Blind Spots with Kimberly Berens
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody, to another episode of the Authority Podcast here on the Be Podcast Network. We're so pleased to have you here with us again. Thank you for joining this conversation. My guest today is Dr. Kimberly Nix Berens. She is a scientist, educator, and founder of Fit Learning.
Kimberly co created a powerful system of instruction based in behavioral science and the technology of teaching, which has transformed the learning abilities for thousands of children worldwide. And her first book, which we're talking about today, is called Blind Spots, Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them.
Kimberly, welcome to The Authority.
Kimberly Berens: thanks so much for having me.
Ross Romano: I wanted to start, I really, I like [00:01:00] the term blind spots and the title of the book, but one of the things I really like about it is that It connotes that there's not malintent or negligence, right, that we come about these blind spots, honestly, but what makes them challenging is that we have to know they exist to make the effort to see them, right?
There's that they're structural. If we have, think about a blind spot in our cars, right? You have to know where it is. You stick your neck in the right direction to say, I really know that I need to see around this because if I just sit in my comfort zone here. There's something I'm missing, right? You know, so when we think about that and the structural cause of these blind spots, what are some of those beliefs and traditions that shape the education system here in the U.
S. That then end up resulting in a variety of blind spots?
Kimberly Berens: Right. Well, there are many of them which I I highlight in my book but I'll what I think I maybe I'll start with the most prominent ones, I would say and one of the most [00:02:00] prominent blind spots out there and again, just to to be clear when I, the blind spots I'm talking about relate to the learning process and how the learning process actually occurs.
From the perspective of behavior science. And so the blind spots that are out there pretty predominantly, one of the biggest ones is the notion that kids acquire skills as a function of their age. So they get older. That means that they're that's why they start performing more complex skills or more complex tasks.
And if kids get older and they don't start performing more complex skills and tasks, that means there must be something wrong with the child. And so that's a really dominant belief that to be honest with you, has its origins in developmental psychology, which has really been have heavily has influenced the education system.
But unfortunately what we know in behavior science and now neuroscience is that's actually not the case that a child's physical age is not the predominant [00:03:00] variable in how or whether they acquire a skill a skill acquisition. Comes as a result of an interaction between a behaving learner and their environments and the neurology that, that goes along with that process and that it's actually unrelated to physical or chronological age.
So that's one of the ones that, that causes a lot of issues. in schools because kids are advanced to higher grade levels because they turned a year older, not because they've actually truly mastered the foundational repertoire necessary to succeed at that next grade level, but they're expected to succeed because they're older.
But that actually doesn't predict that they're going to be successful. What predicts success is true mastery and the prerequisite skills required to do the higher level skill. So that's one of the ones I would say that's a big blind spot out there that impacts. A lot of failure on the part of learners in the school system.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and certainly that's one of the the major and if not the major you know, institutional factors in the way that our [00:04:00] education system is designed, right? It's around age, grade levels are associated with age levels and and I don't know if this part is specifically part of your research, but certainly I'm sure it's something you've observed in schools with students is how quickly That you know, tradition or that, that institutional belief begins to impact students beliefs about themselves, right?
And the kid who at age five or six is not as proficient in Reading or whatever skill we say you're supposed to be able to know at that age, then that child internalizes the fact that there's something wrong with them, that they're behind, and it need not be the case because while maybe most kids at that age are at a certain level, it's not a problem.
So they may spontaneously develop those skills in six months but yet by that time they've already formed this belief of themselves that [00:05:00] there's something they can't do.
Kimberly Berens: Well, and that's, I mean, I will tell you my, throughout my 30 year career working with learners that's one of the most devastating impacts that this has on a child is when kids are when we're very obsessed. as a culture with normalizing or norming people into categories, It's something we love to do as human beings. We love to organize the world according to similarity and category. And so that's rampant in developmental psychology and the whole notion of development. And so kids are kids are supposedly they all follow the same trajectory. And they're all supposed to do the same things at the same time.
And then when they don't, which actually is a myth, By the way, and then when they don't do those things, instead of evaluating the environment in which that child is learning and evaluating whether or not there's things that could be modified or changed about the learning environment to accelerate skill acquisition that's actually not the first [00:06:00] thought.
The first thought is on the parents part, it's Why is my child not not doing as much as their friend Johnny? That means something's wrong with my kid. Or it's, if it's in a school setting, it's there must, that child must have a learning disability. Or may not must not be as bright.
And so it's immediately the knee jerk reaction in our culture is to, is always kind of going, go inside the person, right? And blame the person for something flawed in their, whatever it may be that people believe is the cause of learning IQ, intelligence, whatever the myth is, rather than understanding what it really is, which is a very very clearly understood scientific process of, which Behaving repeatedly in a specific way and having that behavior followed by reinforcement until the process that occurs behaviorally and neurologically has the time to take place, and that skill is actually learned and mastered.
And if kids don't have the opportunity to truly master skills in that way, or if they're not receiving [00:07:00] adequate instruction in the classroom that's the primary reason why kids fail, not Because they have something wrong with their ability to learn but the first thing people do and the first thing kids tend to do is blame themselves or look at what's wrong with the kid, rather than what's wrong with the educational environment or the instructional environment, which is devastating because that's a lifelong.
