This program is made possible in part by the McCune Foundation.

And the Grable Foundation.

[Music Plays] So, girls, now we're going to put on our VR headsets and take a virtual field trip.

And I can tell right now for question number one, that out of the students that have answered it, 100% of them have gotten that answered question correctly so far.

And that's where you first.

This is the direction that education is headed in, with a lot of critical thinking and a lot of hands on research and activities.

And then what did you do to make the ball's going around like that?

We attached a motor in the back to this little black wheel.

Are we preparing kids for the kinds of careers that they're going to have in the future?

And are they equipped with the right kind of skills to really succeed in here?

It's like three different codes.

Technology is moving very fast pace, and I just want to be up on the wave.

So that way I won't get left behind.

So should we have lights?

You have to remember there's still kids, but at the same time they're just doing what we did when we were kids differently.

Sometimes if you've already been logged on.

If it doesn't, how are we teaching?

What are we teaching?

Also, we're talking about the dispositions and stances and mindsets of those who are teaching more alike.

But one of the things I've realized over time is that I couldn't teach, but I actually could create the conditions for learning.

And part of that is like understanding where kids come from to have a more equitable space.

So how do we talk to our students who might be struggling in the ones who might not be the diary?

Our work really is about craftsmanship.

It is the artistry of teaching with three equal signs.

Western Pennsylvania is truly leader in education, and I truly believe we're meeting the needs of all kids.

And we're we're not quite there yet but I think we're getting closer and closer.

So we are going to get back on our VR headsets and take a trip to the Holocaust Museum.

Sound good?

Right now we're looking at the Hall of Witness.

There is a need to think differently about how we engage children and young people in learning.

I am Valerie Kinloch, I am the Renee and Richard Goldman Dean here of the School of Educatio at the University of Pittsburgh.

And so we have this makers movement.

And I think this is really an important movement.

How do we think differently about learning?

But how do we create, how do we use the skills and the technologies that we might have at our disposal to really think about engaging students in learning?

Why do we think there were so many bystanders during the Holocaust?

Well, first of all, what is a bystander, Raquel?

People who just want people who just watch.

I'm an instructional coach for science and technology in the Duquesne City School District, and they destroyed 7000.

We're in the boiler room, which is our makerspace for grades three through six, where classes come down two days a week.

And they do activities specifically dealing with Stem.

So science, technology, engineering and math.

This room is actuall in its second year of existence.

Our creation statio has been around for three years.

We're working towards it and just exposing them to activities and curricula that students in these other districts have, just because they happen to be in that district.

It's kind of broadens our horizons, and it makes the playing fiel working towards getting leveled.

So whenever you girls look at these pictures, what do you think of like what did they make you feel?

Rihanna?

They make me feel sad because people don't just do that because of what they are and what they were born into.

Over 80% of our families live in poverty.

Our school district is 100% free and reduced lunch.

We have a universal breakfast program here at Duquesne.

It's kind of been a paradigm shift for having so much technology, and in a short amount of time before 2013, the most technology you would have seen in the classroom was a desktop and a document camera for a teacher.

So now and everywhere they go, there's a valuable technology for them.

We have our Imax, we have our virtual reality headsets, we have a 3D printer, we have a t-shirt press and a mug press that are going to be in use this year.

We've had about 12 to 13% increase in enrollment, and that's the greatest number that we've seen here as an elementary school, I'd say in the past 5 to 6 years.

We need to realize that not every child is going to be book smart, so to speak, that everyone has a different type of learning.

And in this room, you may not necessarily have to open up a book.

You can participate in a virtual field trip, or you can engineer some type of structure.

So this just kind of takes away the boundaries that we place on kids Its still learning but like it's fun.

It's it's not as boring as in the classroom is.

We don't have to just sit up the desk and just look at the teacher and just copy down what we have to do.

We get to actually be a part of it.

The next scene is focusing on the concentration camps and the ghettos.

And that was a word, because whenever we think of ghetto, we think of something entirely different.

Nowadays we get to be kids, we get to play outside.

But back then kids had to go into camp to get beat and killed and stuff, which is just not right.

So we are going to get back on our VR.

The way that we learned even ten years ago is not the way we learned today.

[Music Plays] She's a good, strict teacher.

She's a strict teacher.

She's a nice, intelligent, pretty, beautiful teacher.

Ms.

Utley is one of my favorite teachers.

When we are in a time where we are engaging in creative ways of learning and thinking and doing, that's revolutionary in terms of connecting students with not just Stem, but with also art and creativity, then they get to create, but they get to think with other people.

That is not.

So where did you guys learn about the jester in the medieval times?

I already had a good idea once.

