A Parent’s Guide to Powerful Teaching with Patrice Bain
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody, to another episode of the Authority Podcast on the Be Podcast Network. Thank you so much for joining us. This should be a wonderful conversation as part of this series of conversations we're having around parent engagement in particular, such a critical topic and something that is worthy of a lot of discussion.
And my guest today Will have a lot of wonderful things to share with us. I'll be speaking with Patrice Bain.
Patrice is a veteran K 12 educator, speaker, and author. As a finalist for Illinois Teacher of the Year and Fulbright Scholar in Europe, she's been featured in national and international podcasts, webinars, presentations, and popular press, including NOVA and Scientific American. Patrice is the co author of Powerful Teaching and the author of A Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching, which reinforces the teaching triangle of student, parent, and teacher collaboration, and that's what we'll be diving into today.
Patrice, welcome to the show. Thank you.
Patrice Bain: Thank you so much for having me, Ross. It's great to be on your show.
Ross Romano: [00:01:00] Yes, it's wonderful to have you here. And as I referenced in the opening, such an important topic here, right? And so I'm really excited to dive into it. And let's start right there with what I kind of mentioned, you know, about this teaching triangle, the student parent teacher piece and how they all fit together.
What's that all about?
Patrice Bain: Well, in my years of teaching, I realized I kind of came up with this idea of the teaching triangle because together learning becomes so powerful. I really included the parents of my students as part of the team. And I worked with parents on learning. Whenever we had any type of meeting, whether it was an open house night, I talked about learning.
When it was parent teacher conferences, I spoke specifically about [00:02:00] how their child learns. So I sent newsletters, I had parent symposiums, and what I realized is we really are a powerful team. When the parents understand learning, they can so reinforce what is happening in the classroom.
Can I talk about learning a little bit?
Ross Romano: Totally.
Patrice Bain: So there's. Three steps to learning, encoding, storage, and retrieval. And encoding is getting information into our heads. Step two is storage. We put it in there, and there it is. But as parents, I tell them there is a third step because how often did you talk to your [00:03:00] child about something and A week later, they give you the deer in the headlights look as if I've never heard you say that before.
Ross Romano: right.
Patrice Bain: And it's because that third step is retrieval, bringing that information back out. And when I talked to parents about these three steps, you know, they kind of think of encoding, getting information in. It's kind of teacher speak, right? But I would tell parents. You are masters at encoding. You have been doing this since your baby was born.
When children eventually come to school, you know, everything that they know, so much of that has been encoded by parents. Beliefs, family lore, how to tie shoes, recognizing letters, and so. When parents realize [00:04:00] that they are really important partners in the learning process, that teaching triangle is just really important.
Ross Romano: Yeah. What's the traditional state of the teaching triangle, you know, in your observation and in your even discussions with educators, right, colleagues throughout your career? I mean, how much Attention and emphasis is typically being placed on thinking about these three, these three stakeholder groups right in their interactions and the importance of really servicing that.
Patrice Bain: Well, it has to be intentional. A downside. To working with parents I don't, that might be a little strong, but because we have all been through an [00:05:00] educational system and we survived and got through, that often parents will rely on the very strategies that they used. Growing up, but we now know so much more about learning and like the, like I said earlier, those three steps, simply being able to have Our children retrieve that information is so paramount, and there are specific strategies that can be done at home that really reinforce learning, increase learning and knowledge retention.
So I think it's absolutely vital to have that discussion with parents, or if your teacher does not intentionally involve the [00:06:00] parents there, there are resources available. I wrote, you know, The Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching. My, my stipulation with the publisher, it had to be less than 10 and had to be less than 100 pages because I didn't want it to be overwhelming.
I want it to be just a conversation, but there are tips in there that take us beyond the way we learned, the way we studied research based strategies and explain those so parents can really understand and use them at home.
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Ross Romano: HAve you seen any perspective shifts over the past? Two years, either from the educator side or the parent side. I mean, this book, I believe, was published in the early part of 2020 which means, of course, you were working on it before that, right? And obviously you were [00:07:00] of the mind that parents needed to be engaged and have knowledge about how learning occurs even before that, right?
But, as it went later into that year, 2020 and 2021, and everything that happened with the pandemic, remote learning, and a lot of shifts and parents having new views into the classroom from that POV, right? And then as things progressed, there's been a lot of debate and discussion about You know, parents who either do or don't feel like they're being involved in what's happening in schools.