You know, I have, I've worked with adult learners in my career and I have plenty of adult colleagues and friends who created a story about themselves as a writer or a reader or somebody who can't do math, like that story about you having I'm not good at math. I'm not a good writer.
I'm not a good reader. You know, that starts in the early primary grades. And that's a lifelong belief. People actually have about themselves that they have fundamentally something missing in their DNA that's prevented them from being good at those skills, which is incorrect. I mean, they just didn't adequately learn and master those skills.
So it's, it is a tragic outcome of that system and [00:08:00] it's the very, it's very, it's the common, it's the most common explanation for failure is that there is something wrong with that learner's ability to learn.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and it also I think that's so representative of why it, these things become blind spots, right? Because when there's these historical ways of organizing and grouping and the way things are done traditionally, and it persists over such a long period of time. lose perspective on the fact that any of these ways of doing groupings are arbitrary, right?
The fact that you know, I don't know if this specifically is the case, but it's just an example that For example, perhaps a three and a half year old and a four and a half year old are closer developmentally than a three year old and a three and a half year old, but but they're going to be grouped according to that three, four, five those round numbers, things like that.
That's like, well, it's Ultimately, it's all invented, [00:09:00] right? What's a year? What makes it an age? It's all these arbitrary things but once we get so used to it, we believe that there's some specific inherent logic to it other than just our desire as a species to impose order on things in a way that, that may not actually be you know, scientific.
Kimberly Berens: Well, I think it's also misleading because it. In large part, kids physical development does seem quite similar because to be honest with you, human children are interacting with their environment in a non verbal, physical way very similarly when you Think about how they learn to walk learn to crawl, learn to walk, learn to open things, learn to pick up and drink from a cup, hold a fork those kinds of things are what I call direct acting skills, meaning that they're directly shaped by the physical environment, right?
Like the feedback for whether or not it's a correct response [00:10:00] is provided by the environment. I mean, if a child. you know, doesn't pick up the cup properly, then they won't pick up the cup. And that means that they won't be able to drink the drink. And so the environment shapes those responses. And so that that, that's why when you have that kind of direct acting environmental impact, it seems like it's, it, these kids are following the same path.
But when you're talking about skills that are more cognitive in nature that almost, that require a mediator of some sort, like for instance, there's nothing in the physical environment that's going to directly reinforce the response four to two plus two. You know, that, that's why we need teachers.
That's why we need coaches because those are the skills that need a mediator to tell, to provide that feedback, like that's correct and that's incorrect. And so since kids do tend to have the same, similar opportunities to engage in the physical environment with when you're talking about basic motor skills, it's sometimes that kind of carries over into these other skill areas, which actually aren't the same.
[00:11:00] And so there's, it's not a surprise that, for instance, Kids who grow up with two musician parents tend to have the opportunity to learn music early on in their lives, right? You know, cause it's, why? Because there's, that's, that those opportunities to practice and learn those skills are available in that household.
And similarly, if you're born to like scientist parents or mathematician parents it's a high probability that your parents are probably going to be getting you involved in math. at an early age because that's something that is important to them, right? So we forget how important it is for kids to actually have the opportunity to practice and learn skills for those skills to be learned and mastered, right?
Right? It's not just by accident or luck or talent that sometimes you get these kids or even if they're not musicians, but somehow You know, their child playing violin is profoundly important for this family. And so they ensured that opportunity was available. So it's, it is what kids have the opportunity to learn in their [00:12:00] worlds and how well how much practice they are provided to, to really learn them.
That, that really predicts, that's why you have some young. Very young children who are masters at instruments and it has nothing to do they're nine years old and they play more fluently than a lot of adults. That's not because of some inborn talents or that's because of the way they've practiced and how much time they've spent practicing and how good that practice has been and the kind of coaching they've received on that practice.
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Ross Romano: Makes me think of a totally the separate topic around that you know, the scarcity of Time or at least the way we perceive the scarcity of time as contrasted with the number of different things we need to teach and learn and the rush from one thing to the next that can very well prevent the amount of time spent practicing and really,
Kimberly Berens: Oh, and you're landing on another very important [00:13:00] blind spot. And so as the world has evolved and we've learned there's more and more that we've discovered as human beings that we have to pass down to children via instruction. You know, that's unfortunately translated to the educational the, I call it the educational establishment.
And the form of, we have to expose children to more and more content at earlier, at earlier and earlier ages which is why you have kindergartners, for instance, who are being expected to write in journals and engage in kind of scientific thinking when these kids are at the level where they need to be mastering fundamental skills, like I can find letters and sponic sounds and sounding out words and holding a pencil and engaging in early numeracy skills, but because the, there's again this belief system that if we expose kids to stuff, that something will stick and that our job as educators is to expose kids to as much [00:14:00] as possible, which actually is erroneous.
And it's not only erroneous from the behavior science. S research and from the neuroscience research. So that's not how learning and mastery works. You know, you don't master anything by being exposed to it once or twice, and then being tested on it and moving on, that no one masters anything that way at all.
But it's the belief. But so not only is it contraindicated in, in two very prominent scientific fields of learning, it's also contra indicated in our proficiency rates in the United States. You know, when you think about that is actually the pro. predominant tradition in American schools is exposure.
