Here & Now

In Focus with Courtney Bell: Teachers, Students in Wisconsin

Murv Seymour:
Courtney Bell, welcome to “In Focus.”

Courtney Bell:
Well, thank you for having me.

Murv Seymour:
I really appreciate you being here. So, we know you’re in education. So, here we are in the Wisconsin Historical Society building, a place of learning, a place of education. Any vibes you get coming into this space?

Courtney Bell:
I love it.

Murv Seymour:
Not necessarily the auditorium space, but like, you know, the building itself.

Courtney Bell:
One of the first things someone told me about this space is when I first came on campus, I’m new to campus, when I first came on campus, they said, “You have to go to the Wisconsin Historical Society. You’ve got to go see the Reading Room.” And they were right. So for me, it’s this awesome place of sort of learning and scholarship. And it’s been here a really long time, so it’s pretty cool.

Murv Seymour:
Is it a space that you find yourself visiting periodically still?

Courtney Bell:
Mmm.

Murv Seymour:
Now that you’re in your professional career?

Courtney Bell:
No, I’m mostly in my office and on Zoom, like so many people. But occasionally I stop through and just sit and do a quick few emails, and keep going.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah. And now, and you work for the Wisconsin Center for Education and Research. Give us a sense of what you guys do over there.

Courtney Bell:
So WCER, which we fondly refer to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research as, is an externally-funded research center here at the university. So it goes, UW, the School of Education, and WCER. So there are, roughly speaking, 600 researchers who are students, faculty members, academic staff, and all the supportive people who try to get external money to do good things in the world around research, evaluation, and development. So, there’s lots of projects, everything from early childhood kinds of things, all the way to studying how to help young people of color navigate getting their PhDs.

Murv Seymour:
Nice.

Courtney Bell:
Mentoring, those kinds of things. So huge range, all research, all education.

Murv Seymour:
Good stuff.

Courtney Bell:
Yeah.

Murv Seymour:
I love getting people to kind of give us a sense of the state of things in their field. What do you think in terms of the state of education right now? Maybe even from a teacher’s perspective and…

Courtney Bell:
Yeah.

Murv Seymour:
…So forth.

Courtney Bell:
Well, I mean, you know better than anyone, it has been a rough go with COVID for everyone at the university level, but also at the K-12 level. So on the one hand, we kind of think about COVID as over, right? We’re not wearing masks as much as we used to and schools are in session, but in my world, researchers who are working with school districts and with higher education institutions, we’re still totally dealing with COVID, to tell you honestly. We’re dealing with young people with mental health issues. We’re dealing with grown-ups with mental health issues. [chuckles] We’re dealing with, you know, big gaps in knowledge that occurred when kids were home from school. So things are not yet easy. Not that they were easy before COVID. But I think the other thing is, it’s hard to remember that the world is moving on, but there are still these things that are lingering for all of us to be paying attention to and trying to deal with.

Murv Seymour:
So what have we learned in terms of how to best teach in this environment? Like, how do we get education to where it was prior to COVID?

Courtney Bell:
There was a recent “New York Times” article that profiled a study that was done. It was a collaboration, I think, between Harvard, AIR- American Institutes of Research- and NWEA, which is a company, I think they’re not-for-profit, that creates what we call formative assessments. So, just sort of short-term regular assessments that are supposed to help teachers in the K-12 environment address what their students are, where they are, and where they need to go. And that report showed that COVID, the longer schools were closed, the worse it was for young people. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. People were doing the best they could with the information that they had. So, the federal government saw some of those findings very early on, like as early as the fall of 2020 and early 2021, when we all went home in March. You know, sort of K-12 schools went home in March, in many places, of 2020, and they immediately started to try to get funds to states to deal with that situation. So, a lot of that has looked like high-impact tutoring. We see some movement on that, so, long-term, high-impact tutoring. But there’s been some hiccups, I would say, along the way. We do know that the online learning for the average child is not useful. You can imagine, young people might be more interested in playing a game off to the side versus paying attention to their Zoom call. And it’s hard for a lot of kids without that interaction, without the facial cues. All that said, for some kids, the pandemic and being away, I’ve heard stories, individual stories, where it’s been really good for a child, where they were finally getting the attention that maybe they needed, or hadn’t gotten. So, I don’t think the news was awful for every child in the country, but overwhelmingly, the conversation in the research community is what are we doing now to remedy this situation? There are big learning losses that will affect this whole generation of kids, not dissimilar from the 2008 recession did. And you know, we know that that has impacted those young people.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, I was curious to know if there are any aspects of remote teaching that work well, or that may stick around now that things are more normal than they were when this all started. Like, are there any pieces of that that are gonna stick around?

