- I think we are good to go.
I'm real excited for
this conversation today.
By way of intro, my name is Adam Geller.
I'm the founder and CEO of Edthena,
and real excited because we have today
a conversation with Jim Knight.
And Jim, I'll let you introduce yourself.
- It's great to be here and
thanks for the invitation.
I'm Jim Knight.
Have several little positions.
I work at the University
of Kansas part-time.
And I run a organization called
the Instructional Coaching group.
And also run a research lab
called the Impact Research Lab.
My work focuses on how to improve
learning by improving teaching.
That's got me involved
in identifying effective
instruction and school wide change,
but probably most people know about
the work we've done on coaching.
And in working on coaching
we ended up spending
a lotta time on video,
and I've come to believe that video
is the most significant
technological innovation
in education in maybe decades,
probably since the computer came along.
It's extremely powerful and a disruptive
technology that has great potential,
not just professionally, but personally.
I'm excited to talk about
that with you, Adam.
- Great, great.
Well, I want to start, I
know that you just released
a new book called, Better Conversations.
You've released a few books,
but this is the most recent.
So we'd love to hear a little bit
about that book in terms
of, you know maybe,
kind of what spurred
writing the third book.
And how does it differ to
some degree of prior books?
And in fact, I'm realizing
I said third book,
you've probably written
more than three books,
I know three that come to mind for me.
- Yes. (chuckles)
Well the book I think is
probably my most important book
because I think it deals with something
really, really important which is
the kinda conversations we have.
I think you can't have
professional growth in schools
unless we've got a setting
where ideas will stick
and they won't stick in
a place where there's
terrible conversations, where
it's a toxic environment.
So the book's about that.
And two big ideas would be
one is that I think when you strive
to improve your communications,
if you think deeply
about what you believe,
and then you monitor yourself
to see if your actions are
consistent with your beliefs,
which is what the book's all about,
it's a movement towards a
truer version of yourself.
It's actually a movement
towards authenticity.
I think sometimes people worry
about these communication books,
and they think, well if I
try to act a different way,
I'm gonna look like a phony.
But this is about being a real person,
a real version of yourself.
And that involves video.
I mean to really know what it
looks like when you interact,
it's extremely helpful to
watch yourself on video
and to see how you listen,
or how you share positive information,
or how you engage in dialogue,
how you demonstrate empathy.
And it may seem a bit different
to watch yourself on video,
but I think the smartphone
that most people
have in their pockets is
a secret to a better life,
because it will lead to
better communication,
better conversations,
better relationships,
and that's huge in
school and huge at home.
- Well video feedback and conversations,
where feedback is the topic kind of
makes me want to ask the question,
so you just released the book,
what kind of feedback are you hearing?
I mean I know of course you involved a lot
of educators along the way
in developing the book,
but have you been hearing
back from folks now that
the book is out there and
they're able to purchase it?
- There has been a really good feedback.
You know if you watch the Twitter feed,
there's different groups that are looking
at the book and studying it.
Well, look at our time.
It's not a time where
you see great examples
of respect and empathy and communication,
if you watch the political debates.
And I think people are
thirsty for humanity
and thirsty for respect,
and thirsty for setting up settings
where they feel psychologically safe,
and trust and all those things.
All the response I've got is positive.
It's selling really well I'm told,
but I haven't heard much about it so far.
The big thing is I think people say,
yeah, we need to do this,
not just in our schools,
but our society needs to spend more time
with empathy and respect
and finding common ground,
instead of fear and hatred
and worse things than that.
- But I was just at a conference,
and while thankfully the politics
weren't on the agenda, it
was really interesting to me
that folks are coming up to me
and you know they see the
work that we do at Edthena
with video coaching and they
actually are starting to talk,
more than just a few
times talking with folks
that are talking about, oh yeah,
well here's my Jim Knight book,
and some of them are even
pulling it out of their bags,
so you know I guess draw the line for me
between the current
book, which really talks
about having a framework
for conversations,
draw the line between the framework
that's presented in that book,
and the prior work that you've been doing,
and it's kinda laid out in
some of the prior books,
that it's really I guess
more tactical in some senses
around the process of
instructional coaching,
or the process of using video.
- It's kinda funny how
these things evolve.
I'm gonna share this little anecdote.
We've known about the
power of video for decades.
I mean back in the 70s at Stanford
they had microteaching projects.
And a friend of mine, Mike
Hook, studied tutoring,
and he saw that until the
teachers saw themselves
on video, the ones that
were doing the tutoring,
their skill level didn't change.
But the moment they
started to do a checklist
and watch themselves on video,
their consistency with the
checklist went through the roof.
And so we've known about
the power of video.
And everyone's known while
a teacher will try it
back in the, say in the
90s and the early 2000s,
but the trouble was (audio drops out)
and it was hard to figure out how to use,
some kid had to show you how to use it.
They just take the video
tape or whatever it was
and put it in some other machine,
so you could watch it on a TV,
and you had to sign all these things out,
and when they brought the
machine into the class
it was really noisy and disruptive
and wasted all kinds
of instructional time.
And then when you watched it
somebody else might be watching
and it had to be on TV.
Then some people didn't
do 'cause it was too hard,
but you know ever since the
smartphones have come along,
you just stick it on the wall,
or up on a bookshelf or something,
and you push the red
button and away you go.
It couldn't be any easier.
And now it's here, it has huge potential.
And I got the idea, I was
watching the World Cup in 2006
and I always wanted to use video
as a part of professional learning,
but I didn't know how to do it
for the reasons I just said.
And they showed Mick
Jagger up in the crowd,
and he had this little camera.
You know I was like, oh
man, that's really cool,
I wonder what that is,
and it was a Flip camera.
And a few weeks later we bought
Flip cameras for all of our coaches.
Initially we were gonna
do them for research,
and then they just became
a power tool for coaching.
So once we started using the videos,
we started to get clearer
on how do we use it.
And so and focus on teaching,
I really talk about zoning
in on very particular
aspects of teaching,
like instructional time,
how much time is wasted,
how much time is productive,
or how often do you reinforce
kids with positive attention,
or is all your attention directed towards
kids who are acting up, because if it is,
teacher attention is a strong motivator.
You're actually reinforcing
the wrong behaviors.
And the kind of questions you ask,
and all kinds of different aspects,
or getting really good
at a particular practice.
So the focus on teaching is about
how teachers on their own,
or teachers with coaches,
or teams, or principals
working with teachers,
can use video to improve teaching.
But as I was doing that,
I was also looking at conversations.
And I've written about conversations
in a lot of other books.
And we had people all over the world
try out video recording
their conversations
with maybe their six-year-old
or their husband or wife.
It worked in coaching.
And they analyzed, they're writing these
in these reflection sheets that were just
to sort of focus their attention.
We got over a thousand of these forms.
And it became clear that people
didn't have a very clear picture
of what it looked like
when they communicate.
And also it became clear
that they could get better.
And we looked at all those forms,
it was clear that lots
of people were making
really kind of dramatic improvements
in the way they interacted.
So, first book is really about teaching,
and grew out of this process.
And as we were writing the first book,
we realized there's a second thing here,
which is conversations.
And conversations is like,
it's like steroids for learning.
If we don't have the conversations,
it's not gonna happen.
But if we have good conversations,
then the learning will take place.
