In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Bart Epstein,a Research Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. The education entrepreneur was named one of the 30 K-12 IT Influencers to Follow by EdTech Magazine in 2022. He is the founder of the EdTech Evidence Exchange, a board member at ISTE+ASCD, and a civil test pilot for NASA.
Some Questions We Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“I think we're most likely in the coming years to see AI teaching assistants help reduce variability in classrooms in a way that makes whole class lessons more effective for all students.”
“At ISTE and ASCD, we are focused on providing educators with the tools and support, and community that they need as they lead this recovery. Quite frankly, they are exhausted, and many of them are working environments in environments where there are teacher shortages. They are heroes who can only operate on fumes for so long. And so we need to collectively find ways to make it as easy as possible for them to get the support that they need.”
“AI, when it's done right, like other technologies, should save you a lot of time. And it should free you up to do the things that are most human and most impactful.”
“Stay laser-focused on the wants and needs of your intended audience. In a world of endless boring press releases and webinars, the way to stand out, in my experience, is to understand what people want and then give it to them. And if you don't know, ask them! People love to talk about their problems. Ask them what frustrates them, what else have they tried, what would fix their problem, what evidence they'd want to see what change they care about in the world.”
“Remember, it's never about you. It's always about them.”
“I'm most hopeful that we'll continue to make progress towards learning how to use technology to better support students and teachers. We really need it to perform.”
Connect with Bart:
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Bart Epstein,a Research Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. The education entrepreneur was named one of the 30 K-12 IT Influencers to Follow by EdTech Magazine in 2022. He is the founder of the EdTech Evidence Exchange, a board member at ISTE+ASCD, and a civil test pilot for NASA.
Some Questions We Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“I think we're most likely in the coming years to see AI teaching assistants help reduce variability in classrooms in a way that makes whole class lessons more effective for all students.”
“At ISTE and ASCD, we are focused on providing educators with the tools and support, and community that they need as they lead this recovery. Quite frankly, they are exhausted, and many of them are working environments in environments where there are teacher shortages. They are heroes who can only operate on fumes for so long. And so we need to collectively find ways to make it as easy as possible for them to get the support that they need.”
“AI, when it's done right, like other technologies, should save you a lot of time. And it should free you up to do the things that are most human and most impactful.”
“Stay laser-focused on the wants and needs of your intended audience. In a world of endless boring press releases and webinars, the way to stand out, in my experience, is to understand what people want and then give it to them. And if you don't know, ask them! People love to talk about their problems. Ask them what frustrates them, what else have they tried, what would fix their problem, what evidence they'd want to see what change they care about in the world.”
“Remember, it's never about you. It's always about them.”
“I'm most hopeful that we'll continue to make progress towards learning how to use technology to better support students and teachers. We really need it to perform.”
Connect with Bart:
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
Hello and welcome to Build Momentum, a show where we explore thought leadership and education. I'm Sarah Williamson, the founder of SWPR Group.
Katie Lash:And I'm Katie Lash, the director of the East Central Educational Service Center.
Sarah Williamson:Together we explore how to leverage key partners, your constituencies and the media to authentically impact your organizations and the leaders who champion them. We can't wait to get started. So let's dive into today's show.
Katie Lash:On today's episode, we're delighted to have University of Virginia School of Education Professor Bart Epstein on the show Bart, will you share your background with us and your journey in education?
Bart Epstein:I'd be delighted to after years of teaching kids to love linear equations and then working as a corporate lawyer. I spent 10 years helping to build run and then sell the world's first online tutoring company where I helped to build a massive program to provide tutoring and homework help to every US military family. From there, I launched the University of Virginia's edtech accelerator and venture fund, where my team and I discovered and explored some serious structural problems related to education technology. After organizing the nation's first edtech efficacy research academic symposium, I launched the nonprofit Edtech Evidence Exchange, which has been working hard to help millions of educators learn from each other's experiences selecting and implementing technologies for their schools and classrooms. And along the way, I've invested in and supported dozens of edtech companies served as a mentor for most of the EdTech incubators and accelerators and I currently serve on the Board of ISTE and ASCD where I Chair of the Finance Committee, yeah,
Sarah Williamson:Awesome. Wow, that's it.