Courtney Bell:
Well, we’ve seen some things stick. So for example, when schools have snow days and things like that, some school districts have chosen to like, “Okay, everybody has Zoom on their computers.” We’ve got one-to-one computing in many places. Not all places, not all kids. But then we can say, “Okay, take your computers home and we’re gonna do some things remotely.” So, that part seems to have stuck in certain places. I think some of the individualization has stuck. Like here in Madison public schools, when they’ve had maybe not enough teachers to teach, let’s say a gifted class, or a class that’s meant to help young people who are a little further behind, they’ve been able to have that teacher be centrally located and teach kids across the district. So, some of that has stuck, I think. And some of the, like, getting access to really good, like, let’s say an AP course, where that might have been done in a, you know, if somebody had to drive, or they sent a bus to go pick up a few children from one district and bus them to another, that can all be done remotely by now. So, I think that technology, we’re more fluid with that. I think that has helped. And I think one other thing is teachers, all of a sudden, we’re catapulted into needing to be able to learn to use these learning management systems. So, putting all their files online, the course assignments, those kinds of things. And so, for older students in particular, that stuff seems to have really stuck.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah.

Courtney Bell:
Which is much more like university, you know, when they go to college, or something.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah,and I know part of your mission, you know, is to kind of deal with, you know, the complex elements of teaching.

Courtney Bell:
Mm-hmm.

Murv Seymour:
I read that when I was looking over some of the publishings on your website. What kind of things are we talking about when we talk about complex issues in teaching?

Courtney Bell:
Hmm. So, you know this, you’ve been a student. Let’s pretend there’s 25 kids in front of you. They can be 10-year-olds. They each have different-

Murv Seymour:
I’ve been a substitute teacher. I’ve been there.

Courtney Bell:
Have you?

Murv Seymour:
Yes.

Courtney Bell:
That’s a relaxing job.

Murv Seymour:
Oh, very relaxing.

Courtney Bell:
And kids are so good to the subs, right?

Murv Seymour:
No, they treat us like the real thing. I describe it as being like, you know, in professional wrestling, they have the referee?

Courtney Bell:
Right.

Murv Seymour:
You know, he’s counting, he’s doing this and telling the person, nobody listens to that referee.

Courtney Bell:
Nope.

Murv Seymour:
That’s what’s-

Courtney Bell:
And they know you’re not gonna be there tomorrow.

Murv Seymour:
Nah.

Courtney Bell:
So, it’s like, “Whatever.”

Murv Seymour:
But you know what, most of the time, I am there tomorrow because when I go there, they know that I can control that classroom and they bring me back. And once I get the trust of those kids, I learned that they do pay attention and listen more.

Courtney Bell:
They’ll totally listen. They totally will listen.

Murv Seymour:
And I also learned too, that a lot of the times, whatever control I did have in that classroom was kind of based on how much control the teacher who runs that classroom–

Courtney Bell:
You got it.

Murv Seymour:
How much, you know…they had.

Courtney Bell:
What norms were in place.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah.

Courtney Bell:
What sort of routines? Like, we sit down when we come in, and we open our book.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, and I’m sorry that you’re giving me flashbacks to my substitute teaching days, but yeah, that brought back memories there.

