Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
How 80,000+ Teachers Are Rethinking Instruction with Robert Barnett of Modern Classrooms Project
Robert Barnett co-founded the Modern Classrooms Project, which has empowered 80,000+ educators in 180+ countries to meet every learner’s needs. Before that he taught math, computer science, English, social studies, and law, from the middle-school to university levels, at public and private schools in the U.S. and Switzerland. He graduated cum laude from Princeton University and Harvard Law School; speaks English, French, and Spanish; and lives in Washington, DC. His book, Meet Every Learner's Needs, comes out in February, and he hopes his two young children will learn in Modern Classrooms someday!
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Modern Classrooms transforms the “operating system” of schools
- Why teacher-created videos are more powerful than polished content
- The case for paper-based mastery checks in a tech-driven world
- Rob’s take on AI tools—and why teacher-facing AI holds promise
- How to truly personalize learning while keeping it personal
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:27] Rob’s journey from overwhelmed teacher to instructional leader
[00:03:46] What’s wrong with today’s classroom model—and how to fix it
[00:07:54] Inside a Modern Classroom: self-paced, human-centered learning
[00:13:33] Paper beats screens—for fast, meaningful feedback
[00:14:25] The power of personal: making your own instructional videos
[00:17:46] Tech should amplify, not replace, teacher-student relationships
[00:20:26] Why AI needs clearer use cases in classrooms
[00:26:59] Chronic absenteeism demands a new instructional model
[00:34:51] AI avatars: promising or uncanny? Rob weighs in
[00:39:32] Rob’s new book Meet Every Learner’s Needs—a guide for redesigning instruction
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Robert Barnett: Sometimes people visit a modern classroom and they say. Where's the technology? And I think great, like the technology is extremely important. It would be really difficult to do this if you didn't have the video, if you didn't have a learning management system that kept everything organized. It's essential, but it's not where we really want students spending the majority of their time.
And some people do use online platforms and some people do have online mastery checks. That's great. If that works for your students, wonderful. Do it. But we are often trying to. Keep instruction really human, while also using digital direct instruction to make learning accessible and sort of facilitate this, this self-paced environment.
[00:00:46] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here
[00:01:00] Ben Kornell: at Ed Tech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer our event calendar and to go deeper.
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[00:01:25] Alex Sarlin: Robert Barnett co-founded the Modern Classrooms. Project Project which has empowered 80,000 plus educators in 180 plus countries to meet every learner's needs. Before that, he taught math, computer science, English, social studies and law from the middle school to university levels at public and private schools in the US and Switzerland.
He graduated CU Laude from Princeton University and Harvard Law School speaks English, French, and Spanish, and lives in Washington, dc. His book Meet Every Learner's Needs. Out in February, and he hopes his two young children will learn in modern classrooms someday. Rob Barnett, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to have you here. I have been following modern classrooms project from a distance, but I don't know as much about it as I'd like to, so I'm so excited to have you here to really unpack it, your background, how you got to it, and what it's doing in classrooms.
Let's start with just an overview. Tell us about how you got into the education and ed tech sector in the first place.
[00:02:27] Robert Barnett: Yeah, of course. Well, first of all, I'm not really in the ed tech sector, but of course I have a lot of overlap with the ed tech sector, and I'll explain that. I was a teacher. Public school teacher, high school math teacher, and I really struggled a lot in my classes.
I had students who were, they loved math, they were on grade level, they were ready to fly. I had students who were years behind and had big gaps and lack confidence and needed a lot of support. And I had students who weren't there at all, and I was sort of standing up at the front of the room wondering like.
What do I do? I needed a way to meet all of my learners' needs, and so that led me to Ed Tech because I think tech has some wonderful solutions to this fundamental challenge of teaching. You know, at the same time, I wanted to be a teacher 'cause I wanted to work closely with the young people. So I've spent my time teaching and now my time at Modern Classrooms trying to think about how can we use tech to meet learners' needs while also having classrooms that feel fundamentally human.
[00:03:30] Alex Sarlin: And you have this concept of sort of the classroom operating system as a metaphor or as a sort of analogy. Tell us about how that worked in your time in the classroom and then how you're trying to improve the, the operating system of the classroom now and what the future looks like.
[00:03:46] Robert Barnett: I hazard to go too deep into this analogy on a, well, I know many of your listeners are much more techy than me and probably understand, don't worry about it operating systems better than I do.
But one thing that you often hear is that the classroom of today looks a lot like the classroom of a hundred years ago, even though so much has changed. And so I always think about why is that? Obviously the tools that we have today are so much. So sophisticated, but the way that the classroom operates, for the most part, hasn't changed.