Bart Epstein:That's all I've done.
Sarah Williamson:Geez, Bart, man, I don't know how you do it. But that's pretty impressive. So I had the pleasure of randomly sitting by you at the ASU GSV breakfast for Indiana superintendents, and was so delighted. I actually thought you're in the wrong place. When you sat down. I had said Do you know, this is the Indiana superintendent breakfast because I thought you were looking for not that we're not cool, Katie, we're very cool Indiana superintendents, for sure. But I did think you were in the wrong place. But I was so delighted that you weren't and it was a great chat. And I'm so curious to hear what you think about ASU GSV. It just seems like you know, everyone, the only thing that people were talking about out of that conference was AI. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Bart Epstein:Sure, I think gonna ASU GSV since nearly the first year when it was only a few 100 people. And it's been fascinating to watch it grow into a destination for 1000s and 1000s of not only investors and entrepreneurs, but now educators. And this year, you're right AI was everywhere. And AI is unquestionably the next shiny new thing that is going to generate millions of clicks, be wildly overhyped, built into 1000s of products, generate hundreds of millions of revenue be improperly implemented, and then spawn a huge backlash as it fails to improve student learning at first.
Sarah Williamson:Yep, I love it.
Bart Epstein:Now, the reason I am bullish on AI over the long run is that variation is the enemy of instruction. And what I mean by that is, if you give me a class of 30 students and asked me to teach them the quadratic formula, that class becomes exponentially more difficult to teach when some students never learned how to solve square roots. Others don't remember how to factor polynomials, and others don't know how to divide by negative numbers. And teaching in that situation is often further complicated by the disparities in students home environments. No matter how well I teach, some of my students will go home to a quiet house where they have a parent or older sister who understands math and is available to help with their homework. And other kids from my class live in a crowded apartment where they're the primary caregiver after school for younger brothers and sisters. And they don't have access to anyone to help them with their homework. So if money was no factor, we could have several great teachers in most classrooms, and they could work with students who are all over the map and need help with different concepts. But money is of course a factor and the reality of our current situation is that huge numbers of kids right now find school frustrating or boring because they're not receiving what they need to keep them challenged and on grade level, and when AI is done right. It is highly likely that it will be able to do almost everything that a good teacher can do It will be able to diagnose what I'm stuck on, provide me with differentiated instruction, check for comprehension, provide positive feedback and help me master some discrete concepts that I need to know in order to keep pace with my class and my peers. And so I think we're most likely in the coming years to see AI teaching assistants help reduce variability in the classrooms in a way that makes whole class lessons more effective for all students.
Katie Lash:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point and heard folks approach it just that way. But you're so right, the pace in which we're gonna see things iterate is just so fascinating to like, we're just faster than ever. But Bart, would you share with our listeners, the research that you launched at the Ed Tech Genome Project, and the work of the Ed Tech, Evidence Exchange is possible to give us a glimpse into the implementation variables that are most important?