Courtney Bell:
Well, so at any rate, the substitute teachers face this and long-term teachers face this too. 25 different kids are in 25 different places. Of course, there are patterns in where they are, like, let’s say you’re teaching science, or you’re teaching journalism, right? But you have to figure out, “I want them to move over here “to this goal. “I want them to understand, for example, how the media shapes society.” That’s a big goal. And the question for you as a teacher is how do you get 25 different humans there, given where they are, develop those relationships? So, when we study teaching, we try to measure, I think, three big aspects of the complexity. One is the relationship between teachers and kids, and kids and kids, ’cause those relationships matter a lot too, for learning, right? If I’m not safe, if I’m worried, this happens, especially at certain grade levels, if I’m worried my friend next to me is gonna make fun of me, that’s gonna be much harder for me to learn in that classroom, right? I won’t take risks. We know learning requires risks. So, we pay attention to relationships and we try to understand the complexities there. And those intersect with the management things you were talking about. What do we do when we come in? How do we get called on? Do we raise our hands, do we just speak out? All these, like, routines that are about classroom organization. And then we pay attention to instruction. So, on that, how to get them to learn the role of the media. So, what topics do you introduce for second and third? What ways do you engage them? So, those things all intersect with one another in teaching. They’re confounded with one another. So, we can’t pull just one apart and say, “Oh, only relationships matter,” or, “Oh, only classroom discipline matters.” We know that those things are related to one another, like you said, even in your little story. And so, figuring out…

Murv Seymour:
Little story? Still traumatic times.

Courtney Bell:
Yes, your traumatic experience being a substitute. But yeah, so those are some of the complex things we try to measure, both with human eyes and then with some other ways. We can ask students what they perceive. And students, older students are very good at telling you what they notice. They know when teachers have high expectations of them, and they tell you.

Murv Seymour:
And they respond to that?

Courtney Bell:
Oh. You know what, the best… I was a former high school teacher and I’m the mother of three sons. Kids know a lot. We don’t give them credit for knowing as much as they know and paying attention. And on the one hand, they may like, you know, “Oh, I can’t believe it’s due. I want this, or what.” On the other hand, they actually realize what achievement looks like in the world. They know the people that they respect in the world, and they know that by doing nothing, they’re not gonna achieve those things, so, yes. I’ve taught rural kids in the South, I’ve taught kids here. Like, yes, they wanna be held to high expectations and supported to meet those expectations.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, I come from a family of teachers. My mom was a teacher. Taught here in Madison for, I think, almost 40 years. And I saw the iron fist.

Courtney Bell:
Yeah.

Murv Seymour:
And my friends who had her in class, they saw the iron fist. [Courtney chuckles] You know, and I think that’s probably instilled in me in terms of the expectations I have. And you know, I actually went to the same high school she taught at, at East. And I remember her getting into it with one of the students, and the student called her something that we can’t say on PBS.

Courtney Bell:
Okay.

Murv Seymour:
And back in those days, you could probably get away with this, but she opened the door and said the same thing back to him.

Courtney Bell:
Mm-hmm.

Murv Seymour:
You know? And she would never let those kids control that classroom, you know? And I know things are a lot different now, and things are just done in different kind of a way, but that was certainly a learning experience, you know, for me.

Courtney Bell:
But I think in your mom’s case, and I would say in my case as a classroom teacher, and maybe in your substitute teaching days too, kids actually need us to be in charge. They need-

Murv Seymour:
I think so.

Courtney Bell:
They need grown-ups to be grown-ups.

Murv Seymour:
I think so.

Courtney Bell:
Period. So, at home, that isn’t to say they need to have an iron fist. There’s lots of ways to accomplish goals. There’s not one way. But there actually need to be grown-ups in charge of buildings and in charge of classrooms.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, I get the sense they mirror what they see and what’s expected of them.

Courtney Bell:
Mm-hmm.

