How can technology boost student engagement?

Kevin: This is What I Want to Know, and today I’m joined by Pablo Garcia to find out. Pablo Garcia is an educator of mathematics, currently in his 26th year of teaching. He has taught pre-algebra through AP calculus in various settings, including over 20 years in a traditional brick and mortar public school system. Now he teaches students online through the Idaho Technical Career Academy, an online public school program for high school students with a focus on career readiness education. He joins us today to discuss how to best leverage technology to engage students. Pablo, welcome to the show.

Pablo: Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin: So, I want to talk about your expertise in math. You’ve been a math teacher for 26 years, and you’ve also integrated technology into your classroom, and that’s really one of the things I wanted to talk with you about. But in looking at your background, I understand that you also were a wrestler in school. So, a wrestler, a mathematician. Are you a musician as well?

Pablo: No, I’m not.

Kevin: So, when did you know that you had the skills to really help others with math? And how did that work with your wrestling career early on?

Pablo: Well, they were really connected, actually. So, I’ve been wrestling since I was a little kid, in junior high school, and I wrestled all through college. And when I was in college, I would come and help my local high school with coaching, and that’s where I realized that I’m a natural teacher. So I really enjoyed working with the young people. At that time, they were just a couple years younger than I was, but I really enjoyed breaking things down. I was pretty natural at motivating people. And that’s when I realized, I don’t know, for me, the secret of teaching is a good relationship, a good strong human relationship between people — that’s what a teacher really does, you know?

Kevin: Yes, that makes a whole lot of sense. We’ve got a crisis with STEM, and we’ve got a crisis in the fact that so many young people are introduced to math by teachers who aren’t math teachers but they’re teaching math. And why do people view math as so hard?

Pablo: Huh, that’s a good question. Anytime I meet somebody new and: “What do you do for a living?” “I teach math. Oh, I hate math.” I get that 98% of the time I meet someone new, and it is such a shame. And I tell them always the same, I say, you know what? If you were to dive into math right now as an adult with a little bit more maturity, you would love it.” It’s such an interesting subject. The ideas of calculus are one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and it’s a real shame when students go through their 12 years of education or 12 years plus college and never get introduced to those ideas. You don’t need to be an expert at them, but what is it all about? So yeah, I think we learn math in elementary school. Unfortunately, most elementary school teachers gravitate more towards the English, history side of school, and they reluctantly go through the math classes.

And I think that shows to the students. So, I think passion is really important, respect for those ideas, because if the teacher doesn’t have that, they don’t communicate that to the students. Because I really believe in order to really explain something well, you have to understand it really, really well. And you need to see the big, big picture of where this little slice of what you’re teaching fits into that big, big picture. And I think when you can explain it like that, students naturally gravitate towards that. I think little kids love math. They actually really do, if it’s explained in a certain way, if they’re allowed to practice it and see it in the world around them. So, other countries, a lot of the Asian countries, the Middle Eastern countries, are really well known for their math education. And the big difference between what they’re doing and what we’re doing is they teach very few topics, but they teach them very, very deep.

We teach a lot of topics, but we only go an inch deep. And so we spend a lot of time backtracking. You start fifth grade, and you spend the first quarter of fifth grade going back relearning what you should have learned in fourth grade, whereas instead of maybe just focusing on just fractions for an entire year but you see fractions from every possible perspective before you move on to the next topic. So there are lots of things that we could be doing in this country that could make math education more effective, in my opinion.

Kevin: Well, I’m going to tell you, listening to you, I think I want to sign up for your math class now because you make it sound more fun. I ‘m like many of those people who you run into who say that they hate math or whatever. I grew up in a family where everyone in my family was good in math but me, but I think that was largely because my elementary school teachers were not good in math and said they did not like math. As I think back, my second and third-grade teacher was like, well, we don’t like math.

Some of us aren’t good in math. And, I think, psychologically I and several of my classmates internalized that as I look back on it. And as I understand from my family, my father who had a chemistry degree and my sister an accounting degree, that with math, it’s like building blocks, that if you miss the foundational stuff, you can’t really keep going level by level because it just doesn’t work. And the foundational stuff is so important. How can we change the narrative around math so that it feels like fun culturally?

Pablo: That’s a great question.

Kevin: You have a passion for it, and other math teachers I speak with, everyone in my family except me, has a passion for it. And it’s interesting because their kids have passions for it as well, but how do we make it cool to like math?

Pablo: Right, well, let’s think about some other things in culture that are difficult and challenging, yet we embrace them. Sports is one of them. So, I know wrestling and wrestling is a heck of a tough sport. It’s a really tough sport.

Kevin: Which is experiencing a comeback, by the way; a lot more people are into wrestling. Yeah.

Pablo: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s a wonderful sport. And you learn a lot of life lessons through the sport of wrestling, and a lot of kids are passionate about it. But why? Why? So what’s the difference between math, which is also a very difficult endeavor; what’s the difference? And I don’t know, my thoughts are: you have your parents, you have your coaches, you have the school, all excited about athletics. You get kudos for doing well in athletics; you get all these social rewards for doing well in athletics. And so, it’s part of the culture; it’s a fabric of the culture; you’re naturally motivated to do well in it. Whereas in math, I would have a lot of parent-teacher conferences, and the first thing out of the parent’s mouth is, “Well, I am terrible at math, so therefore, this is why little Johnny here is terrible at math,” while little Johnny is right in front of the parent.