You know, that's why there's state standards and teachers are responsible to it's like a checklist. They're responsible to, to introduce you know, all of these concepts during the school year. And they have to, that's a requirement. And it's not about how the learners perform or master that content.
That's not the requirement. The requirement is that the teachers have exposed the students to [00:15:00] it, right? And so that, that's, that is the primary manner in which schools are designed. And we now, since COVID, I mean, it was 60% below proficiency prior to COVID, now we're close to 70 percent of American school children who are below proficiency in all academic subjects.
So if exposure to more and more content was the solution, then I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in where a majority of students are below proficiency. And also we have a very small amount of kids who are functioning at the advanced level at any grade. So far less than 10 percent of American kids are scoring at the advanced level by the time they graduate, which is horrifying.
So, so not only is it scientifically contraindicated in, in behavior science and neuroscience, that exposing people to stuff doesn't produce learning and mastery, It's also contraindicated by our educational outcomes that are being evaluated on a cycle in the United States. So, so the [00:16:00] point is, this is a belief system.
It's a belief system that, oh, we've got to expose kids to more stuff, but there's no evidence that actually works. And there's a large amount of evidence that it actually doesn't work. But the efforts to change those practices are very difficult because of. The fact that it's an ideology, it's a belief system running the education system in America, rather than it being based in science and evidence and pragmatism, which is unfortunate you know, we're, and it's only getting worse since these and that's not going to improve when you think about climate change and pandemics, there are going to be more and more disruptions to the education process to schooling.
In America and all over the world, like this is going to be become kind of a normal thing that schools are going to have to shut down in various regions due to some kind of climate disaster or whatever it may be. And so we have a very fragile population of students, and clearly, because there [00:17:00] wasn't a lot of resilience there in terms of their learning outcomes as a result of a pandemic and.
And the fragility of students is heavily related to the fact that they're not mastering to like a level of automaticity that we talk about in behavior science called fluency, which is in the vernacular and people know that term, but in behavior science, it's a technical term. And it means a level of mastery that is that, predicts neurological permanence of skills, the ability to use a skill for learning something more difficult, and the ability to perform a skill under any conditions, even distracting ones or stressful ones.
So fluency is a true measure of mastery, meaning that skill is in that learner's repertoire forever and can be used easily to learn something more difficult. But kids aren't acquiring levels of mastery in elementary school and really critical skills, and so that's why these disruptions.
Are very detrimental because kids haven't mastered anything. You know, they've been exposed to lots of stuff, but that's not what retention, that doesn't produce [00:18:00] retention or long term memory. You know, exposing people to things for a short period of time and moving on, that doesn't produce long term memory.
And so you have kids who, who show great very significant declines in performance as a function of these kinds of disruptions and an instruction. So it is a problem, and it does need to be addressed, which is why I wrote my book in the first place, because, which is hilarious, because I wrote the book before COVID, and then it was released right when COVID happened in the early 20 in the fall of 2020, and I just, it was shocking, like how this was a real That was a real interesting moment for education because we were faced with a lot of things that I think we hadn't been faced with before, obviously, and also the opportunity for parents to be on the front lines of what was actually occurring in their, in instruction, because their kids were online at home, and parents got to see what classroom instruction really entails, and to be honest with you, there was a lot of alarm About that, [00:19:00] about the lack of engagement, the lack of attending, kids not being engaged, not attending, not learning anything and to be honest with you, it's really the first time parents have been able to, like, be in the classroom with their kids on a regular basis, right, and really see what happens in classrooms.
So, sorry, that was a really long winded soapbox
Ross Romano: No, I mean, it's a really important point because, and it's something that you referenced music earlier it applies to sports, it applies to all kinds of skills, that if you have truly achieved fluency in the fundamentals, you can always, perform in any circumstance and you know it to me it's kind of like fluency you know fundamentals plus imagination is what allows you to build and to do other skills but you have to have the fundamentals first and or else you have what i assume is kind of a an oxymoron or paradox but temporary mastery right as we move quickly through school oh i got an a in this subject and then two years [00:20:00] later i don't remember anything about it because
Kimberly Berens: implies, which is very true, and that implies that A wasn't a reliable measure of mastery at all which it isn't letter grade.
Ross Romano: because I, because once, once you achieve that grade, then you stop learning about that subject, or you never revisit the things that you learned. And and I think it's totally consistent with what most people would understand to be the purpose of education to be that we can't possibly, that there's no successful person that ever, like, stopped learning in 12th grade, never learned anything else the rest of their life and their life was a success, right?
I mean, the purpose of that the school system is that it prepares us with the knowledge that we need to continue to learn new things to be successful, but. That it's being misapplied, that they're trying to cram too many different things in there and not spending enough time on the as you said, the automaticity, the things [00:21:00] where when you don't feel like your brain is working, you're still able to do that when you're exhausted or you're stressed, right, or you're under duress, whatever the circumstance may be it could be academic skills, test anxiety, it could be your, you know.
Playing basketball and you're totally exhausted. It could be you're in the military and you're in the middle of conflict and you have all these things happening and you need to be able to execute, right? And that's why in those. in those situations, it's drill. It's repeat, repeat, do it and do it again until it's just in there.
And you can pull that out at any time. But you know, and the other thing that I definitely wanted to get to is I part of what allows these blind spots to persist is our impulse to explain rather than understand, I think, right. And the creation of myths that. They say, well, if this isn't happening, if this isn't working, it's because of this, versus and [00:22:00] explaining a way, what, without actually changing the belief, versus investigating and interrogating, well, is this belief accurate?