Mr.

Shemp said that we were going to make medieval stuff, and I think we have an obligatio to really create spaces that are built around collaboration when they graduate, need these skills, they need to be able to collaborate.

We're able to start exposing them to this level.

In fifth grade this year, we had a project which combined art and music and computers, and we build around this idea of a medieval theme.

The whole grade picks a project that they have to do in each grade does it, and then it goes in the art show on display, and then all the parents come.

I made a juggling gesture.

We have a ton of things happening in grades K to five, and we work our way up through cloud based learning and robotics and programing.

And instead of doing word processing and keyboarding, we're moving in a different direction and challenging the kids to add coding to it.

And the idea of digital citizenship and thing that are going to help make them a more well-rounded technology user.

I learned how to build stuff and how to like more how to program within the Fox Chapel School District.

We have such a range of learners.

We have our highest exceptional learners, and we have a fair amount of struggling learners and everything in between.

Same kind of idea with the motor and everything.

When we look at project based learning, we look at all these different initiatives that we have going on and really working within the collaboration across curriculum for me and other students, if if they wanted to go in a field with art and technology, obviously it would be quite helpful if they wanted to make a robot one day, just more advanced.

Because if you enter a career range, like involving tech or art or the combination of both, then it's definitely going to give you a hand and you could probably get a better career in life and afford more things by giving them these opportunities where they're able to collaborate and they're able to learn, and they're able to have multiple experiences when it comes time for them to graduate and go to college, and they're able to go through and know how to work in a group and work as a team and be a leader.

I worked with a partner.

He was okay.

I was working with my wonderful partner, Rachel Nest.

Me and her were working on a castle that is right up front.

Did it work the first time you did it?

No.

At first I kept touching the other side, but we eventually got it.

You figured it out.

Very great success for them.

I mean, you learn from your mistakes, you grow from your mistakes.

And kids in any other school go through that same process.

It's nice because I have the kids from K to 5th grade, and every year we add a little bit more and a little bit more.

And the idea is when they go to the middle school, they should be ready for anything those teachers throw at them when it comes to technology.

And it also, on a personal level, the idea of challenging yourself and learning to work with others is big, and you're going to have to do that for the rest of your life.

And it's an exciting time to think differentl about how we engage young people and even our teachers and their families in this enterprise called education.

I did not send you the quiz yet, boys and girls.

Hands down as a teacher, this is my favorite program to use in the classroom.

And hands down it's my students favorite.

[Music Plays] Just now candidly and see how it works.

It was interesting and weaknesses and seen our scores can d is a personalized learning tool.

It's intended to give real time feedback on student performing through quick check for understanding quizzes that give the teacher that insight into grasp of new material before they move on to new topics.

What's our average Kamara, and what does that tell me?

90%!

I can automatically see right away where my kids are struggling.

It places them on different grade levels based on how well they did.

It really levels the playing field.

So if a kid was in a traditional classroom desk in a row, teacher just teaching to the middle, those kids who are struggling would never get that that extra help.

The same thing for kids who need enrichment can.

Duluth can speed up that process of learning.

That's the hardest one because there's more than one.

A key part of buildin a personalized learning strategy is to have real time information about the performance of your children.

The teachers must have that to get a good handle on what their kids need.

Tools like can do have emerged to give the teachers just that.

Personalized learning is fundamentall about a shift from one size fits all traditional classroom to a more student centered approach, where what we teach and how we teach it is more flexibly adapted to meet the needs of each student.

Which number did you miss?

Four!

Four?!

Okay, so what does that tell me as a teacher?

We got to work on this more.

One of the exciting things about personalized learning is that it applies to kids from all backgrounds, in schools, of all types, and there's no expensive resources necessary to do this.

In terms of volume, some of the school districts who are struggling financially, we just can't add a reading teacher.

We can't add an additional kindergarten teacher to lower the numbers.

So if you have a class of 27, 28 kids and a kindergarten or first grade classroom using technology to meet the needs of all kids, that's really our only option.

It's a group of educators from around southwestern PA that have gotten together to try to tackle a pretty complex set of changes associated with this movement to personalize learning.

So the Personalized Learning Network emerged from what had been a grassroots, informal gathering of educators who said, we need to change.

So I created a four point quiz on volume, but I want to see how well you can do this on your own.

Right now, it's helping me how to find out new ways to do different subjects and different techniques.

Did you guys see that you self corrected that that I have to tell you what you did wrong.

Did I take my red pen, my handy dandy red pen mark and X and say you added instead of multiplied and you only did two dimensions instead of three dimensions?

Did you figure out that on your own?

Yes.

How did they make you feel when you were able to work through that?