Bart Epstein:Sure, I would be happy to. So it's really important to understand that as a nation, we spend approximately$50 billion a year on technology for our schools. And the vast majority of this technology is either improperly inequitably, or completely unused. And this is a huge opportunity for us to do better. You know, imagine if you are a cardiologist, and 85% of the pills that you prescribed, were never taken, and people are already paying for them. So the idea behind the Ed Tech Evidence Exchange, and it's Ed Tech genome came from the first ever ed tech efficacy research academic symposium, where we brought together nearly 300 of the nation's leading educators, researchers, investors, policymakers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists to do a deep dive through a year of field research into questions about efficacy research, who does it? Who uses it? How do people make decisions? What motivates them? What are they afraid of? What makes them more or less likely to succeed? And one of the things that we learned is that the same technology can be a huge hit in Sarah's school, and a decent success and Katie's school and a failure in my school. And it's the same technology. So what's different isn't the technology. It's the contextual environments, there's something about our environments that's different. And everybody wants to know what's happening in other schools. But we as a country, are unfortunately saddled with an extremely fragmented education system, more than 13,000 school districts, each operating independently for the most part, and with very little opportunity to communicate and learn from their peers. And where I'm going with this is that our nation's schools suffer from what economists call a collective action problem, which is what we call it when everybody would benefit from somebody doing something. But it's not in any one person's interest to do all the work. And the classic example here is a snowstorm. It's knows our street has a foot of snow. I don't want to go out and shovel the entire street when everybody else can then just use it. So the answer is government. Government collects taxes from us, it hires a contractor who has a truck with a plow on it, and government solves that collective action problem. But in education, we don't have that. We have 13,000 school districts, approximately 100,000 schools, each implementing different technologies, having experiences learning lessons the hard way. And then those lessons stay trapped in everybody's heads, because at the end of the school year, nobody has an extra 50 hours to carefully document their work and try to understand why a product failed and what the change is made. We're halfway. And so the Ed Tech Genome Project brought these people together to reach consensus on what are the 10 most important implementation factors that explain why something is such a huge hit in Sarah's school and a failure in Bart's school. And so over the course of several years through research and working groups, the genome project participants reach consensus on what are these most important factors and built measurement instruments. So for the first time now, we can go into schools collectively and ask everybody a series of brief questions. To get a snapshot of teacher agency, How involved are teachers with the decisions to bring in technology? What is the culture? Like? How is leadership support work? How many competing priorities are there? These factors, which your listeners can read more about online at the Ed Tech Genome Project page at the EdTech evidence exchange are really the baseline that we should all be looking at as we consider our school environments, and how much technology we're ready for.
Katie Lash:Sarah, I know your questions next. But that is so interesting, Bart, I want to study up more, I get to kind of see that firsthand as like a regional consortium, right? So there'll be some thing that like, honestly, when products are catching momentum in our area, right, it's because a superintendent or a couple of superintendents are using the same thing had good success with it. And then all of a sudden, a third or fourth person adopts, and they're like, I did not have that same experience. Right? And then like that, so naturally occurred, for me watching that happen of like, why so I just had no idea that you've studied this, why? Like, we're Indiana's big local control state, right. So part of the reasoning is local control, decision making folks don't use all the same thing. But then, yeah, this is fascinating to me, very naturally occurs in my everyday life.
Bart Epstein:And when you say local control, it's a really interesting question of where the control should be, because almost every decision maker thinks that control should be with them. And, you know, they say, you know, as a district, I don't want the federal government telling me what to do. I don't want the state telling me what to do. I don't want the regional service center telling me what to do. I know what to do. And guess what the people two levels below them in the org chart are saying, and I know what the superintendent telling me, I don't want... right? Everybody wants the right amount of input and control. And how much agency you give teachers really matters for different products. I'll give you one brief example. If Sarah's had a huge success with a product in her district, it might be because she had a process that involved teachers, it evaluated several different alternatives. They did pilots, they collected data. And when they eventually made the decision, there was broad buy in. And when I made the decision, it might have been because I copied Sara and I said, Sarah is great. Let's do what Sarah does. And I just showed up one day to my school and said, This is what I picked. And as a result, my teachers are not bought in, they don't feel respected, they're less likely to go to training, they're less likely to persist through difficulties. And for some products, that doesn't matter. If you bring Gmail into a school district that never had it before, it's probably going to be a success, because it's so easy. But if you bring a complicated math curriculum in, that might be a big problem, especially if it's planting a math product that's been in school for 10 years, and people have invested in. And by the way, if I'm in my final year, as superintendent, people are going to wait me out if they don't feel that they're bought in. And these factors all are really important. And we should take them into account and be critical thinkers as we look at success of programs elsewhere. And we hope for the same results.
Sarah Williamson:Yeah,
Katie Lash:That's true. That's so true.
