might not have been in a pre-K classroom recently, that kind of center-based interaction is often around a table where kids go to centers, like the block center, for example, and are able to experience hands-on as well as hopefully in a lot of dialogue as well, versus sitting in rows, face forward, watching lecture as teacher, which is unfortunately what we see often in kindergarten for second grade, which may not be really appropriate for those kids. So if I'm understanding correctly what you're saying, it's helping to make much more seamless. The transition from having a pre-K environment that allows some of that, enabling that to kind of move into the kindergarten world and up, and so that teachers understand that they need to construct environments to do that. They need to construct environments, and they need to pace the construction of that environment based on where the child's development is over time. So if they're leaving a pre-K classroom with 36% of their time in choice, and they're going into a kindergarten classroom in the fall with 2% of their time in choice, those two teachers need to say pre-K, maybe you want to ease up on the choice a little bit by the end of the year, and kindergarten, maybe you want to increase choice at the beginning of the year, and then you transition so that there's this undulating classroom structure that all the teachers are talking about as a child transitions through the life of the school, as opposed to my experience as a teacher and what I need to construct in that classroom to maintain control. I see, I see, right? Being open to outside the classroom. So what kind of myths around young children have you been wanting to overcome? I have a particular story. I had the honor of having Indira and Nayir give a keynote address for a Creative Technology conference I ran yesterday in Pittsburgh, and she had a beautiful story about learning to learn that I think is really powerful because the most important thing we can create in the pre-K classroom is the sense of delight and wonder about the world that causes us to, for our lifetime, want to learn. And she's a physics PhD and has become a giant in the field of education, but she was walking with her three-year-old and there was a grease stain on the sidewalk. And her theory looked down and said, look, mom, a rainbow. And she said, well, and you know what she was about to say, that's actually, you know, a grease stain. And her daughter who knew exactly what she was about to say said, stop, stop. Can't we just pretend it's a piece of a rainbow that's fallen on the sidewalk? We forget how important wonder is and delight to the educational process. We have to leave room for ourselves to find magic and everything around us. We took non-contact thermometers, little $20 devices that chefs use to measure the temperature of candy and such. And you pointed at something even from far away and tells you the temperature way over there. We gave them to three-year-olds and they started wandering around the class outside at the window, the trees, the grass, and they started taking the temperature of everything and then drawing and creating their documentation about what the temperature of things looks like to me. That is revealing an invisible thing to them. And in so doing, it's taking their wonder and it's simply augmenting it and amplifying it and boosting their ability to tell a story with wonder. We have to do that. And that's so much more important than anything disciplinary we do. So to hear these stories makes me think, I've got kids in elementary school and middle school at this moment. And I mean, they've been having a fine educational experience, but there are just things that just get lost and these things are not the norm for most kids in this country right now. What is it that allowed this innovation to happen in these two places? Was it something that happened in Lansing? Was it something that happened in Pittsburgh? Was it something that happened in your particular school district? And are there any lessons that we can take from that in the policy realm? Go ahead. Sure, an organizational structure to us was absolutely paramount. We have old city foundations in Pittsburgh, Grable Foundation, Denadim Foundation, Heinz Endowments and R.K. Mellon because it was a big town, right? It had more foundations in anywhere but New York once upon a time, but it's a small city. And it has multiple schools of education that we touch in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It was all about organizational networking because by having the professional development access at the School of Ed and having the foundation funding them to do PD and having local schools willing to take risks. And most important of all, having administrators in those schools willing to not hue closely to standards but rather allow standards to fall out of good disciplinary practice and let the experimentation happen. That's what it took to create what we have in Pittsburgh now, which is this incredible remake learning thing, longitudinal technology from pre-K all the way through high school. So John Goodland says that for any change to occur it takes policy, people and ideas. But for us it took, it took teachers that are really tired of analyzing high stakes tests to change their practice with the idea that a high stakes test will actually give them enough information for them to be able to change their practice. So the teachers were