Murv Seymour:
You know, I even, I think even I’m probably guilty as a teen of, you know, as they say, “Give ’em an inch and they take a mile,” sort of thing.

Courtney Bell:
It’s the nature of being a young person, right?

Murv Seymour:
Yeah; who do you think do we… And we chatted about this a little bit when you were on the “Black and White” series with us. I forget the year now, ’cause time’s running. But who do we blame for our failures in the classroom in terms of, you know, how the students are doing and how that, you know, teachers may not be able to cope, and those sorts of things?

Courtney Bell:
You know, I suppose the answer depends on who’s answering the question. Your answer might be different than mine, might be different than my 81-year-old father’s, right? But I think one of the hard things about being a teacher… Oops. I still work with teachers. We’re socially friends with teachers. One of our closest family friends is a principal of an elementary school. And I think, what I will say is, all of us are to blame for presuming that schools and teachers are magic. On the one hand, they can be the best of us, right? They can ameliorate problems that exist in society. They can help fill gaps that maybe a young person doesn’t have at home, like a computer or something like that. They can help us learn to read, which opens whole worlds, right, to young people, imaginations, things they can’t imagine from their current circumstances. But on the other hand, they’re human institutions. And teachers are not magicians. And they have them, you know, six-ish hours a day when you figure in bathroom breaks and lunch and recess. They’re not magicians. And so, if we send them to school hungry and, you know, maybe not paid attention to in certain ways, or treasured and cherished the way children should be treasured and cherished, right, seen as whole people, we can’t fix that. We can’t expect schools to fix that. So, one of the hard things I think is pretending that there is one person to blame. Schools, education belong to all of us, and unless we understand that, I think, as adults, as citizens, we’re gonna keep just wanting to point fingers. That is not gonna solve the problem. It will not fix things that we wanna fix.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah. I’d love to hear your journey in terms of how you knew you wanted to commit yourself and your life to education. How did that happen? It’s a laughing matter for you, I see. The evil laugh, I call it.

Courtney Bell:
I… I laugh because I never was one of those young people who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I’m not sure I even know now. [chuckles] But I laugh because I needed a break after college. You know, I was an athlete, a student athlete. I worked half-time and went to an academically rigorous institution. I was tired. I was tired of school, I was tired of that grind. So, I wanted a break before I either went to graduate school, or went to medical school. And so, I took all my little tests, or whatever. At any rate, there were a couple of options, and I wound up doing Teach for America. So, I taught in the rural South. There were many things that I learned. I grew up just outside of Detroit in an inner-ring suburb, but grew up in the city.

Murv Seymour:
I lived there briefly.

Courtney Bell:
Yeah? Southfield Public Schools are the schools that I went to. And so, I was pretty comfortable being in situations where I was the only white person. Certainly very comfortable. My class, my high school class was a very diverse, and I do mean diverse, class, but I didn’t realize how much I would learn, going as a Yankee, as a Northerner, going to the South. I didn’t actually think that was still really a thing, to tell you honestly. So my students, I taught ninth through twelfth grade biology, chemistry, physics, and water management from a grant that came–

Murv Seymour:
‘Cause you gotta know when to drink the water, right?

Courtney Bell:
Yeah, and you gotta clean it. And know how to filter it. Water management, big water management systems, right? So, my students were just tremendous humans. They are still tremendous humans. I wasn’t that much older than them, right? Some of them were 18 when I showed up in their lives as a 22-year-old, first-year teacher. And for some of them, I taught them all of the science that they ever got exposed to in their high school experience, which, let me tell you, was frightening for them. I was a chemistry major in college, so I was a much better chemistry teacher than I was a physics teacher.

Murv Seymour:
Okay.