And I think there's an assumption there that leads to this sort of discrepancy, which is that every student should learn the same thing every day. And sure there are schools, you know, there are innovative schools sort of on the margins where students are moving at their own paces. But for the most part, the operating system of the classroom is one lesson per day to the students who.
Happen to be there. And that operating system makes it really difficult for even sophisticated tools to make a difference. You know, I was a math teacher. I loved using Khan Academy, but if you're using Khan Academy and you're expecting your students to do the same lessons every day, you've just sort of replaced a worksheet on paper with a worksheet online.
What I'm trying to think about is how do you. Get past that assumption of every student doing the same thing every day. 'cause then you can really leverage the incredible power of some of these tech tools.
[00:05:13] Alex Sarlin: So, you know, the ed tech sector, I think as you know, we've been trying as a group to sort of crack the nut on differentiation, adaptivity, the sort of different names for that idea of getting out of this one size fits all.
Fixed pacing. Every student's learning the same thing at the same time model. There's been a number of sort of generations of movements towards this and I think modern classrooms has done something really interesting. You've created a model that really can actually scale to many different schools. So I think back probably 15 years ago now about School of One.
There've been these different attempts. I'd love to hear you talk about past attempts to break the one size fits all model and what's different about modern classrooms. I.
[00:05:55] Robert Barnett: Yeah, of course. I mean, I think oftentimes when you hear about something like personalized learning or individualized learning, what you picture is students sitting in front of a screen all day, and I think to the extent that there have been, I.
Efforts to sort of break this model. A lot of them have been really reliant on technology and I, I understand why. Obviously a computer program can respond very quickly to a student's misconceptions and give them the next thing and be accessible outside of school. I don't think that's what students want, and I know that's not what teachers want.
We become teachers because we, we wanna interact with young people, and if young people could learn just from their computers, there would be no purpose in going to school, right? School should be a human kind of environment. And so I think a lot of these approaches have fallen short because they haven't thought enough about what's the role of the teacher and how do we get students.
Working together in some way. I had no choice because I was at a public school in the mid 2010s that didn't have a ton of technology. It wasn't like today where there's so much one-to-one. I had a handful of devices and so I didn't have that ability to get my students, you know, just. Sitting in front of the screen all the time, I didn't want to.
So I really had to put the blend in blended instruction and figure out what can my students do on screen, but more importantly, what are they doing off screen? How am I meeting their needs there? And I think, you know, at modern classrooms we have this Venn diagram where we say on one side is teacher training.
How to teach. Teach. On the other side is tech training, which is often, how do I use X, Y, Z tool? But there's not a lot in the intersection thinking, how does the teacher decide between and use the tools as well as sort of the human pedagogy. Two, get the best of both worlds and harness technology while also having a human classroom.
[00:07:54] Alex Sarlin: So I'd love to dig deeper into that because I think I have myself been part of projects that try to do this kind of differentiation. And as you say, you see a lot more students in front of computers than you want to, and it isn't very satisfying or appealing, frankly, to anybody, but especially to educators.
Can you just walk us through what sort of a day in modern classrooms project. Classroom looks like and how you actually accomplish that kind of social interaction and empowering the teacher while differentiating.
[00:08:27] Robert Barnett: Of course. Yeah. And I think the easiest way would be to talk about sort of what are the components of a modern classroom lesson.
I mean, I think the first part of the lesson is the direct instruction, and that is what we're helping teachers digitize. So I would record videos of my. Lecture slash direct instruction, and we train teachers to do the same. This is a pretty concise video. Maybe it's five or 10 minutes, maybe we use a platform like EDpuzzle to embed some questions, and that's where students get the direct instruction.
After that, students close their screens. Then it's about finding someone else who's in the same place as you to do some practice collaboratively to work together. Once you feel like you understand that, you'll take a mastery check. In my classroom, mastery checks were on paper. It was a little half sheet of paper with one problem.
I give it to the student, they show it to me. I, as the teacher look at this and I say, okay, you understand it. You're onto the next lesson, or you're not there yet. I. Sit with me, let's talk about it or rewatch my video or find a friend. Make sure you understand it and then try again. And people sometimes say, well, couldn't that practice be on the computer?
Couldn't that mastery check be on the computer? And I say, of course, but students wanna be working together on the practice. And I actually like seeing that mastery check on paper because it's really easy for me to give feedback on paper. I don't have to log in and find the student's assignment. I look over their shoulder, I say, you got it.
Great. Or like. If they made a mistake, I circle it, say, figure out what's wrong with this. You know, ask a friend, keep working on it. So sometimes people visit a modern classroom and they say. Where's the technology? And I think great, like the technology is extremely important. It would be really difficult to do this if you didn't have the video, if you didn't have a learning management system that kept everything organized.