ready for a change in the way that they were doing business. The second thing was that in urban areas where you have dramatic diminishing resources, enrollment drops and fund equities that are evaporating before your eyes, you need to make some dramatic, drastic, bold changes in those areas. And so the community had a malaise about them that just was like somebody do something different because we can't continue the way we are. And that's not unusual for our community. That's throughout our state. And then I think the third thing for us is that is what is the coherent cohesive nexus around this change. You can reconfigure stuff, but if you don't have an instrument of observation like we use the snapshot, we also use the class for grades four through 12, Bob Pianti University of Virginia. If you don't have some sort of convening theory of action, some sort of framework that the whole district can embrace and move forward, then really all you're doing is moving the chairs on the deck. And so the snapshot instrument and all the observations that we did were absolutely critical for us to move forward. Yeah, excellent. Well, we've got a minute or two or three, I hope, might still have a little time left. And I just thought this would be a great time to take questions or two. I know that we've been doing a lot of listening and I'd love to hear from any of you out there who may have a question about these years of early childhood and what kids are gonna need or about school reform and what it's gonna take. So let's just open the floor. Yes, in the front. It's coming with the microphone, yeah. Hi, thanks. Judd French from FSU. Be interested in hearing your observations about the appropriate use of technology in this pre-K through period. You've now written a book on the subject and each of you have different experiences in implementing them. The first reaction is I don't want my students staring at a screen. You've talked about some very innovative other types of technologies to deploy in that environment but it'd be interesting to hear some observations about what you do think is appropriate. Yes, please. Let me jump into this. We actually have a project called the Children's Innovation Project and it's really interesting. If we're going to teach children to be creative, we start with pens and crayons and paper and art supplies. We know how to get to the essential basics of it. With technology, we give them an iPad, a black box that has no screws on it. You have no idea how it works and you don't learn the material of technology by using an iPad. But in fact, you can do it and we've been doing it in Pittsburgh quite successfully. We give them screws. We give them single capacitors and resistors and they spend literally weeks drawing them, talking about them, feeling the materiality of those objects and making the simplest circuits from them. And then they take toys from Goodwill and they take them apart gently and they see the toys interior. These are four-year-olds, in my opinion. And they're using screwdrivers. So watching four-year-olds using screwdrivers and they're fined by other scouts, it's impressive. You can totally do it, but you do it by not teaching them technology. You teach them the materials, the building blocks of technology, just the same way we do art right. And in so doing, we empower them to have a power relationship where they're in charge and the technology is something they can remix and create new objects from. In fact, they take toys from Goodwill and then they make a completely new toy, inventing a new toy out of the existing pieces and bits. Then we get calls from the parents from home saying things like, my child says there's a resistor in my toaster, so they'd be worried. And we say, no, that's good. That's, your child is correct. There is a resistor in your toaster. And I actually wrote a book about this recently called Parenting for Technology Futures about how I think parents can help support this idea of thinking about the basic material technology. Yeah, right. If you have two, give them one of them. Did you have any? I'll be able to answer that question after I visit. Yes. We're not quite there yet. Well, I'll take a moderator's prerogative for just one moment and answer from the research that I've been doing on how technology could be used with young children in a way that really promotes learning. Instead of mind-numbing this, there's a lot to learn from studies that show we have to be looking at the content, the context, what's happening with children, what kind of dialogues, who's sitting next to them, how are they talking together. And then lastly, the needs of the individual child before, so those are called the three C's, content, context, and the child. And you have to take into account all three of those before you can make any smart decision of any kind about what type of tool to use with children, especially in these younger years. So, there's a lot more to learn on that. We're working now in the Early Ed Initiative and in our learning tech project on how reading is changing and how the teaching of reading is changing because of technology. So, stay tuned on that, the book coming out this fall. But these questions are ripe right now. A lot of people are wondering, what are we doing and where are we going wrong? And I think we need to make some corrections. So, I think we are at the end. Thank you very much. Thanks to our panel for being here today. Thank you.