You know, where do these myths come from and what's the, what what do they cause?
Kimberly Berens: Well, I mean, and there again, there's so many myths out there, but I'll say that one of the the myth that if a learner struggles and fails, that it has something to do with their neurology, right? Like that there's an immediate. A belief that a learner has something wrong with them neurologically, either maybe just a low iq, they just weren't born very bright, or they have a diag quote unquote diagnosable learning problem.
You know that comes Again, all of these myths are propagated by. actually specific disciplines in the world. And so, for instance, modern psychology is very responsible for learning disabilities being a almost knee jerk explanation for a learner failing [00:23:00] to appear Succeed academically in school and the medical establishment is not innocent of this either because although the medical model, the disease model is used quite well in medicine you go to the doctor and you have symptoms, sore throat, fever, body aches.
And the doctor makes an assumption, well, from the symptomology I'm observing it's likely that you have strep throat. But then what does the doctor do? The doctor orders a strep culture, and then the strep culture verifies that their observation of the symptomology and the patient's physiological symptoms align with a test that measured The the bacteria, the Streptococcus bacteria in the body.
Ross Romano: So, Kimberly, you referenced a little earlier that statistic about 60 percent of students graduating below proficiency, and you know, obviously one of these things, especially with big numbers like that, is that the statistics can be overwhelming, and it leaves us saying, [00:24:00] what am I really supposed to do about this?
But, of course you've matched up your knowledge of those stats with your actual work over the years in schools and seeing what that means in practice. I'm wondering if you have any and you share some of these in the book, right, of those stories that stand out of those blind spots and action of saying, okay, this is what's really happening here and this is why I need to dig into this.
Kimberly Berens: Yeah and that's a big question. And I always feel bad when I'm interviewed or I feel like I'm the bearer of bad news for the public often, because unfortunately a lot of people aren't even aware of those statistics, even though they're publicly available. I mean, I encourage all your listeners who are interested in learning more to go to the NAEP website, which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
It's conducted every, on a cycle. And those data are publicly available. So the public is welcome to inform themselves over the state of affairs and education, but [00:25:00] that was a side note. But what I'll say is I think one of the most important things for us to do as for the public to do and for people in education to do is to really step back and evaluate practices that are traditions.
Versus practices that are informed by evidence of producing an effective outcome, and I really have to say that's the number one kind of biggest missing in education is that it doesn't operate like other scientific institutions that are guided by really the pragmatic practices. Thank you.
Philosophy, which is, there's a goal, and then there's evidence collected around whatever the problem is baseline evidence is collected, and then there's a goal of the direction of change, like if it's a cancer cell, then we want to reduce those. If it's reading, we want to increase that, right?
So there's a goal and you have a, you have an understanding of what direction you want to, what direction of [00:26:00] change you're trying to produce, and then you systematically implement vary, change variables. So you systematically intervene on that phenomenon, and then you systematically evaluate the effects of that intervention and determine if those, if that intervention effectively accomplished your goal, and if it didn't.
Then you change something again and you continually use evidence to guide your what you're manipulating in the world. And that's, it's helpful when you have a scientific underpinning on your side. And I think that's also what's missing from education is that there's educational research, which usually involves like large end studies with lots and lots of kids and statistics are used.
And so it's usually like a really broad scale look at some globe, very large methodology or curriculum with thousands of kids, but that's very different from behavior science, which is a natural science, which means that we're actually evaluating at the level of the individual. [00:27:00] And we're measuring that individual repeatedly over time and then making interventions making manipulations and then evaluating the effects of that manipulation over time.
So we're taking lots of data on a single subject and evaluating the impact. And in behavior science, we have a, we have scientific principles that have been discovered using that scientific method, that natural science approach. And those principles guide our interventions.
So they guide what we know to do to change behavior. So for instance, the principle of reinforcement, like we understand almost a hundred years of science. has let us know that it's the consequence that follows a behavior or a skill that makes that behavior more likely to occur or less likely to occur.
So if it's a reinforcing consequence, it's going to engage in that neurological behavioral kind of process I talked about earlier, and it's going to work to strengthen behavior. So that's just an example. So for the education system to fundamentally change, number one, there has to [00:28:00] be a guiding scientific system underneath it, and there has to be science done in the evaluation of practices, rather than looking at things from the lens of traditions.
Like, this is what we've always done. And it's, we just do it this way because it's always been done that way. Regardless of whether or not it's producing the outcome we want, which is a majority of kids graduating not only at the proficient level, but at the advanced level. Because when you're talking about the kind of public we need, the populace we need, in the future to keep up with what the problems we have to solve, and how technology's going, and how science is going, we need some really high level thinkers.
We need some experts. So we need to be graduating a majority of kids at the advanced level. And that's not happening. So in order to accomplish that, we need to act like scientists and not get stuck and entrenched in traditions and never evaluate those traditions with respect to a scientific lens.
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Ross Romano: Right. And it also strikes me [00:29:00] that the necessity of the precision of identifying what are the specific areas where we can improve things, make those actionable, if there's steps to all of it, if you have these overarching, all encompassing labels, proficient, not proficient, what does that mean?