It's essential, but it's not where we really want students spending the majority of their time. And some people do use online platforms and some people do have online mastery checks. That's great. If that works for your students, wonderful. Do it. But we are often trying to. Keep instruction really human, while also using digital direct instruction to make learning accessible and sort of facilitate this, this self-paced environment.
[00:10:50] Alex Sarlin: There are a couple of sort of insights in there that I'd love to hear you unpack 'cause I think they're really interesting. One is, as you mentioned, the idea that mastery assessment can be done on a computer and obviously many adaptive, personalized, individualized programs, that's exactly how they do it.
But the preference of the educator. And the ease by which they can. Like you say, look over somebody's shoulder grade quickly, just sort of go, da, da, da, looks great. Go meet with your friend over there and start working on stuff. I think that's a really interesting insight that that clearly comes from your personal experience as a teacher and probably many conversations with teachers.
Can you dig into that a little bit? Because I think this is something we struggle with as an ed tech sector. Often our first solution is to do a technological solution. Partially because it captures the data, right? In a way that paper doesn't, but also because it's just hammers to, to do a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Tell us a little bit more about that insight, because I think that's gonna be really educational to some of the education entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast. I.
[00:11:51] Robert Barnett: Of course, and I would never claim to speak for that teacher. I mean, I work with teachers all over the place and many of them do prefer to do their mastery checks online.
Fair enough. So that's great. I support that. But in my experience, yeah, I think I. A big part of the learning process is feedback, and so when you work on something on paper, like I just found it easier to see and give feedback and know where my students were than when they're online. And if they take an assessment online or maybe they click on the feedback to read it, but maybe they don't, maybe they don't know how to access it or they don't understand it, or it's not delivered with a human touch, feedback often begins with.
I see the things you did well. I know you're working hard, like here's an opportunity to improve. And I think in my life I like to get feedback from a person as opposed to, you know, feedback from a computer. So I think that gets to the human element of teaching and it was inefficient. You know, I had my students sometimes would finish the mastery check.
They'd have to wait five minutes for me to take a look. I'd have to go in later at the end of the day and enter it into my grade book. Like that took time, but it was worth it to me because that felt like I knew my students better, and I think my students responded better to the feedback. And if someone can figure out how to do that with.
Technology. That's great. Like maybe AI can give better feedback than what was available to me at the moment. But I know in my experience and a lot of other teachers, they like seeing the work, they like giving the feedback. That's why we became teachers. That's how we add value to these young people's lives.
And so we continue doing things that way.
[00:13:33] Alex Sarlin: That makes a lot of sense. And it just creates consistent interactions, positive interactions between the teacher and each student that yes, you often don't see in some of those other. Types of models where students are sort of going back and spending a lot more time in front of a screen.
Talk to us a little bit about the direct instruction piece. 'cause this is another thing that education technology often loves the idea of direct instruction video, but you do something a little bit different. A lot of ed tech. Has these sort of centralized videos. It's like the video that you watch to learn a particular math concept, and everybody's watching the same one.
You actually have the teachers make the videos, which I'm sure takes training, takes thought, and you have hundreds or thousands of versions of each video. But for this, I imagine some of the same reasons. There's something really positive about the actual classroom teacher making those videos. So tell us about that piece of the model.
[00:14:25] Robert Barnett: That's our recommendation. Again, there are lots of teachers who pull videos offline or who have from their curriculum, and that works well. But for me, you know, I was teaching high school math and I love Khan Academy, and I started by giving my students Khan Academy videos, and I just realized these videos were often too hard.
Yeah. For my students, a Statistics Khan Academy video is generally created for someone who. Is assumed to have the skills that you would have to get up to statistics, and a lot of my students had gaps in their learning, so I wanted to explain it in a different way. I also felt like my students had a personal connection to me that they didn't have when it was Sal Khan or someone else.
Like they liked learning from me. They thought it was fun. They were impressed that I could create a video and they, you know, when I made a mistake in the video, I'd hear about it from my students. You know, it was part of that. Relationship, which is so important to learning. It did take time. It was a learning process for me.
It's a learning process for our educators, but I got to the point where I enjoyed it making the videos, I was having fun doing that, and I felt like if I made that investment of time to create the video, once I could keep reusing it, I could send it home. Could watch the video, they could get to know me a little bit.
I could let my personality a little. And so for those reasons, perhaps. Like I'm saying with mastery checks, the extra work and the perhaps inefficiency was justified by the benefit it had for my students and for me. And I think in so many areas of our life, we're trying to do the most efficient thing. I don't know if that's the approach that we should take with teaching, because it is, you know, there is such a human element and if students aren't really learning.
Then it's inefficient, right? So I found that my students learn best when I made the videos and I graded the mastery checks, even though that that took a lot of time.