Courtney Bell:
At any rate, so it took me a long time to then ultimately decide like, “Oh, I’m not done with this thing. “I’m not done facing this inequality “that’s in our country. I could go be a doctor.” I thought I always wanted, you know… I always thought that would be an interesting thing. I love taking care of people. I love science. It seemed like a good fit. But the longer I was in the classroom and the more I realized there were levers to pull that could improve things for young people, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I went to graduate school for my PhD, I had no idea what graduate school even really was. So, I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go back and be a principal. Maybe I’ll be a superintendent, I don’t know.” And here I am, you know, fast-forward to get real curious. I get sucked into-
And I love to think, so I got sucked into all the thinking stuff and the puzzling about the intersections of research and policy and practice, which is where all the interesting stuff happened, in my mind. And so, two decades later, here I am running this big research center, and studying teaching, and working with amazing people in K-12 schools. So, it was not a linear path there. And even applied to and was accepted in medical school. And finally like, “Okay, no, you really don’t wanna do that, Courtney.” But it’s hard. It’s hard to figure out, I think, when you’re a young person…

Murv Seymour:
Yeah.

Courtney Bell:
…What you wanna do.

Murv Seymour:
What was it like for you stepping in to a role where you were the minority and the students didn’t look like you? Like, how did you handle, you know, the diversity of being in that situation? And what has it taught you? What have you learned from it?

Courtney Bell:
“All the things,” we say at my house, when something is complicated and profound. So, I learned all the things. One of the things I learned that was the most profound for me was the ways in which we can be born into advantages that we have no idea are even advantages. So the example I said before, like, that sometimes we send children to school, and they never, at home, get the message that they are loved and cherished and great just the way they are. I was loved and cherished and great. I didn’t know that was an advantage. I walked around with that advantage my whole life. I walked around with this skin color, which is an advantage in our public schools, my whole life. So, I learned a lot about the advantages that I had been given just simply by my circumstances. They were not earned advantages. They were just advantages. And one of the funniest things to learn was that when children were given the opportunity… And these were the descendants of sharecroppers, for the most part. This is the rural South and eastern North Carolina, in the tobacco and cotton fields. When those children were given the opportunity to learn, they just soaked that up, took every advantage of it, and thrived and flourished. So, it was amazing to me to understand the ways in which, in this country, which I thought of as a much more equal society at the time, when I was 22 and wide-eyed and idealistic. It was shocking to me that with some readjustment and opportunity to learn that there could be so much flourishing. It was kind of magical, actually, to watch and to be a part of. The greatest compliment I got from one of my students, which I can say to you 20 years later, is… Tiffany Gardner said to me… I was doing after-school tutoring. And Tiffany, I was talking about… You know, let’s say she was in fourth period, and second period had been struggling with something. They were both chemistry classes or whatever. I was like, “But you know, they’re getting it. “They’re getting it. I think it’s gonna be fine.” And Tiffany said to me, “Miss Bell, you think everyone can learn. You think all of us are smart.” “Yeah, I do. “I think you can learn and I think you’re smart. That’s actually true.” So, it was really fun to watch that become true and to be a part of being able to help them see their own potential.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, you have to hear it.

Courtney Bell:
You do have to hear it. We all need to hear it. Everybody needs to hear it.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah.

Courtney Bell:
Yeah.

Murv Seymour:
And one thing I love about your work is you are international, you are all over the world. I’d love to get your perspective on who’s out there doing it the best. Who’s teaching at the highest level out there? At the various levels?

Courtney Bell:
Yeah, Murv, I will just say to you, the systems are so different, one country to another. So like, just take Singapore as a case in point, right? A diverse nation in terms of racial and ethnic backgrounds. They pride themselves on being a bilingual country. One institution in the whole country trains all the teachers, one. Every teacher who is certified in that country goes through one institution. There is one curriculum. Their government tells you where exactly you will teach. And I could go on. It is lined up so tightly in that system, the standards, what teachers know, what kids are expected to know, the allocation of teachers across schools. They are drop-dead serious about that. Now, so you say like, “Oh.” And Singapore scores very high on, like, PISA or some of these international assessments that the OECD and some of these global organizations help countries use as yardsticks to see where they are. So, you could say like, “Oh, well, Singapore’s got it right.” But it’s very hard to say like, “Oh, let’s just take the Singapore thing and just, “you know, let’s go put it into Wisconsin–”

Murv Seymour:
No, I think of it being here and I could see people resisting that because they want to be able to choose how they learn and…

Courtney Bell:
Absolutely.