And I’m like, oh, don’t say that. We’re giving kids the excuse, the out, to not do well in math. And so, it’s part of our culture. So, why are other cultures more successful in math? There are higher expectations. And so, in our culture, we have high expectations for kids in sports or in other endeavors but math is not really one of those in our culture. So, how do you change that? Little, little at a time. But one way I suggested is: let’s get some more math specialists at the elementary school level so that when kids do arrive at the high school level and learn algebra and trigonometry and geometry and calculus and statistics, they’ve got the tools, they have the confidence, and they hopefully are motivated in a way that they know if they do well at that, that they’re going to get kudos for that.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And, by the way, I had Erica Beal, who is a terrific teacher known for helping kids read who otherwise have been written off as being unable to read. And she said the same thing you did, that part of it begins with this cultural belief that all kids can learn and that you instill upon the kid high expectations. And so, if a kid feels like “I can’t do it, or my parents can’t do it, or it’s too hard,” then as you said, it becomes a fait accompli, then they’re not going to be successful.

But if you just keep drilling down, and you have the patience, and you tell them this is something that’s possible, then it’s something that they can do, and they eventually do well. You have also, as a way — and this may be part of the answer that we’re talking about in terms of making math cool and fun — you’ve integrated technology into your classroom. You worked for many years in a brick and mortar classroom, and then now you’re at a virtual career academy in Idaho, but you integrated tablets into the classroom, found ways to make sure that you had these supplemental technological tools to help promote this interest in math. Talk a little bit about how that began, when you moved beyond the spreadsheet to some of the more technological tools that you could utilize.

Pablo: Math is a verb. Math is something you do. Learning math, I often tell students, is learning how to play the piano. You don’t listen to someone else play the piano to learn to play the piano; you don’t watch a math teacher do a problem to learn how to do math. You do it. I tell them, Nike, just do it. You’ve got to do math to learn math. And that’s how I teach: I want the kids to be doing math. I want to watch them do math. I want other kids to watch other kids do math. I want to have conversations about that process of doing math. I want to see mistakes because that’s what we learn from. When you do the problem correctly the first time, you don’t learn a darn thing, but when you mess up and you get advice and you get some constructive criticism, you learn a ton.

And other students that are watching you make that mistake learn from that mistake as well. So, it’s a wonderful process. So, when I was in brick and mortar, I would start every single period I had my kids trained. When they would walk in, they would just go up to the board, and they would write down the homework problems that they could not do that last night. So, somebody would go up, and they would write down number 13 on the board. Somebody else would write number 23, blah, blah, blah. So there’d be eight numbers up on the board. And then, as soon as somebody would write up a problem, someone else that did that problem last night on their homework would go up to the board and start working it out in detail. And I had them trained to do this. The bell hadn’t even rung yet, and they would go up and get this process going.

So, in the first 15 minutes of class, I would have, I don’t know, 6, 8, 10 problems written on the board. And I’m talking trigonometry, calculus, AP problems, lots of steps, drawings, graphs and everything, all written up by students. It was wonderful. And then I would start the class. So I have other things that I did in brick and mortar, but that is the essence I thought was one of the best activities that I could ever do. And so, when I came to online teaching, all of that stopped because… So, I’m teaching basically on a virtual whiteboard. And the first year I’m writing with this, and have you ever tried to write with a mouse?

Kevin: No.

Pablo: It’s really difficult. It looks like you’re a third-grader writing, because your writing is so sloppy, and you’ve got to make it so large to make it legible that you can barely get anything on the page. And the kids are there; a lot of them are very reluctant to turn their cameras on; a lot of them are reluctant to hop on the microphone. So, I just had this huge chasm between me and the kids. So, I went from wrestling coach, teaching with kids talking to each other and all this interaction, to just this huge chasm between me and the kids. So, that was my first year of teaching online. And so, now I’m on year number five, and I’ve slowly been breaking down that chasm with technology, so I’ll cut to the chase. So, how do you get the kids writing? I want to see their math, just like I was in the brick and mortar. I want to see them writing. I want the other kids to see kids writing as well. I want to talk about it in real time as you’re making that mistake.

Hey, let’s stop right here; it’s a process. A math problem is not something that you see after it’s done. If I just show you a math problem worked out, you’re like, ugh, okay. There are a bunch of symbols there. Kids don’t get that at all. But when they see me doing it as we’re going through it, that’s a whole different process. When they hear my narration as I’m talking through the problem, it’s a whole different process. When a kid is working out a problem, narrating what he’s thinking, “Okay, I’m going to do this now, I’m going to do this now,” it’s so much more powerful. So much more powerful. So, how do you get that to happen? And so, the kids didn’t want to write with a mouse either, so they were extremely reluctant to show me their work. So basically, they would do problems on paper; they would scan the paper; they would turn it in, but that’s a homework problem.