[00:16:26] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And one of the things that I, I love about the ed tech sector is you have people creating and innovating and having new ideas and new models.
Based on a whole variety of different perspectives and experiences, and I think one thing that really strikes me listening to you talk about the modern classrooms model is how you are really delicately balancing the idea of scale and efficiency. With the idea of maintaining a strong relationship between the students in the classroom and the students with the teacher, as well as trying to make the experience of teaching actually rewarding, which is something that I.
In my experience, sometimes ed tech companies, even though they come from the best intentions, don't always put that at the forefront of their decisions. They want to, of course, they want teachers to love the product. They want teachers to use it. They want it to be. Effective and efficient, but in practice, sometimes going to tech as a solution for things creates things like teachers having to log in for every single moment or using dashboards or not having those personal moments.
So it's a really interesting balance and I'm curious as somebody who believes in mastery learning and who has sort of combined tech tools like Khan Academy with. You know, hands-on teaching, like making your own videos. Why do you think this balance really sort of has struck a chord and is really growing as a model?
[00:17:46] Robert Barnett: Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes in the ed tech world, it's possible to see teachers as the obstacles too. Innovation. Like if only the teacher would do this, if only the teacher would do that. And you know, teachers are. Very rational people. Teachers have not a lot of time, they have a lot to do and they're trying to make the decisions that make the most sense to them to get through to their students.
And the teacher is the most important person in the room. So I think any solution that will work has to work really well for the teacher and. I think about that with my own kids. I want them to go to school and the teacher to get to know them and for them to have that relationship with the teacher and feel connected.
And that's not always efficient. Relationships are inefficient, but they're also what makes life valuable, what makes learning valuable as well. So I think if I can give advice to people in ed tech, it's how does your tool support that human interaction? Between teachers and students and you know, teachers are sensitive to feeling replaced.
Are you saying I should use this other video 'cause you don't trust me to deliver the content? Are you wanting your students on screen because you don't want them learning from me? Like the tech really needs to empower the teacher and fit into. What the teacher wants, which is to reach the young people in a personal way.
[00:19:09] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a incredibly valuable insight that I think we don't hear often enough on this show. We almost always talk to ed tech entrepreneurs or thought leaders or executives, and I love the ed tech sector and everybody has absolutely the best of intentions, but I think it's a really interesting. Here to sort of reframe the relationship between the ed tech and the teacher, and between the teacher and the students so that you maintain that human relationship, even if it means an efficiency cost at times.
I think it's really interesting. It's obviously incredibly relevant in this AI moment where fear of replacement is coming in through all sorts of lenses and where people are trying to figure out what is the differential value for like a tutoring relationship, for example, versus. A always available AI bot that can give you the answers at any time, or ideally not give you the answers, you know, teach you at any time.
How do you trade off between these things? I'd love to hear how you think about that, but I also wanna ask you about the scale of modern classrooms. It's really very interesting how over 80,000 educators have been using it. But let's start with the AI question as we tackle this sort of next. Generation of ed tech tools.
This question of what is the role of the human relationship is just coming up everywhere. How would you recommend Ed tech entrepreneurs think about it and how do.
[00:20:26] Robert Barnett: That's a great question. I mean, I'll admit my bias. I start off from an approach of skepticism about a lot of student facing ai. Like I'm just skeptical that students are gonna want to interact with a chat bot sort of thing versus interact with their teacher and their classmates.
And I may be totally wrong about that, but that is sort of my bias as I approach this. So. I am skeptical of that. I look at teacher facing tools, which I think have a lot of promise to save teachers planning time and let teachers focus on their interaction with students. I think oftentimes some of the tools I've seen, they seem to be built on what can AI do versus what do teachers want, and what do teachers need.
And so I think the classic example of this is using chat GPT to create a lesson plan. Great. I mean, a lesson plan is a nice document to have. Having a lesson plan has very little to do with actually delivering an effective sort of lesson, especially if that lesson plan is based on the idea that a lesson plan is for every student in the room to learn the same thing every day.
Like I don't see the AI generated. Lesson plan or worksheet being effective unless it fits with an approach to instruction that lets students move at their own pace and requires mastery and creates space for those relationships. So. What I'm always looking for with an AI tool is not what can it do? I realize AI can do incredible things, but what is the actual specific use in a classroom that works for every student?
So which specific piece is being created? And I don't need 80 different features that do 80 different cool things. You know, if I'm following a sort of modern classroom approach to instruction, I need. A good video. I need some good collaborative practice. I need a mastery check. If AI can help me create that, wonderful, but that's what I'm always looking at is not the capability, but the actual practical use case for the teacher.