Have there been some shifts occurring particularly regarding maybe a broader awareness of the importance of getting this right, or of saying, you know what, this is something that everybody wasn't always thinking about before or considering a necessity, but now.. [00:08:00] Maybe we're seeing where it's not only an opportunity to build upon learning, but it really is.
It's an expectation that parents are wanting to know more about what, what's happening with learning,
Patrice Bain: Yeah, I think the pandemic opened a lot of eyes. And I think a trend began where parents were able to see more, whether, you know, if it was virtual learning, you know, parents were able to kind of see more into classrooms. But it didn't necessarily strengthen the learning opportunities at home.
Again, like I mentioned, too often, you know, parents try to do those strategies that they were used to. But we know through research, like, like, What is one of [00:09:00] the worst ways to study by rereading your notes or to look at what you highlighted or, you know, how often do we say Oh, go look over your notes? We know through research that those are not good strategies. We have to have ways that our students, our children, are retrieving or pulling out that information. And I have very simple things that can be done at home. Just, for example, instead of saying, when your child comes home, How was your day? Well, we know we never get a good answer asking that question, but instead, you know, asking something like Why did that science experiment turn out like that? Or where did you go in history today? Can you [00:10:00] tell me a story? Just by rephrasing the types of questions we ask our children really helps them.
continue to retrieve that information. There's something that is called the forgetting curve, and it's, oh my goodness, it's off, off hand. It's so disappointing because we know that as soon as we start learning something, we start to forget it. And yet, we know there's ways to overcome that, and if, within an hour, we already have started to forget what we learned, and if we wait a day, we've lost over 20 percent of what was learned, and we can help set that aside By doing that retrieval, by asking those questions at home or if we were to paint your room, how would we know how much [00:11:00] paint to buy?
You know, being able to rephrase, um, questions about things that they're learning helps that forgetting curve go away and helps reinforce learning. And it's those kinds of tips. thAt are really important for that teaching triangle to, to reinforce learning at school and at home.
Ross Romano: Right. And as you described it, you know, the amount of practice and repetition and reinforcement of content and to make it Permanent, right? To stick. It requires that additional time outside of school because there's just not enough time within the academic day to spend enough time on all of the individual concepts [00:12:00] to make each of them stick when you move on to the next thing and the next thing.
And that's. A part that maybe, I don't know if that's frequently reflected on a lot. That's, it's not complicated to understand why that would be the case. But it's, you know, it's just thinking, well, there's only so much time. And there's all these things on which. Students are going to be assessed and sometimes even the short term proficiency of what shows up on the test or an assessment may be, may not actually be Representative of, was that information really stored for the long term, or is it, you know, if we haven't spent enough time reinforcing it and making sure that we really deeply understand it in [00:13:00] six months from now, when the student goes to retrieve that, are they going to realize, I don't really remember it anymore because I had to learn it so quickly.
And then we did the test and then we moved along to the next thing.
Patrice Bain: Ross, that is like, so, such a great example of often what happens. So I've talked about retrieval, which is pulling information out. Another I call them power tools. We call them power tools in our book. Is spacing that in order to have that information stick, we need to space information out. So when I would talk about learning to parents, I would say, Okay, so we talked about, let's say the French Revolution.
In October, but you're going to see me bringing up questions about it again in November and perhaps in December because [00:14:00] I'm spacing out that retrieval, which helps get that into our long term memory. Another power tool I want to talk about is metacognition and to me, I define that is differentiating between what you know and what you don't.
And to me, this is one of the most important tools that we have, but it is often overlooked. Too often, students and our children don't get the opportunity to test what they know. Before the test comes around and they study by reviewing their notes and rereading a chapter and then they go in and take a test and realize, Oh, I don't know that and there are so many techniques and strategies available that [00:15:00] help students test their own metacognition to know what they know and what they don't so often Our children will study what they already know, like, I know this, and it brings up an illusion of confidence.
So they think they're ready for an exam, and they don't. And how frustrating when as parents, we see our children study. They knew the information that night, and they go take the test, but that forgetting curve means that they have forgotten it that next day and the students get so discouraged and the parents get discouraged and yet help is here.
We know just what to do to alleviate those problems.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And so I think at this point, I think three of the four power tools have been mentioned, retrieval, spacing, and then the metacognition fourth being [00:16:00] interleaving. And you know, listeners, you may or may not know this, but we've referenced this book is the parent's guide to powerful teaching.