I could give them feedback on it. But they did this last Tuesday, and I’m giving them feedback four days later. There’s a huge disconnect there. It’s that real-time coaching, which is super effective. And so, now I use this right here. So, this is a pen tablet for our listeners who don’t even know what one of them is. I basically write on here, and it becomes my mouse. So, this is my mouse now. And obviously, I can write much neater with this. It’s more pleasurable to write with this; I can write small so I can fit a lot of work and do one whiteboard screen.

And so, I started teaching with this tablet. So that was great. Now I can express my work to the students, but they still were not expressing their work to me. Fortunately, I have a great, great principal, Monty Pittman, at our school. He’s a great guy because he’s constantly looking for solutions. He’s always looking for, “Hey, can we do this a different way? Can we try this? Can we try that?” He’s really open to listening to suggestions from teachers. So, I have been talking about how wonderful these tablets are, and finally last year we brought this proposal to the board. The board said, “Hey, this is an awesome idea. We think this is really important. Let’s go ahead and do it.” So this year we bought a writing tablet for every kid in the school. And not only are they using it in math but they can use it in all other subjects as well.

Kevin: So far, how has it gone?

Pablo: Going great. It’s going really, really well. I feel like my effectiveness level has just shot through the roof. So, I use this in conjunction with some other technology, so it’s snowballed. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jamboard.

Kevin: Yeah.

Pablo: But Jamboard is a free Google application, and it’s just basically a whiteboard, but it has 20 slides and you can invite people onto those slides. So, I invite my students onto that slide in the middle of a live class session, and I can upload problems onto those slides. So, there might be an algebra problem on each slide. And so, I’ve got 20 kids on there working out the problems simultaneously.

Kevin: What’s really cool about that, because it’s an understandable concern and criticism that online programs don’t have the social interaction, and you experienced that. But one of the reasons why I wanted to chat with you, Pablo, is that technology, to some extent, gameful learning, gamification, using tools that are available can help close that gap, if you will, and the other thing is for kids who have been unengaged in traditional brick and mortar settings: Many of those kids just totally embrace the new technology. Do you find that to be the case?

Pablo: Yeah, I do. I do. Kids love technology; they really do. So, I have them take notes now using the pen and tablet. I use PowerPoint for notes. So, my slideshow as I’m teaching is my PowerPoint presentation. I send that PowerPoint presentation to the students. So they are using their pen and tablet because Word and PowerPoint have a draw function on there. So they use their pen and tablet to digitally work out example problems as I’m doing it in class.

And so they have a record of that; they save that. And PowerPoint is just awesome because I might have a great diagram. and I say “We’re going to use this diagram many times. Everyone duplicates this diagram five times” — you hit a button, and you just copy that slide — and now they’ve got a blank one. So they can work one out; they can fill out a unit circle or do some trigonometry on here, and then they’ve got another blank one here.

Kevin: But do you feel that the engagement’s improved?

Pablo: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. They are getting on the microphone a lot more because we’re looking at each other’s writing, and they have to. I ask them, I’m like, stop. Let’s do this problem a little bit differently. So they hop on the mic. And so, we are definitely engaging so much more. We’re engaging intellectually because we’re watching each other work out problems.

Kevin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Pablo, one last question. This is what I really want to know. There are still school leaders, principals, teachers that feel that technology like this can be more of a distraction than an asset. We have a lot of school folks that listen to this program. What advice would you give them in terms of taking the step to at least trust the process of starting? Because, it’s sad to say, I’ve been in schools over the last several years where there are still computers in closets, and so apparently it is clear that you did certain things that gradually got you to the place where you could communicate better and help engage kids better. But for a lot of teachers and school leaders, it’s still a challenge. What would you say to them?

Pablo: Look at every job. It’s very difficult to even find a job where if you don’t know your way around a computer, there’s no way you’re even going to get hired. So, using the tools that are available today, you are doing your students such a huge disservice by not giving them just the practice of becoming competent, using the latest software and using computers and things like that. So, that would be my first comment. Technology, it’s not going anywhere.

It is part of the fabric of our society, and we need to embrace it. You’re fighting a losing battle if you’re not embracing technology. There are pros and cons to everything, but as teachers and educators, we need to focus on the pros of the technology that’s available to us. Just yesterday we were in a faculty meeting, and one of our teachers said, “Have you guys seen this ChatGPT thing?” And she brought it up and typed a question as in something like, can you write an essay on… Oh no, write a poem on, I don’t know, winter and this and that, and write it from the perspective of a 10th grader in high school, hit enter and 15 seconds later there’s the poem.

Kevin: Yeah.

Pablo: It’s crazy. It’s crazy. That is a big one that’s coming around the corner that we’re going to have to wrestle with here pretty soon, but putting it away and locking it in a closet is not the solution. We need to embrace it, and we need to find ways to use it and multiply its effect and not the other way around. That’s my opinion.

Kevin: Well said. Pablo Garcia from the Idaho Virtual Career Academy, thank you so much for joining us, and I appreciate all that you do for our kids, and thanks for being on What I Want to Know.

Thanks for listening to What I Want to Know. Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education and write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That’s #WIWTK. For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining What I Want to Know.