Right? And same as we talked about earlier, right? There's, something arbitrary, or at least subjective to that, who decides what proficient means, or even saying, okay, if you take two students and they both have a 3. 0 GPA, one can have two A's and two C's, the other one has four B's, it's not, it's they're different, right?
But just, but you need to drill down a little further and say, okay, Schools are not good at teaching in this specific way, or toward this specific skill. One, that's something we can actually improve, because now we know exactly what it is, and we can find a different [00:30:00] way. We see the results and the effects of that, and what that's leading to, and it's much...
It's more you know, more constructive and less judgmental, right? Because when we just say, well, our schools are failing. Okay. Then that just, everybody's under that circus tent of, well, that means everybody working there must be a failure. And that must mean that they either are no good or they don't care.
And when there's probably a lot of things they're very good at and other things that they could do better, but. The system has obscured where those opportunities are,
Kimberly Berens: And I love that you're bringing this up because this is one of the critical differences, again, from a scientific system and an ideological one. And when I say ideological, belief based. So in education and with teachers in teacher training, it's almost instantiated that teaching is a talent.
You know, it's something that people are either good at or [00:31:00] bad at. And that becomes a deeply personal thing. Where if a teacher is ineffective at changing, at effectively teaching a skill or producing mastery in a skill that almost becomes a personal attack on the teacher in that in the way education kind of has gone, but that's very different in a scientific organization like fit learning, for example, which is my company that I established.
along 19, back in 1998, and we operate as scientists at every level of organization. And so what that means is my, my staff is trained and certified to implement a very specific type of instructional methodology based in our science. But what that also means is that my staff is, they're constantly taking data and evaluating the effects of their instruction on their learners.
And when they see that something's not working, it's not something they feel like they have to be defensive about or hide. or glossed over or make excuses for, they actually [00:32:00] engage in that as scientists, meaning they, they look at it with the lens of discovery and wonder as if okay, why is this particular or.
strategy I'm using with this learner, which has worked with maybe five or seven other kids I've worked with. It's not working with this kid. Rather than saying, I want to hide that because if someone knows it makes me a bad person or a bad teacher, it's not that way. It's like that comes to a group discussion with the top leadership team.
And we all get in a room and talk about it. Like just curious scientists that we are and say, okay, what could be missing in this child's repertoire? What should we maybe slice back on? Is there a reinforcer problem? Have we missed a skill? You know, we problem solve in a more pragmatic, excited, curious way, rather than it being an attack on that individual instructor.
Because it's not it's an, it's not an attack on anybody. It's a discovery we've made about something that's not working well. And our job is to solve that problem, rather than it [00:33:00] being like, Well, I did everything I was supposed to, so there must be something wrong with this learner, or well, I don't know why this isn't working, but this is how I teach that's kind of what tends to happen, and that doesn't help anybody it doesn't solve the problem, and it actually ensures that the problem doesn't get solved, and then it becomes kind of a toxic, nasty culture of not being curious.
And not being willing and humble. You know, being a scientist means you're humble, which means we know we haven't even scratched the surface on what there is to discover about learning. We haven't. We haven't just scratched the surface on, on, on what we can discover about more rapidly accelerating learning outcomes and producing experts.
I mean, there's so much to learn and discover, and that's so exciting and awesome. But when you're dogmatic and defensive and take things personally, it cuts off all inquiry. And like, there's no discovery possible. There's no curiosity, and I think that's a shame. And so I think what you're saying is that precision gives you so many things, and it also gives you access to being just being [00:34:00] curious and humble in your practice, which allows you to evolve, which is really important to be an effective educator.
Ross Romano: right? Yeah. And the rigidity and having a rigid view of things is detrimental at both ends of this proficiency spectrum, right? It's detrimental towards students who are still attempting to attain proficiency because then it turns into, well, should we just bucket them and say there's something wrong with them and they're incapable or whatever?
Versus that. So that I'm shifting the blame away from myself or, but also students who are proficient or even advanced to say, well, there's no limit to how advanced you can be. And we just have, again, we have these marks. Oh, well, you've read 90%, 100%. That's a grade, but there's things out there that.
are much more advanced. There's knowledge to be gained that we as a species don't even know yet, right? There's no limit to how good someone [00:35:00] can get in a particular field. But if we're just looking at just these different markers, we'll say, all right, well, these kids, we're done with them.
Basically, they're good. And these ones are in the middle and we're trying to get them a little, and these other ones we're giving up. And I mean, this could be, I'm sure this is like a bad. Analogy, but it would be like, for example, I'm sure when a company not like a Netflix achieved 70% uh, market penetration in the United States or something, that they're marketing people were still trying to figure out new solutions for how to reach the other 30 percent and not just saying, well, those people, they're just There's something wrong with them, and they just don't care about this, so we're just going to give up.
Kimberly Berens: a great point.
Ross Romano: They must have looked at it and said, well, there's just something about what we've been doing clearly is effective in a lot of cases, and it's working, but it's not going to work for the others, so we need [00:36:00] something different, right? But you can imagine, right, if that mindset found itself into other industries where, There would be a lot of people out of a job,
Kimberly Berens: it's interesting where you don't find that in a lot of other industries. I mean I will say in, and look, I'm not only a professional who's been doing this for like close to 30 years, but I'm a parent of two children. And so I both my kids are my daughter's graduating from college and my son is a junior in high school.