And it's in reference to the book, Powerful Teaching, right? Which lays out these teaching strategies and these power tools and What is the importance of parents understanding both parts of this? How learning happens, as you mentioned earlier, with the encoding, storage, retrieval, and then how teaching is that and what the teacher is, you know, how this teacher is strategizing and what they're attempting to achieve and how that process what does understanding that help a parent to be able to do,
Patrice Bain: When I worked with the parents of my students, something I always said to them was, I have your child for one year. But you have them forever, and you are their greatest advocate. [00:17:00] So, regardless if... Your child's teacher uses research based strategies or not. You, as the parent, are the constant that can keep this going from year to year.
And I think that is powerful and also really important. And so for parents to understand just the basics of learning and how to use some of these strategies at home simply by asking questions. The strategies that I developed are ones that could easily be used at home as well. And I would like to say, there is a site that I would like to recommend and that is www.powerfulteaching.org.
And if you go to the [00:18:00] resources section, you can download templates of my strategies that you could just download these and use them at home. Let me give. An example before, and let me give you a little background of how this started. When I had been teaching about 12 or 13 years, I was flummoxed because some of my students did really well.
But some didn't, and I couldn't figure out why. I'm the teacher, and everybody is hearing what I'm saying, so why do some kids learn really well and others not? And there was no place for me to go. By this time, I had already had my master's in teaching, and there was no place for me to go, because Up until 2006, research on how we learn was done at [00:19:00] universities, with college students, in laboratories.
Up until 2006! And the information was all tucked away in these journals that I didn't have access to. And so, this... incredible opportunity happened where I met two cognitive scientists, Dr. Mark McDaniel and Dr. Henry Roediger, who wrote the book, Make It Stick, which is a fabulous book. And they wanted to research how do children learn in an authentic classroom.
Not on a college campus, but in a classroom where there's fire drills and, you know, interruptions and being sick and that classroom was mine. And so I worked with cognitive scientists for, oh gosh, about 15 years in really. Helping understand how children learn [00:20:00] and how to develop the strategies.
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Patrice Bain: Another book I'd like to recommend is by Dan Willingham, and it's Why Don't Students Like School? And it's a fabulous book that also talks about learning, but he has a quote in there that is Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn. Let me say that one more time.
Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn. So, if your child goes to the very best school in the country, or not. If your child speaks English or not. If your child is in Japan or the United States, children are more alike than different. And so [00:21:00] when we can grasp just the simple concepts of how we learn, we can use those at home with our kids.
So let me get back to an example I was giving. Before I did the research, I would have my students do flashcards. How often have we done flashcards? You get a term, you look it up in the back of the book, you write it down, and you repeat, and you really don't know them. And so, I changed, one of my strategies is retrieval cards, where I would give the students either a definition or a term, and I have what I developed, I call the four steps of metacognition.
And the first step is simply going through the terms, do you know it or not? Put a star if you know it, [00:22:00] a happy face if you know it, a question mark if you don't, and you don't have any notes or book open. Step two, now go ahead and answer all those that you starred. Step three, now open your books, look up those that you didn't know, write those down.
And step four is then... Verify that what you thought you knew, you did. So those four steps. So from flashcards, I have these retrieval cards where the students would go through those four steps. Now, something so easy to do at home is to Make your own retrieval cards, get index cards or download my template.
And when your child is finished with homework for the night, have them simply write down a term. Or a definition, and that's it, put it away.
Ross Romano: Right.
Patrice Bain: And then a few days [00:23:00] later, have them, do you know it? You know, and using that, you're using retrieval, you're using spacing, you're using metacognition, and the students absolutely get this information into their long term learning.
Very easy to do at home.
Ross Romano: Would you like to see our schools of education, universities, teacher training, and then, you know, ongoing professional learning, providing more research based training to educators?
Patrice Bain: Absolutely. There are learning myths that are pervasive out there. Things like my child is left brained or right brained. No, that is not correct. There's no research that backs you up on that. We use our whole brain, or another is learning styles, you know, my child is visual or [00:24:00] auditory or, you know, kinetic, you know, there is no research that backs those up, yet, often some of these learning myths are still taught in our teacher education programs.
I am on a mountaintop shouting that. We need to get what we know about learning into our teacher ed programs to, to have it readily available to parents, because what happens is our students become so successful. Let me share a little story. Every single year comes second quarter after the report cards.