[00:22:31] Alex Sarlin: We've talked to many ed tech entrepreneurs and ed tech. Thought leaders, including Sal Khan about this, and they always say the greatest thing about AI is that it can finally personalize learning and remove the one size fits all, model and scale, adaptivity and individualization. And I'm hearing you say something, which I think makes total sense, which is.
Well, the teacher in the room who actually knows the students. That's the sort of core personalization. That's the core aspect of where the differentiation can come in and some of the different pacing or the different interests or the different groupings, and I just wonder if there may be some, I.
Dialectic, like how could the personalization and the relationships that come from the teacher, between teacher and student and between students and each other compliment the potential personalization that can come from an ai, which we know is possible. But you're right, it's not yet proven that students want to be interacting all the time with an ai, even if it knows them, even if it's giving them targeted questions or making the questions about things they care about, we don't have the proof of that yet.
So I'm curious how you react to that. Is there. A future in the modern classroom mindset where the types of differentiation or personalization can come from both sides.
[00:23:45] Robert Barnett: I want to give the listeners just a quick experiment for a minute, which is to close your eyes and think about personalized learning. I.
What do you see? I mean, a lot of time when you say personalized learning, you think of students on computers, but the beginning of personalized learning is personal. And so personalized learning is becoming so impersonal, and I think what we've always said at modern classrooms is, you know, tech in the classroom, it doesn't need to be pretty.
It needs to be personal, and that describes the videos I created to a T. My videos were not fancy. Sometimes I would start a Zoom call with myself, you know, go through a Google slide deck and end it. But they were personal. You know, my students understood that they came from me, they related to them. I think my class felt.
Personal. The differentiation in my class was not every student working on their own problem, but it was me sort of knowing, okay, these five students are ahead of pace, so they're gonna sit together and work on this. These five students missed class yesterday, so I'm gonna have them sit over here. I'm gonna make sure to give them a little mini lesson.
You know, that's not. The most sophisticated, it's not the most data driven I was handing with a bribe brush there, but you know, it allowed for the interaction. So I think there is, you're saying this disconnect between personalized and personal and we may need to. Maybe we live with a little bit of inefficiency to have the teacher be the one to sort of make the decisions about what does each student do next, even if they're not perfect decisions, you know, if, if the teacher's involved there, and I think it will be better.
And again, I think about my own kids and. How do I want my kids to spend their school day? I don't want 'em more screen time. Like I want them interacting with their peers and hopefully interacting with peers in a productive way. So, you know, if my, if my son already knows something, I. And another classmate already knows something, they can move on to the next challenge.
If my son missed class yesterday, like he can sit with the teacher and catch up. That's the kind of environment I want and that's the North Star for me is what's the kind of experience I want for for my own kids in a classroom.
[00:25:51] Alex Sarlin: I admire it. It's a really human centered and very logical and humane, I don't know what a better word is, approach to thinking about what personalization means.
I frankly think it's a word that's very overloaded. It can mean it's very strange, and I agree that. People think of personalization as a kid in a computer is a little bit of a shame. But I, I also am a big believer in AI and technology, of course in education. So I feel like there's gotta be a way to have some of that beautiful interpersonal understanding and that type of really hands-on personalization that does have the personal in it.
But I think technology has a number of ways to enhance that and AI does too, and something to chew on. I'm gonna think about that. But one thing that's definitely, definitely clear about the modern classrooms approach is that it resonates very much with educators. You're in 180 countries, that's basically the whole world.
You have 80,000 educators that you've trained with the kind of pedagogical and the Venn diagram type training. You mentioned earlier, how do you combine technology and learning principles? Tell us about the scale of the Modern Classrooms Project and what you attribute that real embrace of it to.
[00:26:59] Robert Barnett: Yeah, I'd be happy to, and I'll, I'll use another tech metaphor that maybe I don't understand that well, but I sometimes say it's like a virus.
You know, it spreads from teacher to teacher, sometimes without administrators or big decision makers, even knowing that it's there, it's really a teacher to teacher approach, and it's from the ground up. We never impose this approach on anyone. Sometimes we do work with schools and districts to recruit teachers to opt in.
Everyone who has taken our training, at least to my knowledge, has, has opted into it. And I think the reason it has gotten this kind of traction is because there is a fundamental challenge of teaching, which is that the different learners in one room need different things. And I don't think the on screen all the time approach has fulfilled that need.
For effective instruction. If so, there would be no need for modern classrooms because students would be on screens all the time. So there is a problem that every teacher faces that kind of tech first solution isn't working. And so teachers are looking for something that addresses this challenge. You know, one problem I think, which is so apparent now is, is chronic absenteeism and what do you do for a student if it's Thursday and they come in for the first time having missed.