So I've, I'm at the end of my road and getting kids through school. But I'll say as a parent in what other industry. Are you called? aRe you told that something hasn't worked for your kid in the school setting, they haven't learned something, they're not doing well with something, they're not behaving the right way, but it's not addressed by the people responsible for that job.
It's a, it's, the responsibility is put on the parent. Right? I mean, that happens all the time. Well, your child's struggling with [00:37:00] this math skill, so what are you going to do about it, basically, is what happens. Which is weird, like, that you'd never, that would never happen if someone's fixing your car, or when you go to a restaurant, or when you go to the doctor.
You know, they're not, well, I couldn't fix your strep throat, so you've got to figure this out yourself. I mean, in what other universe would that occur? But it's become... It's just what happens in education. It's in parents are afraid. I mean I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of families in my career and parents are afraid of schools.
They're afraid to question the they see the school as the ultimate authority. The teacher is the ultimate authority. And they're afraid of the not having their kid fit into these boxes and they scramble and do everything they can outside of, and I'm not saying there shouldn't be a collaboration between a family and a school.
Of course there should. And it starts at home and parents need to put in good strategies and good create an environment that promotes all these positive adaptive behaviors that kids need to have in classrooms. That's 100 percent true. But [00:38:00] when it comes to learning a math concept, That's 100 percent the school's responsibility and when that doesn't happen, it becomes the, it's on the, it's on the parents and it's just an interesting culture in that way.
That's weird if you think about it with respect to other industries, it just doesn't occur that way. They those industries solve problems that their industry has not, they don't put it on their customers, right?
Ross Romano: Right. All right. And they understand that it's their responsibility to understand what customers are looking for and figure out a solution to do that. And if. If I'm not if I launch a new product based on instinct and nobody buys it then I'm accountable because I clearly didn't do my research.
You know, and then that makes me think about advocacy and effective advocacy what makes. advocacy effective for both. And This certainly is the case for parents, right, [00:39:00] where parents when they feel engaged and in the loop, right, and they know what's happening, they can, they, and they know that their voice is welcome, they can figure out the areas where they can speak up and support their child.
When that's not the case, then I think things get a little messy, but there, and there's also educators, right, who want to be able to advocate for students, and sometimes that's challenging within the system as it exists for how to advocate, we talked earlier about. The difference between the solutions oriented approach and working together and versus a more of a blame shifting thing and figuring, okay, am I feeling inhibited from advocating for a student because it's going to turn into a some type of an investigation to say that I'm not doing something versus me saying, look, I am doing what I know how to do.
And, but the student still needs something else, and I need to go out and [00:40:00] get those resources and figure out what those are but what's your perspective on advocacy from those different groups and what they might be able to do when they can tell that according to everything we see here, like, that there's a child that whatever is being done for them is not working or it's not working well enough,
Kimberly Berens: Well, I mean, so I'll start with the advocacy. At the educator level, which I love that you brought that up because that's not talked about very much. You know, when you're talking about what teachers are responsible for doing they are responsible for educating our nation's youth, right?
That's a really big job. And so, as an advocate for teachers, which I 100 percent am, I would say that for teachers to be able to accomplish that job, they have to be trained in a way that allows them to accomplish it, number one. And if you look at colleges of education and teachers, teacher training programs, [00:41:00] unfortunately, I there's very little from a behavior science, like someone who is an expert in the learning process from the behavior science perspective.
There's very little that teachers are trained to do in. They're undergraduate programs and in there. I mean, I've taught at the undergraduate and at the graduate level in colleges of education in my career, and I know what that those that curriculum is and what that training entails. And I'll tell you that very little of that training actually translates into effectively producing a learning outcome with every kid in a classroom.
It doesn't. And so teachers aren't trained. Such that they can be problem solvers. They're, number one, like they actually don't have that skill set. Not because they're not talented. Not because there's something wrong with those teachers. Because they're actually not trained to have those skills. So, number one, they need better training.
And the training should be guided by what science says about how learning happens. Number one. Number two, teachers who actually get this because they have been able to access [00:42:00] additional training outside of the traditional education field, of which there are many teachers who access in services from people like me, who learn how to do this in a better way, they actually don't have the power to do it.
Because they're required to follow district guidelines that don't translate into being effective. Number one, I mean, they have to introduce and touch on content that a majority of the kids in their classrooms have no business learning yet because they haven't mastered prerequisite skills from three, four, five years ago.
But they don't they have no choice. So teachers are responsible for teaching kids like upper level fraction skills when kids still can't add or multiply, they're still using their fingers. And so those teachers are in an impossible position because even if they do have better training and they've paid for it, most of these teachers I've worked with have paid for it out of their own pockets to get better training.
But then they can't use the training because it just doesn't work because of the position they're in their classrooms. And they're also not given the freedom to be that way because of how [00:43:00] controlled they are by the kind of bureaucracy that runs the show from the board of ed wherever it may be.
So teachers actually do need advocates and teachers unions. Hello there. That's a brilliant idea. And I'm all for people being treated fairly in the workplace and having of having a. A group that's in charge of making sure that they are paid what they deserve to be paid and that they're not taking advantage of it.