Murv Seymour:
…What they learn. But at the same time, I think of it like a franchise, where if you’ve got everybody on the same page and it’s being done the right way, then it’s more likely to be done the right way. So, I can see it both ways.

Courtney Bell:
Yeah, right, and it’s a both/and, right? You can see why it works in one country in one way and why it works in another country the other way. What I can tell you is, Pasi Sahlberg, who is a very famous author that’s written about the Finnish system. Everyone talks about the Finnish system, and the revolution that started in the ’70s in Finland that has transformed Finnish education. And he’s written a number of books about it. But one of the things he wrote in a recent blog post is that while we see, like, let’s say Japan, who really, if you want your child to learn math, send ’em to Japan. That while we see these different economies and countries being successful in different ways, there are a few things that are true across all of them. One is that they don’t use high-stakes accountability. So, I think about that, as a policy person, as like carrots and sticks, like, “Here, come do this thing, and you have this carrot,” and then.

Murv Seymour:
But no rewards.

Courtney Bell:
No, not from the federal government. Not in a sort of high-stakes accountability kind of way. None of them use it like that. They don’t have that. They do have in common continued, very steady, we’re not good with steady in the U.S., very steady investment in social capital, so human knowledge and capability at all levels of the system. So administrators, school principals, teachers, et cetera, school counselors. Those systems, no matter how they’re structured, invest in that kind of knowledge and skill development with supports for professional learning at all levels of the system. They believe professionals have to keep learning. They all do that. You don’t need to talk to very many teachers to know we don’t do that. That’s not our superpower. Yet, yet, yet.

Murv Seymour:
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what we do well here in Wisconsin when it comes to education.

Courtney Bell:
Mm. We do lots of things well here. One of the things I think we do well is we are not hyper-reactive to national conversations. Some states really love to be on the leading edge of absolutely everything, regardless of if it’s a good idea. We don’t have that in us. We’re a little bit more circumspect. That’s a good thing, I think. One of the things we do well here has to do, I think, a little bit with our Midwesternness. We do tend, rural, suburban, urban, we do tend to see one another, and try to show up for one another, and care about our communities. And that’s not to say other states don’t do that as well, but as a person who has lived around the country, it’s been remarkable to see the ways in which whole communities of people rally around young people and around schools here in Wisconsin.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah. And one of the things that I was really fascinated about when I first met you, was this idea of this education simulator. Like, we talked about, you know, they have simulators for pilots, we have simulators for people to learn how to drive, we have simulators for police officers to shoot, don’t shoot, those sorts of things. And I don’t even know if this is already in play now, but you were telling me about a simulator for education to teach teachers. How exactly does that work?

Courtney Bell:
Oh, it’s just the coolest. And I should say, for audience members who, you know, have been in theater, or done role plays, it takes that and it automates some of that. It uses AI, artificial intelligence, to do some of that. So, we have it, and it doesn’t have to only be used for education people. Right now, we’re partnering with a company by the name of Mursion. And they are working-

Murv Seymour:
I’m sorry, did you say Murv?

Courtney Bell:
Well, they’re not quite that cool. Mursion.

Murv Seymour:
Okay, I just wanna make sure I had it right.