Monday to Wednesday, like, what do you do? And I ask people this all the time and it's, it's really hard to have an answer. You could say, stick it on a computer. But if anything, that student needs more time with you, more connection, more support to feel welcome. In your room if, if it's just stick 'em on a computer, they might, they could do that from home.
So how do you practically do that? This is a problem that every teacher faces more and more now, and so they hear about an approach, modern classrooms, which I. Allows you to take that time with the student, right? Because my students are moving at their own paces. They've got the instruction from my video.
They can work together. I can welcome that student and say, Hey, uh, hope you're doing okay. We missed you Monday to Wednesday. Here's Monday's lesson. Start off on it. You know, here's a few other people that can help you. I'm here to answer your questions, et cetera. When teachers realize, okay, this is, uh.
This helps me solve that real fundamental challenge of teaching. They're as hungry for a new operating system as the ed tech world is. We're just trying to figure out how to be in the middle. And this conversation is funny to me because I think oftentimes when I speak with schools and districts, they're saying, why do you use so much technology?
Don't you know humanities at the center of this? And now I'm speaking with you from the ed tech perspective and it's. Well, couldn't you use more technology? So we are trying to be in the middle and bridge this gap?
[00:29:37] Alex Sarlin: Totally. I'm not necessarily recommending more technology, I just am channeling the ed tech world where there are often very different solutions to some of the same problems.
But I will say that I think the attendance issue, this chronic absenteeism, is something that the ed tech world has really wrestled with because in education technology, there's this concept of, you know, implementation fidelity. It's like. It would work if they used it as much as we prescribe it being used.
And there's many reasons why that does not happen. One is often educators aren't particularly bought into it and they don't want to use it as much, or the students aren't bought in and they don't want to use it as much. I. Or the student is simply not in the room as much as you would expect them to be at the beginning of the year.
And that's more true now than it has been in a long time. And I think this is a, a little bit of a blind spot, frankly, for, for the ed tech sector. So I'm glad you're bringing it up that this is a serious pain point for teachers in classrooms. It is sort of one of the most pointed needs for differentiation out there, and it's something that I think most EdTech products don't particularly.
Take into account as to a core pain point. I think they, they assume some level of absenteeism or some level of people not being there. It's not only not factored in, it's not central to their thinking, and they're not trying to arm teachers with strategies for that exact situation, even though it happens probably every week.
[00:30:58] Robert Barnett: Yeah. I wouldn't fault the EdTech industry for that. I think it's a blind spot for everyone. I mean, I just think there's a lot of attention on. Bringing students back to school. But what do you actually practically do with the student who missed Monday through Wednesday and is here on Thursday? And in my teacher training, I never got an answer.
You know, we work with curriculum companies. Curriculum companies don't have a great answer. The answer is kind of like I. Hey, get some notes from a friend and stay after school. Well, students who miss class a lot probably can't stay after school. And if you could learn from a friend, there will be no purpose of going to school.
So it is, you know, these students are, are basically forgotten and there needs to be an approach that, that meets their needs, that modern classrooms, we don't talk so much about. Absenteeism because we don't wanna be seen as the solution for absent kids only. You know, this is also a model that works well for the student who's three minutes early to class every day and loves the subject so much and needs a challenge.
But it is hard. And you know, again, I, I know I have like a broken record here, but I think about my kids, you know, if they're sick and they come back to school, what do I want for them? Well, I don't want them thrown into the regular lesson. Because they'll be behind. I don't want them told, Hey, here are the notes.
You know, go, go, go study this. I would like the teacher to be able to sit with them and say, okay, welcome back. Here's what you missed. Here's how you can catch up. I'm here to support. And by the way, your classmates have been here, they've been doing well. Here are some people you can ask. You know, that's the kind of experience that I want to create, and the, the operating system of the classroom needs to not just accommodate that, but be designed with that.
I. Reality in mind.
[00:32:39] Alex Sarlin: You mentioned that the teacher created videos are also available to students and families outside of the classroom at home. Is that also potentially part of the solution that a student who comes in on Thursday and has missed things can then go home and watch the teacher created video for the entire week as a way to catch up?
[00:32:59] Robert Barnett: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's possible with all of these platforms, but again, I think it's perhaps more likely with the teacher created video because you know, you feel more of a connection to the teacher from a parent perspective. I think, you know, oftentimes the parent says, oh, they didn't teach it this way when I was in school, so I don't know how to help my student.
Well, if your teacher's video is online, you can watch the teacher's explanation and you can. Help your student learn it that way. So I think there's a real opportunity as well. I think one criticism we get oftentimes from parents and students is to say, well, you're not teaching me anymore. You're just making the videos.