It made me feel that that we don't always need somebody to help us.

I have seen phenomenal results based on.

After using candy for a year and having a streamlined vision of their focus and instruction, I've definitely seen an increase in their scores.

We get to like look like what question we missed.

It does look like we did to miss it and like we after we look at it, we go back and we try to redo it over.

[Music Plays] How did that make you feel Isaac?

Smart that you can do this on your own.

That's what it's called personalized learning.

When people ask about Wilkinsburg School District, I don't think we get credit where credit is due because there's amazing things going on in this school district.

The teachers are really honing in on what our students need individually, grade level wise.

Personalized learning has taken off in the last 10 to 20 years.

When we talk about personalized learning, we have to have a really clear understanding that it's personalized learning.

But it is not individual learning.

Every type of learning experience is collaborative.

We want you to work on creating the base thing that will work.

The smallest possible version of your program that is runnable.

All Star Code is a nonprofit computer science education program based in New York, expanded to Pittsburgh last summer.

Have you done the bouncing ball yet?

Teaching high school boys of color, computer science and exposing them to personally into the tech industry, both in New York and and Pittsburgh.

So CHS is another language that we're going to learn.

And all star code is at the forefront of creating minority children who really have aspirations in the tech field, whether that be computer science, entrepreneurship, anything.

And they're really helping a lot of a lot of teenagers.

I heard you talking about a grid of canvases.

Yeah, right.

The founder is Christina Lewis.

She was at a tech function, and there were about a thousand people.

And she said that she didn't see anybody of color in the sort of arena.

We have students from 17 different schools in the greater Pittsburgh area.

We have 28 total students right now, range from Pittsburgh Public Schools, charter schools, private schools, parochial schools, anywhere from recently graduated to recently, sort of.

What is it?

They finished their freshman summer.

We go to places like Duolingo, Google Colab 18, the BNY Mellon Innovation Center SIM Coach games.

Do you break up in teams to do that?

To help them understand what the tech culture is all about?

Did you make a new photo?

So we have a battleship folder here today.

We're actually starting our own code for making our own version of a battleship game.

When you click a square, it'll change colors.

In here, it's like three different codes for different activities that we did.

So this code was making a Pokéball from Pokémon.

The second and third coats were making different objects move like the.

This second coat was a paintbrush.

Stats have shown that about 10% of the tech industry, or less than our people of color, black and Latino, and less than are.

About 1% of VC startups have a Black and Latino member on their founding team.

So this is to help bridge the gap between those who have and those who have not.

A lot of us are working, playing sports, going to different summer programs, but I feel like it was a better chance to better myself.

So I decided to stay right with my comfort zone.

A lot of our technology is based off of coding, and so if I could get a head start on coding in the future, I might be able to like, be the best at it.

I'm a teaching assistant, so I help out the lead instructor with keeping the kids on track, helping them with their projects, basically providing any assistance they need.

So I did the program last year, so that's why I came back this year.

It's another way of just showing us different opportunities of what we have instead of what we're exposed to in life.

Totally changed my aspirations and what I want to do for a lot of other kids.

I know it decided their college major.

It's the side of the career path they want to go into, and it's it's just a great program in terms of networking with other people, developing soft skills like interview skills, meeting new people, elevator pitches, all of that kind of stuff.

So our site visit today is to SIM Coach Games.

It was founded by somebody who went to CMU.

It's very cool.

I met them in the fall of last year.

They are an educational gaming company.

Some games are about swords and fighting and whatever, but we're still learning things if they're really, really well designed game.

There are clear goals.

Programs like All Star Code will result in a more diverse workforce in the future, or exposing more people, more diverse people younger to, you know, these skills that are going to be needed just to to sort of, I think, be literate in our, in our workplace in the coming years.

That's all you have to do.

Yeah!

Yeah!

How come it wasn't in his mind inside, though?

Hey, he's well, he just walks the bright lights when we know we need to do better.

When we know we need to do more and provide more experiences for students, then we have no other choice but to find a way to make that happen.

Coding technology that is important work.

And so many of our young people, particularly black students in Pittsburgh, are not exposed to the richness of that work.

We can have young black boys coding.

We can have young black boys going to Google.

We can have yellow black boys talking about this work inside of their schools and in communities and designing and creating.

And that's what I want.

It's it's a simple concept, but at the same time it's like really fun, unique as you're in, well, coatings hard, but you don't want to give up on it because will help you out in the future.

Would you mind starting development and growth is something that we should all be striving for, and I think we all do here to learn from the shared wisdom of all of these people.

I'm here.

You get to share your ideas, your inspiration.