I got it. So really the unions need to get involved in what effective teacher training means, ensuring teachers have access to it, and ensuring that district rules Don't interfere with teachers actually be able to do their job. So that's a big deal. And then on the parent side, I would say unfortunately, the fact that we need so many advocates for parents is because school kids aren't learning parents wouldn't need so much protection and help from advocates.
If teachers were given the freedom and the training to do their job the right way, but they're [00:44:00] not. And so now you're in a perfect storm where and unfortunately what happens and I've been in many IEP meetings in my career. I've been in many of these meetings and I'll tell you, it's a toxic environment because you have teachers who are being held accountable for a job that they can't do because they're not trained to do it the right way and they don't have the power to actually do it.
And so you have failure, but then you have a district coaching telling a teacher that they can't, they have to brush they have to push this off on other reasons why this kid has failed rather than a district acknowledging our teaching practices aren't working and we need to overhaul what we're doing, which is the right answer, but they can't, they don't say that because they don't want to, they're avoiding lawsuits.
And so then you have parents who now have, who have kids who are victims. And then you have parents who are winning huge due process lawsuits for hundreds of thousand dollars a year for one kid to access an alternative educational placement. Trust me, I have many of them at FIT Learning who have, whose parents have won hundreds of thousands of [00:45:00] dollars and now have, now can place their kid at FIT as an alternative educational placement because school has failed their kids so badly.
And I'm, that's I'm happy that kid gets those, accesses that. They deserve it. But that's not the solution. What, one lawsuit at a time that costs districts hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than fixing the true issue, which is going to the root of the problem, which is teachers need better training and they need to be empowered to use it and be effective in their classrooms.
So it's to be honest with you, none of this is an easy solution. I mean, this requires overhauling a lot of things. You know, at a lot of levels, which is a big deal. It's like clowning it's not a small undertaking,
Ross Romano: right. Yeah, it's a large endeavor and the way to go about it, of course, is to go about it with specificity and look at one thing at a time and how do we improve this and that and You know, and even then it's not always easy. I have once, for [00:46:00] example used to work with a great organization called future of school, and we, one year did these teacher grants that were, they're basically micro grants that were available for teachers who were looking for any particular tool or resource that they really wanted their classroom that the school couldn't provide for or that. It was just too much paperwork to go through, right, and these were things that were 200 that were I remember one in particular that was a teacher who wanted to purchase these headsets That were kind of like what you might see in the United Nations, right? She had a whole bunch of different different native languages among the students in her classroom.
And this way she could instruct, it could translate to that student's primary language, and they could understand her so much better. And... You know, for a couple hundred dollars, change the entire experience that these students are having in the [00:47:00] classroom, because now they could clearly and entirely understand what their teacher was teaching them, versus maybe getting a little bit of it.
You know, and because it wasn't just a bilingual, this was like six different languages, right? There was, no other solution other than this amazing technology that wasn't that expensive, wasn't that hard to procure. But it was just something that seemed out of reach you know, going through the traditional channels and, but things like that and the same thing applies, right, to practices where I would say the more precise and specific an individual educator is about.
Something they want to try and that they believe will have an impact, the better chance there is of them being approved to try it, right? Versus saying, well, we have to do everything differently. And now that might not always work, but at the very least, maybe there's a starting point for a dialogue. [00:48:00] Maybe there can be some pressure put on administrator, administrators to just reflect on, okay know, we need to as I think the fit learning website says allow that science of learning to meet the art of teaching.
Okay. There's, there, it's both of those. It's, there are things that are. Fit into that art part of his experience. It's, again, practice, it's reps, it's I've been in enough different classrooms, enough different students to kind of understand where things need to be adapted and understand that, but have a firm foundation and training and knowledge of.
That background in the science that can be taught better in schools of education can be more incorporated in training right and goes back to that's a systemic thing that needs to be adjusted so that all the pressure isn't just put on. One end or the other or put on teachers who are under [00:49:00] resourced in a variety of ways, whether it's the the financial resource for the classroom or not given the proper training resources and things to say, well, you have to figure it out.
And if you don't figure it out, then you're failing. You know, that's just, that's not a good system. And it shows up in the results of you know, shortages and burnout and
Kimberly Berens: there it is.
Ross Romano: public negative public discourse and all of those negative trends that clearly need to be reversed but that require some thoUght.
Kimberly Berens: Yes. Well, and you know, when you mentioned some of these things one of the things districts tend to do is these huge curriculum overhauls, right? Like, they're consistently, which has been going on since the dawn of the NAEP, to be quite honest, since the early, I mean, really, the first study of academic outcomes, and I talk about this in my book, was done in 1948.
And to be quite frank, not that much has changed since [00:50:00] 1948, when you're talking about the percentage of kids who are functioning at the proficient level in the United States, there hasn't been that much gain made over all those years, which is shocking, right? So schools are trying to fix it, always.
Like, it's, I'm not saying this isn't for not trying. I mean, schools are not just sitting there apathetic but the problem is. All of these, this money and resources get spent consistently on the same stuff over and over again that produces the same results. And it's so funny because when you understand learning from this from a scientific perspective, like, like people in my field do, we're not surprised at all that these reform efforts never work because curriculum is not the same as instruction.