And I think I, as a teacher, I'm teaching you so much. Like I'm in your pocket. You can, you can watch this video on the bus home, you can watch it at home. You always have access to me and my instruction, and then you. You know, you, you, you come back to class and you can ask me questions. So I do think that there's a lot of ways to make instruction more accessible outside of class.
How do you make that more accessible and more personal? I think the teacher created videos a pathway to do that.
[00:34:02] Alex Sarlin: So I have a, an oddball question. I am, I have a suspicion of how you might answer this, but I tru I don't truly know. One of the use cases that we've started to see for AI in ed tech is. We call it, uh, extension of teacher reach or avatars to extend teacher reach.
And the idea that teacher can actually create material that is them, that is based on them. It can use their voice, it can use their face, but it's not actually them, and it can be created very quickly. I. Through ai. It obviously is less personal obviously, than the actual teacher doing it live, but perhaps more personal than a Khan Academy video or a a video out of the textbook.
How do you see that kind of tool? Do you think that's something teachers are going to find very creepy and uncanny value ish, or it's something they may embrace as a way to really scale their own content creation?
[00:34:51] Robert Barnett: That's a great question and I've seen these things and to be honest, I don't know how I feel about it.
I mean, and I think the, the people who will determine whether that will work or not will be teachers who try this out and share it with their students and, you know, hear what their students think. I think. I'm not a classroom teacher anymore, but if I, if I were a classroom teacher, I would certainly try it.
I would wanna see how it is. Recently I tried a program to translate a teacher facing video I made into Spanish, right? And, you know, I speak a little bit of Spanish, but with a terrible accent. And I watched this video. I just started laughing because I sounded like, sounded like I spoke perfect Spanish.
And I loved it. Like it was, it was fun. Okay. That it wasn't perfect and you know, we are now sharing that video, so there's an extent to which I love it. I. Other teachers might. I think some teachers might feel there's this Sun Candy Valley and they may not want to use it, but I don't have a strong feeling.
I can see it being really promising. I can see it being creepy and the way to know is to give it to teachers and to trust their response and not to say, oh, don't you get it? This is you. Like, but to say, here's a tool, here's the clear use case for it. Right. This isn't just something that AI can do that we want you to figure out how to use.
This is how we believe you should use it. This is where it fits into your day-to-day instruction and routine. I could see it being really powerful.
[00:36:19] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting when you talk about the translation use case of you can have yourself as a teacher speaking in one of many languages, which is definitely a real thing.
YouTube just announced that they're, you're now able to do things in nine different languages. So, and if anybody has a YouTube video, teachers who make YouTube videos suddenly can have them be translated automatically to many languages. Obviously increases access not only to students, but also to families.
That's a great case. Ways to. That AI is scaling content creation. The avatar is a, maybe a little bit of an extreme one, maybe controversial one, and this even more extreme ones, which are like real time conversational avatars. And I don't mean to nerd out on the AI here, even though I love to, but then there's translation.
But they're also interesting ones like tools that will, if you were a teacher and you made a 10 minute video about. A math concept, it would automatically edit it. It could add music, it could add fast cuts, it could change the format so that it could be watched on a mobile phone, things like that. Do you think that that is the kind of thing that teachers might embrace?
And as a follow-up, do you ever anticipate modern classrooms actually teaching teachers how to do that kind of tool as part of your training?
[00:37:30] Robert Barnett: Yeah, I mean, I think that's really cool. That idea seems to me to be very appealing. Like, because I said earlier, it doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be personal, right?
Being pretty helps, right? Being engaging helps, being concise helps, right? If you could, you know, we recommend videos that are, you know, five, 10 minutes. If you could cut out all the ums and mistakes from my language, you, you cut that down, you make it more engaging. So I really like that. And in terms of.
Would modern classrooms help teachers use those tools? I think absolutely. We are always looking at tools and figuring out what do we wanna recommend our teachers use? And how at the moment, you know, we are helping teachers use their learning management systems better. We are helping teachers use video creation platforms like, you know, screen Pal, Screencastify Egg Puzzle.
One tool we recommend for creating a video is Zoom. Start a call with yourself, you know, hit record. It's not the fanciest tool, but it works. But if there were an AI powered way to make that Zoom video more engaging, I would be all for it. And we are, we're absolutely looking at, at tools, it's just we're looking at tools within the context of a model and operating system and trying to figure out where does each of these things.
In the instructional need and the pedagogy should drive the selection of the tool and not the other way around.
[00:38:52] Alex Sarlin: I think that's a very open-minded answer. I can tell that you're, like you said, when you go to schools, they say, why are you using so much tech? And then you go to tech circles, they say, why are you so little tech?