You get to collaborate with other educators, like minded educators, spend time lookin closely at everything that we do more than ever before.

It's important for teachers to be learners because they are learning along with their students, every step of the way, and particularly black and brown.

We are at the University of Pittsburgh and we are at the center for Urban Education Summer Educators Forum.

One of the goals of the forum is to really think deeply about education and to think deeply about equity.

Today, we brought togethe educators from across the region to focus on what we call culturally relevant and culturally responsive teaching.

The idea really is to empower, to cultivate practices among teachers that are perhaps more responsive to students with whom they are working.

I have the great pleasure if we work with more than a thousand educators through this forum.

This is the third year.

This is the largest the forum has been.

We need to examine race and racism in schools and in society, because we need to understand race as a social construct.

We need to really affirm positive racial identities.

And I conference like this is saying from the very beginning, fundamentally, relationships are key.

Teacher education programs have to attend to equity and education, and we also have to focus heavily on asking ourselves, what are we doing to prepare our teacher education candidates to enter into any type of schooling environment?

We're going to actually light some torches and dismantle and work to to have a more equitable space.

Part of that is like understanding where kids come from.

Like their story doesn't start when they enter the school building.

But who are they?

That fool being that comes to us?

We are more like, you know, there's not a lot of opportunities for teachers to talk with other teachers.

We spend almost all of our day with students, and so it's a great opportunity to meet with other teachers and learn from each other.

It's great to get these different perspectives so that we can be prepared to give every student what they need.

Just so you know, so far, you guys are fantastic.

Today we're at Quaker Valle Middle School and we are hosting Project Zero Conference here in the Pittsburgh region.

Project zero is a research organization at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Interested in the nature of understanding?

We're interested in how peopl think and learn across contexts.

[Music Plays] It's expensive to travel and to go to Harvard.

And so we started our journey a couple of years ago of trying to bring Harvard here.

It's a natural tendency to look fast, so we need a counterbalance.

We bring in a Harvard researcher that frames our idea to demonstrate what that looks like in practice and all our breakout sessions.

I think this is about our 12th one.

This is my story in like two minutes or less.

This is my third or fourth visit back.

Main reason we come here is to connect with each other, as people, as educators.

And that's the best way to share ideas.

Okay!

What's your name?

My name is Joe.

Okay?

Wilson!

Your Wilson!

She's been involved with projects here.

We can create powerful learning experiences for teachers to learn with and from one another, like at this conference and conferences.

Like them, the more we're sort o creating models for how learning can and should happen with learners in any context.

And if you have any ideas of how, it gives me an opportunity to dig deep into what I actually do and what I've done in the past year, and see new ways and new ways of looking at what I currently teach and how to make it better for my students.

It's hard, hard work, and it's really a craft that you develop over time, and it's something that should be shared.

I think all teachers deserve a little treat every now.

Yeah, exactly.

[Students Clapping] Almost.

When I think about education in the region, there are some challenges and opportunities that I think about.

How are we preparing teachers to really be effective practitioners inside of classroom spaces?

We have to be more open about how we create safe spaces for teachers to think about their practice and take risks.

And you think about how learning used to be, where everybody was desk in a row.

The teacher stood in front of the room and we kind of talked to the to the middle of students and kids who who struggled, struggled, and the kids who needed enrichment never got that.

So really exposing them to a wide variety of materials and curricula and learning just really develops a well-rounded student.

You mixed like art class and computer and science and you put them all together.

And I think it's really great.

We don't use technology every day.

I incorporate it whenever I feel it's possible or it's going to be beneficial.

So the students have a really good balance.

I sure, because I come here to learn and learn new things about how to becom a better person and public often sync of education in terms of action.

I believ that everyone goes into teaching because they can affect change, and they believe they can, and that they seek to mak a difference in someone's lives.

And she helps us a lot.

[Music Plays] I love learning and I love kids, and I love that moment where you can get just to blow a kid's mind, just like, Oh What!

educators are trying to do more of is create situations where students get to build understandings that they can use in real life.

Getting teachers excited to come to work each and every day probably isn't as hard as most people think.

The way that we learned even ten years ago is not the way we learned today.

And we're preparing students for jobs that aren't even in existence yet.

So really exposing them to a wide variety of materials and curricula and learning just really develops a well-rounded student.

Yeah, I like school feeling because we get to learn new things every day.

Everybody glorifies sports and the music industry.

So the Stem field is kind of looked frowned upon basically.

So I feel like giving opportunities like this, it would be a good chance to actually change the game for us and try and change the narrative too.

We got to equalize the playing field when it comes to education in this country, and that's why I'm here.

That's the only reason why I'm here.

I have the world's best job.