Courtney Bell:
Mursion. Murv and Mursion. No. And Mursion is working with a bunch of Fortune 100 companies. Right now, they’re training all of the Starbucks people through the same simulator we’re using at WCER for teachers. For teachers who are going to be certified for bilingual science, right now, there’s a project. I have colleagues that are working on that. Mark Wilson and Mariana Castro are working on that. And my colleagues Sarah Lent, Kimber Wilkerson, they’re both special educators. They’re working on doing it with special education teachers. And what you do is you’re sitting in front of a computer. The computer has the video camera on you. It gets the audio. There’s a human in the loop. So, it’s not just the computer responding with pre-programmed kinds of things. It’s not that. There are young people. You could have one, you could have a parent, you could have another teacher if you wanted the teachers to practice. And there’s a human in the loop that uses voice technology to modulate the voice. And you can change the skin colors, the hair, the outfits, the profiles of these people that appear on the screen, and you can practice. So, I’ll give you an example. One of the things that’s very hard for beginning teachers is to ask a question and close their mouths then, and just stop talking, and let the child respond. And let the child respond long enough and with enough, you know, phrases in a row that the teacher can come to understand what that child thinks.

Murv Seymour:
So, you’re saying, like even as a teacher asking the students a question, the teacher…

Courtney Bell:
It’s hard.

Murv Seymour:
…Continues to talk kind of thing?

Courtney Bell:
Yes; so, it’ll go like this. So, I’ll say, “Murv, will you tell me what you know about the media?” And so, yes, on the screen, Murv raises his hand and the beginning teacher says, “Okay Murv, what do you have to say?” And Murv gives a response like, “Oh, you know, at home, my dad watches ‘Fox News,'” or, “At home, my mom watches ‘PBS,'” or “At home, I just know that the media is the news on TV.” And then the teacher jumps right in and says, “Well, actually, there’s three kinds of media that you could consider,” and, like, then starts to explain. That’s a very, very common pattern of question. One small response, a very long explanation. So, we call that, that they immediately start teaching. The problem is, the only thing the teacher knows at that moment is that Murv knows something about television and media. That’s all the teacher knows. No probing questions. No, like, “Oh, say more about that. “Are there any other kinds of media that you’re familiar with?” ‘Cause the child might, Murv might actually know five different kinds of media, but just happened to start on the TV program. And now, the teacher has just explained everything away. So, something like asking questions, you can get really good at in a simulator if we pause the simulator when the teacher starts to lecture Murv about media, and say, “Look, okay, hold on. Try a follow-up question there.”

Murv Seymour:
So, there’s like a little buzzer that goes. [imitates buzzer]

Courtney Bell:
No! No buzzers.

Murv Seymour:
“Can we do that again ’cause, you know–”

Courtney Bell:
[Imitates buzzer] “You’re off. Second strike, you’re out,” no.

Murv Seymour:
Not that harsh.

Courtney Bell:
No; no. And usually the teacher educators are involved in it. They’re teachers. You can get mentor teachers involved in it. And so, that’s like a really, like a sort of benign example. But a very important skill for teachers to learn is to be able to go with the child’s thinking so you can figure out what is going on here. Could be in math, “Why did you just do that thing?” Let me not presume I understand why you just made that wrong answer. Let me ask enough questions and be quiet enough to learn what’s the story here, right? But it can also be in, like, hard-to-have conversations, right? Principals have an angry parent that shows up about something legitimately to be angry about. It’s not fun to be in that situation for the first time with a real-life person on the other side of it. So it’s really good to get practice where you have to say the words that are maybe hard for you to say as a professional, and say like, “Oh, okay, I haven’t harmed anyone in the process of me messing that up.” You can mess it up in the simulator. You haven’t hurt anybody. You haven’t traumatized a child, you haven’t lectured a parent, right? Your relationships at your school building are still intact. So, simulation allows us to help professionals do the things that they need to do so that when they get ready to go into the building, they’re more ready.

Murv Seymour:
I think that’s fascinating.

Courtney Bell:
Ditto.

Murv Seymour:
And what about in terms of coaching teachers in dealing with diversity in their classrooms, those sorts of things? Are there scenarios for that?

Courtney Bell:
Yes.

Murv Seymour:
And are you using, like, real types of scenarios to kind of play out?