Having to bridge those two world is probably tricky and I, I appreciate you being open to that and I'm sure that EDpuzzle is amazing. All the tools you just named are amazing. I'm sure there are entrepreneurs listening to this saying, that's exactly the tool I'm making. So that's exciting to hear. We've gone this far and we have not mentioned that you have a book coming out.
Uh, your book is called Meet Every Learner's Needs obviously about exactly this kind of moving beyond one size fits all to a differentiated classroom. Tell us about the book and where can we find it and how is the book structured? I have not read it yet 'cause it's not out yet. What is it about?
[00:39:32] Robert Barnett: I'd be glad to, before I do that, I say if you are an ed tech entrepreneur listening to this and you think you have a tool that can fit in, please contact us at Modern Classrooms Project.
Like we want to learn. I know I've been a little bit skeptical of, of tech and I, I hope that's, it's clear why, but we're always looking for platforms that we can recommend teachers use and if it's. There's a lot of tools we recommend to our network of teachers, and our teachers tend to be pretty, you know, interested, tech savvy, innovative teachers.
So I leave that invitation out there. The book, yes, it's called Meet Every Learner's Needs I I call it 10% memoir, 10% manifesto, and 80% manual. And so I wanna tell my story as a teacher and how I developed this approach that is now called the Modern Classroom Model. I. Build it myself, right? I learned from a lot of other teachers who have been doing mastery based techniques for decades, but I sort of packaged it in what's now called the modern classroom model.
The manifesto part is maybe some of what you've heard in how I talk about how I want my kids to be educated. You know, I have beliefs about how education should be, but it's mainly a manual that describes if you're a teacher, how do you redesign a single lesson? So how do you have your digital instruction, your collaborative practice, your mastery check?
Once you have your lesson? How do you build a self-paced? Course and learning experience where students are moving at their own paces based on mastery. And then finally, how do you redesign instruction? How do you take what you have done and share it? How do you convince your administrators? How do you empower your colleagues?
How do you spread the word about this approach that is helping so many teachers? So that's the book. And I think in each part of the book, like. There's opportunity for technology to help, right? There's some places where technology is obviously there, your learning management system, recording your. You know, direct instruction, but maybe there's a tech tool that's gonna help facilitate collaboration or get data from mass rechecks.
Like there are a lot of opportunities for, for tech here. So I think my pitch, if I can make one to people in the ed tech world is that the book lays out what I think the operating system of the classroom should be if we're really gonna meet every learner's needs. And let's try to figure out where can tech help the teacher do that.
[00:41:55] Alex Sarlin: I love that. I think the relationship between educators and students, the relationship between students and one another, working collaboratively on tasks, which you've mentioned, but we didn't even dive that much into. As you said, that's the type of classroom I think we all really want for our own kids.
We both have kids exactly the same age. And think most listeners would think that's what they want for their kids too. I don't think anybody truly wants, maybe not anybody, but I don't think very many people truly want their children to go to school and be. Screen centered and it feel like a cubicle, but at the same time, sometimes trying to find the right balance can be really tricky.
So definitely encourage people to look into the Modern Classrooms project, to look into meet every learner's needs to understand some of how educators really want to. Personalized instruction and what role they wanna play in the classroom and how technology can support them. So just as a final question, if people wanna learn more about the Modern Classrooms project, where should they go online?
How should they help spread the word or help just understand the model? What is the best way for them to understand it?
[00:42:57] Robert Barnett: Great question. Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit organization, and so we make all of our resources, I guess aside from the book, but you know, all of our resources available for free on our website, that's modern classrooms.org.
And we do provide sort of training to schools and districts, so we have a bit of a business model there, but everything is free. And if you wanna learn the approach, whether you're a. Ed tech entrepreneur or someone who's just interested, or a teacher who listens to this, you can go to the website. There's a website for the book also, which is meet every learner needs.org.
And between those two places, I think you'll, you'll find a lot of free resources that explain what should the operating system of the classroom be. You know, what is the, the kind of the best learning experience I think that worked for students in DC public schools. Is that what I want for my kids? You know, I think you'll find.
A vision for that and more importantly, techniques that teachers can use to, to bring that vision to life.
[00:43:54] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. And we will, as always put links to the resources and links to modern classrooms.org in the show notes for this episode. Rob Barnett, this has been really, really interesting. I feel like I know much more about modern classrooms, and I feel like my mind has expanded.
I spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about how AI can differentiate. And personalized. But I love this concept of, you know, the personal and personalized is person, and I'm gonna take that with me into future conversations. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:44:27] Robert Barnett: Thank you. Yeah, I'm, I'm not an EdTech insider myself, so I, so I very much appreciate you for bringing me on and letting me share what I have to say.
Thank you.
[00:44:35] Alex Sarlin: My pleasure. I'm sure people really will love hearing what you have to say. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on subs.