I would have students come up to me and say, Mrs. Bain, I have an A or I have a B in your class. And I would say, I know. But you would see [00:25:00] their whole demeanor change. And they would say, but I never get good grades. And follow it up with, I get D's and F's. And then they would slink down and say, I'm not smart. How can we have educational systems where students internalize failure by the time they are 11 years old? I would look at that same student and say, but look at you now. The only difference is now you know how to learn. And that student by the end of the year was absolutely soaring and internalizing success.
I. I fear that to so many of our struggling students, it is, learning is like this huge party and they never receive the invitation. All we have to [00:26:00] do is teach how to learn, and they soar. They are successful. It's all within our possibilities.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I mean, that's a critical point because it happens even earlier than that, right? I mean, can happen at three, four, five, six years old, where there's some... Constant, say, reading, right, where some of the kids are picking it up pretty well, and others are struggling with it, and they already begin to internalize a permanent conception of themselves as being behind or being
Patrice Bain: and it doesn't have to be that way. I had, I taught in a public school and had all students, whether they were in special education classes or gifted classes or, you know, whatever. I had everybody and every single one of my students. [00:27:00] was successful because they learned how to learn. I would like to recommend another book that just came out like in the last couple weeks.
It's called Initium, I N I T I U M, by Emma Turner, who is from England. And so often a lot of the research gears more for maybe fourth grade on up and Emma's book Initium is really for the early childhood that still talks about learning and helps parents with learning, but it's really geared for the younger set.
So, you know, start your kids out at a young age.
Ross Romano: Yeah, absolutely. And and so much of this too, and we're talking about, you know, research [00:28:00] based practice and um, and informing students and parents about teaching and learning. And it connects a lot to a recent conversation I also had with Dr. Kimberly Behrens about her book Blind Spots. And she writes about the need for more behavioral science to be put in teaching, right?
And a lot about the myths that first persist and the myths that we create to explain why something's not working, right? Instead of looking at it and saying, well, maybe this is not an effective practice. exactly what you described with certain things that are not supported by research that are taught in the schools of education, right?
And that by the time that educator gets into the classroom to teach um, you know, they're not even really thinking about whether or not those things they learned are true. It's just in [00:29:00] their head at that point, right? And, you know, the thing that I had mentioned is, you know, the connotation of the blind spot being that it's not intentional.
It's not um, it's not a, it's not a result of neglect or malintent. It's something that's structural. It's just built in, it's there, and until you're aware that it exists, you can't reposition yourself to see around it and say, wait, what am I missing? What's over there? The same way as you're driving your car, and once you're used to your car, you know, what are the hard angles to see, and I have to stick my head this way or that way, right?
And these things create these blind spots among teachers because it's just.. They're operating on the assumption that it's the case because that's what they were taught and why wouldn't it be right? you know, why would they be teaching it in the university or in the PD if it didn't work and then [00:30:00] You're mounting frustration because well, why are these kids struggling?
Doing all these things that I'm supposed to be doing but some of them are just ineffective. And then, you know, and your experience, of course, with the research base, you know, a lot of that were things that you, opportunities arose, you had to go out and seek yourself. It wasn't same thing that everybody was being told.
But, you know, what happens in your view when some of those, I guess, When there can be a high prevalence of times when educators maybe don't know what they don't know, not because of anything that they're doing wrong, but because of systemic failures, right? To say, okay, you know, because there's certain an infrastructure that has perpetuated [00:31:00] over the decades that that, the things that we're not even thinking to question, because they seem to be the most standard baseline teachings, and yet they may be the ones that are the most inaccurate you know, I, it's not even on my radar.
Patrice Bain: Yeah, I think a really important, well, first of all, I did a national parent survey and I asked several questions, but the one I'm going to talk about is what would help you most to, oh shoot, how did I ask the question? What would help you most with your child's learning? I think it was something like that.
But the top two answers were to understand how my child learns and how best to help my child study. [00:32:00] Those were kind of the two things that was the incentive to have me write that book. And what I hope parents know is It is perfectly their right to ask a teacher to ask administration on what types of research is professional development based, and it's okay to ask your teacher. What kind of research based strategies will we be using this year? Will you be using with my child this year? That it's okay to ask these questions. And I give professional development All over the country, well, other places too, in England and actually next week I'm working with teachers in Kazakhstan, but I think, you know, I always stress to teachers [00:33:00] to ask, is this evidence based?
Because I know how many years I sat through professional development that was based on some shiny new object, you know, sometimes I called it the fad of the semester club, where something caught somebody's attention, and so they bring it in for professional development, but it wasn't research based, and it didn't help my students learn, and it didn't help me grow as a teacher, and I think we are at a point that because there is so much research available, so much knowledge available, that We really owe it to ourselves to simply ask these questions on what evidence is this based.