Courtney Bell:
Yeah, no, real situations, you know, that people have in their classrooms all the time. Often like a piece of text. We can put, like a short text in front of the beginning teacher, say, “Okay,” an example, we were just doing it the other day, is you want to help these five children identify the character traits of Bindi, the main character in the story. “So, what do you notice about Bindi in the story?” And we can train the interacter, the person who’s voicing and acting out those avatars that are on the screen, we can train them, if the tasks are standardized, we can train them to say things that real children say.

Murv Seymour:
Wow.

Courtney Bell:
And so, we try all the tasks and test them out in the feedback loops. And it also helps us do research on how teachers learn, or how professionals learn. So, we can do, sort of give them A-scenario versus B-scenario, versus C, and watch how they interact with those as they as teachers become more skilled, so we can learn about what does it mean to learn to teach.

Murv Seymour:
Wow. And that story there kinda answers this a little bit, but I’m curious, ’cause it feels like we’re already kind of there, but I’m just curious, what do you think the future of teaching looks like? How’s it gonna change and how’s it gonna evolve?

Courtney Bell:
You know, I think certain things are gonna stay the same and certain things will evolve. I think for sure all the online stuff is just gonna keep exploding. I think the big transformation we all, as a society and teachers, for sure have to face, is what do we do about knowledge that is in our pockets, on our pocket computers, which are our phones, right? Are we going to continue to spend time, and how much time, and in what ways to teach that knowledge? Knowledge is critical, right? Knowledge builds the infrastructure in our brains that then helps us solve problems. So, it’s not that it’s irrelevant just because we can look it up. But how are we gonna spend time on that and how are we gonna spend time on the integration of knowledge and action being in the world and problem-solving, these more critical, higher-order kinds of things. The fact that it’s so easy to look things up and you can find the answer so quickly, I think that will, you know, 20, 40 years from now, we will have a different set of answers to that than we have today. But something that I think is gonna stay the same is like, I’m willing to learn from you if I’m willing to learn from you. That’s still gonna be true. So, our relationships with one another are gonna matter. You’re still gonna be teaching me about a thing, about journalism, or about science, or about math. You are gonna need to know about that thing and you’re gonna have to help guide me to learn about that thing. So, some of the interactions, I think, are probably gonna be the same. They might look different. Maybe some will be more online, maybe they’ll be more hybrid, but certain things probably are gonna be a little bit different with the computers that… I mean, that’s the biggest revolution, and for sure, AI as well.

Murv Seymour:
AI teachers in the classroom permanently ever happening, you think?

Courtney Bell:
I don’t think, no. I don’t want my child there, I’ll say that. No, I don’t think so. I mean think about, if you think about your most profound learning experiences, there are some of them that are alone, right, just with the subject matter. Maybe reading a book, or writing a poem, or practicing your scales on the piano, or something like that, or tinkering with a bike. You learn that way. So, it’s not that individual learning, alone kind of learning with automated information is not useful; it is. But it has limits. It has constraints on what kinds of things it can teach you. So, maybe it’ll be a part of the solution, but I doubt a big part.

Murv Seymour:
I don’t do this to everybody. You’ve seen me do this before, but I give out these superpowers from time to time. Yes, Dr. Bell, I give you superpowers. What are you doing with it?

Courtney Bell:
Oh, man.

Murv Seymour:
In the world of education? [Murv sings “Jeopardy” theme]

Courtney Bell:
In my superpower, I would be able to somehow magically ’cause it’s a magical superpower, I would be able to get people to suspend disbelief long enough that they could listen to one another and try to focus on common solutions and common ground, ’cause I think we have common ground, but in this divided and increasingly polarized society, it’s hard for us to see what unites us. My superpower would be to be able to bring us together and help people see what’s common, and help us figure out how to work on that.

Murv Seymour:
Good stuff. Dr. Courtney Bell, thank you so much for joining us on “In Focus.”

Courtney Bell:
Thank you for having me.