And so you have districts throwing re overhauling a curriculum for so much money. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars. [00:51:00] But the problem is if it's the how, right? Like, this is happening right now in the science of reading. And look, I'm not going to throw the science of reading under the bus because I...
I'm very clear on the fact that phonics is essential for proficiency in reading. And we've known this, by the way, since the 1960s, that the data have actually been very clear on that since for a long time. Even though suddenly it's seeming like new information is being revealed it's really weird to me.
thIs is this has been very clear for. It's, I mean, this was presented to Congress in the 70s. This kind of thing. So it's not new and it's weird that we're still having these conversations about reading and in 2023. But my point is the science of reading has gained a lot of traction.
And so districts currently, I mean, like New York City is one of those is dropping balanced literacy, dropping the Columbia College teachers. You know, college stuff, which is huge. I mean, that's like a big deal and are[00:52:00] are scrambling to adopt more phonics centric curriculum, which is great because yes I care.
Like I know for a fact that phonics is an essential building block for reading. And any linguist will tell you that. And there's decades and decades of science that supports that. So there's that, but what I worry about. Is that it's all about the curriculum. It's all about what to teach, right?
It's all about the what, the phonics, the decoding. And I'm not, again, the what matters. But if you have teachers who don't know how to teach those things effectively, if you have teachers who don't understand how to ensure that those essential components, and phonics is an essential component skill to reading.
It needs to be unbelievably fluent. Like, phonics needs to be automatic for kids. So if you don't have the training or the ability to ensure that your kids are [00:53:00] truly mastering that skill, It's irrelevant whether or not a district spending now hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new phonics based curriculum because their teachers still don't know how to effectively teach that.
They still don't know how to ensure that kids are truly mastering those skills. And that applies to any of these curriculum overhauls. So these traditional reform approaches that have been done over and over again with the same outcome, it's because it never gets to the root of the... How instruction needs to go, how instruction needs to be conducted and that should be guided by the science of learning because the science of instruction that I use in my practice is guided by the science of learning.
Like I design instruction based on the principles of learning, which is how it should always go because we know that's what works. But when the science of instruction doesn't exist. And it's just a curriculum and a recommendation on, oh yeah, use this curriculum, but how you teach is how you teach because it's a talent.
It's an art. It's [00:54:00] teachers just do what they think they should do. That's a mess because teachers should actually be instructing the way science dictates human beings learn, right?
Ross Romano: Listeners, once again, the book is called Blind Spots. You can learn more about it at DrKimberlyBarrons. com. You can find it at bookshop. org, Amazon, Barnes Noble, wherever you like to get your books. Kimberly, where else can our listeners learn more about your work?
Kimberly Berens: Well, if you go to Dr. Kimberly Behrens, or yes, DrKimberlyBehrens. com there's a lot of links on there to appearances I've done. So if other podcasts I've done, webinars, news interviews, things I've written for popular press and other kinds of. Scientific papers. So that's a really just great website for finding more information.
And then you can also go to fitlearning. com if you're interested in how this approach applies to in the real world not just I always like to emphasize that I might be a PhD. But I'm not sitting in some ivory academic tower. I mean, I've been in the trenches. Actually, I mean, [00:55:00] I I've worked personally, I do sessions like hundreds and hundreds, I mean, thousands of hours of my life has been spent actually directly working with kids.
And so I practice what I preach. You know, I'm an, I am a clinician through and through. So although I do link this all to science, and a lot of scholarly underpinnings. You know, my, my experience comes from the applied world and the outcomes I've been able to produce with thousands of kids for more than 25 years.
So, you can find out more about how that goes on at the, on the fit learning website. And we talk, I talk about the fit learning outcomes throughout my book as well, which are pretty, pretty remarkable. People don't think they, that's possible, but when you use science, the way we use science, you can advance learners 1 to 2 years, in 40 hours, in a work week you think about a 40 hour work week, that's as many hours as it takes us to advance a kid at least at least, if not more than a grade level in a core skill like reading or math or logical problem solving, critical [00:56:00] thinking.
Writing. So that's a big deal and we gotta think about that because especially with this whole COVID learning loss the fact that we're going in the wrong direction in our educational outcomes as a result of the pandemic. We need to be rapidly accelerating skills so that we can close the gap.
You don't close gaps by doing the same stuff and having kids make no progress or make the same amount of progress they were making before, which was minimal. You gotta exponentially increase learning outcomes and you can't do anything at the exponential level without science on your side. It doesn't this isn't magic, to be honest.
Like, we gotta let go of that too. The whole magic, mythology, talent, like all that romantic stuff we all like to admire. That's not what really actually works. Like what works is science. Science is what I consider to be magic. You know, when you have science, you, our parents think we're magicians. We're not magicians.
We're scientists, which make people think you're magicians, but you're not. But that's how you exponentially advance things [00:57:00] is through the scientific process.
Ross Romano: Wonderful. Well, we will put the link below to where you can find more about the book. Visit Kimberly's website and the fitlearning. com, also the social media link. So listeners, if you're interested in this work at all, dive in, check out more of those resources. You can find the book Blind Spots as well.
Please do subscribe to the authority for in depth author interviews like this one. We have a lot more good ones coming up and visit bpodcast. network to learn about all of our shows. Dr. Kimberly Behrens, thank you for being on the authority.
Kimberly Berens: Thank you for having me. I had a great time.
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