Ross Romano: [00:34:00] Yeah. What about the other part of that teaching triangle, the students? You know, how can some of these same conversations be conducted with the learners themselves about how they learn, right? About how you're teaching and having them come to a better understanding of those dynamics.
Patrice Bain: Every single year on the first day, I introduced myself by saying, I'm your teacher and I'm going to teach you how to learn. And I did. And students, when they realize that they are part of the triangle, when they realize that they have an active role to play as well. And the way I would start it was I always started where they could not fail.
For example, you know, I taught them about retrieval right [00:35:00] away. But I would ask questions like What's the latest you slept this summer? Or... What is your least favorite school lunch? You know, something where students are retrieving, but they could not possibly get it wrong. And as, you know, I would ask retrieval questions a good week or two before I ever got to curriculum content, so that they were so used to bringing forth answers.
And then I also worked with metacognition, if you know it or not. And... I had a big sign in my classroom that said it's okay to make mistakes. That's the way we learn. And I explained to my students that, that I welcomed mistakes. It's not a case where you want the floor to open up and you drop in, but instead errors and [00:36:00] mistakes are like roadmaps.
It just shows you the direction you need to take. And I think when students feel but they're in a really safe environment, that it's okay to make mistakes, that being able to figure out what they know versus what they don't, so they can capitalize and spend time on what they don't, they become so invested.
In the process, my students truly were a part of that triangle, and when parents are on board, too, students understand how important retrieval is. So when a parent asks a question about, oh, tell me about where you went in history today, the student realizes, Oh! I get to have a fun way to retrieve what we learn.
It's [00:37:00] just, it makes so much sense, and everyone is a winner.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. How does that that metacognition exercise, I mean, does that students to really have a. A better understanding of their own knowledge. And, you know, and I'm particularly I'm wondering about students who maybe it increases their confidence level by showing them that there are some things that they weren't giving themselves credit for.
Right. And I'm thinking about, you know, I do, high performance coaching with professionals and a variety of different kinds of roles and then the early going of that process. We typically go through an exercise where we go through all the different areas of work, career, life, family, you know, hobbies, all these kind of things and kind of map them out and see how they're going and what are some goals related to them and you know how to.
A couple of recent conversations lately where we would go through that and say, okay, [00:38:00] well, what's your, what's standing out to you here? What's your takeaway from this? And what I heard back was, I'm realizing that things aren't going as bad as I thought they were, right? Most of these areas are pretty good, and there's one or two that were sort of overshadowing everything else, and there's room for improvement there, but on the whole, right, there's a lot of good stuff going on here.
And I would imagine, for some students, especially as we've talked about, students who have maybe learned, quote unquote learned, to have a lower opinion of themselves, to have less self confidence because they felt they weren't a good learner, that they may go through an exercise and say, No, I don't know this.
I don't know this. I don't know this. But eventually realize, Well, actually, I did know that, or I knew that pretty well.
Patrice Bain: Yes that's absolutely true. And it does boost confidence. It's It's such a win.
Ross Romano: [00:39:00] Yeah, totally. So Patrice, it's been so wonderful to have you here talking about this. And there's of course, I mean, this is a big topic. There's so much more we can go through um, but for our listeners who maybe want to dive in further and learn more and and you've given a lot of great book recommendations already, but where can they learn more about your work, access some other resources that you have?
Patrice Bain: Well, I would like to recommend Powerful Teaching The Parent's Guide. I also have a site at patricebain. com where you can just go and get some more information. There is it's just a very exciting time to be teaching. To be a parent and to realize that, you know, help is right here for us, right here, right now.
And we don't have to see our children struggle. [00:40:00] There are, there is help out there.
Ross Romano: Thank you. Yeah, so, listeners, so the book we most discussed today was A Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching. You can find that at Patrice's website, patricebain. com. You can also find it from JohnCat Educational or Amazon and other places where you buy your books, PowerfulTeaching. org. Patrice also recommended as a place to find more resources.
So we'll put both of those links below. Please do also subscribe to the authority for more in depth author interviews like this one and visit bpodcast. network to learn about all of our 30 plus shows. Patrice Bain, thanks so much for being with us.
Patrice Bain: Thank you so much, Ross. You just, I got to talk about my favorite subjects today, so it was a joy being with you. Thank you.
Ross Romano: Wonderful. Thank you. [00:41:00]
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