Sarah Williamson:It is true. Yeah. Thanks Bart. That's fascinating. So I am also curious. So you're on the board for ISTE and ASCD, which are I know now one, but I'm curious if you can share a little bit about what y'all are talking about? What are some of the challenges and opportunities? I'm guessing it has a lot to do with AI, but anything else? And how are you thinking about AI?
Bart Epstein:Well, I have two answers for you. First, I could say it's all about AI, which is the future. And then I would tell you about how ISTE is announcing this week that in partnership with code.org, Open AI, Khan Academy, Microsoft Amazon, the College Board, we are launching teach AI to bring together top leaders in education and tech to grapple with the most pressing questions related to AI in education. And that's all true. But the reality is that at ASCD and ISTE we talk about AI perhaps 1% of the time, we are mostly talking about what our nation's educators need in order to help their students recover from the pandemic which continues to be the greatest educational crisis our nation has ever faced. 10s of millions of students have fallen far behind. Huge numbers of them are frustrated, disengaged and are not on the trajectories that they should be in life. And we have a collective obligation to provide these students with intensive remediation support. Word tutoring and encouragement that they need to get caught up and to rekindle their love of learning before it's too late. And doing this requires investment in our educators like never before, as well as investment in tutoring and mentoring at scales that our nation has never before attempted. So I'd say at ISTE and ASCD, we are focused on providing educators with the tools and support and community that they need as they lead this recovery, quite frankly, they are exhausted, and many of them are working environments in environments where there are teacher shortages. And they are heroes who can only operate on fumes for so long. And so we need to collectively find ways to make it as easy as possible for them to get the support that they need. That's what we're focused on.
Katie Lash:Yeah, you know, what's funny about that, Bart I stumbled on that link, like, I don't know, the other day wants you to something. And I forwarded to Sarah, and she was like, I already know about this. And so it's funny that like, what I actually read what it was, I was assuming that we'd bring that up today. But isn't that so funny? Like, quickly, and I forwarded it to some friends already, because we were so impressed by some of the things that we saw when we were out there. ASU GSV folks are like excited about the AI.
Bart Epstein:Yeah,
Katie Lash:I wrote a grant over the weekend and use chat GPT for parts of it. I mean, it still needed my brain power, like I still had what I, you know, wanted it to do. But holy cow, it was amazing. Like, yeah, I'm never going back. Now, never going back
Bart Epstein:AI when it's done, right, like other technologies should save you a lot of time. And it should free you up to do the things that are most human, and most impactful. You know, think about how we used to cite things and write bibliographies and graduate school papers, right? You spend all that time now, those things are all automated, and, you know, doing the boiler plate for grant applications, that stuff should be automated. Just like we automate a whole bunch of extremely boring things in education. The analogy that I like to use here is file compression. You know, when you send a picture by text or an email, your computer doesn't actually send 5 million bits, it uses algorithms to compress down the file. Because if you look at your file as a picture, 70% of the picture might be blue. And you can write a formula in one line that says everything inside this geometric shape is blue. And you can reduce the amount of space that you need to use in your file by 90%. And if you talk to most kids today, school is extremely boring. They spend such a tremendous amount of time sitting around doing nothing listening to some explanation that's either boring to them, because they already know it, or it's over their head. We have a lot of opportunity to use AI to help figure out exactly what's the sweet spot of each student's needs, and help the teacher cue up the instructional materials to hit them right where they are,
Katie Lash:so they can get rid of the blue. I like that.
Bart Epstein:Yeah, exactly.
Katie Lash:Yeah
Sarah Williamson:Are you looking to build brand awareness and expand your impact as an organization, but maybe you're struggling to find the ROI with your general marketing and PR efforts, it could be time to try something a little different. At SWPR Group, we approach every organization through the lens of how we can help them add the most value to the conversations that are happening in education today for one of our clients, the Institute for Education innovation, this led to the launch of Supe's choice, an award that we co created to build incredible brand awareness and his firmly established organization as an industry leader driving impact growth and awareness on every level. What will your success story be? Let me know when you're ready to get started. Reach out at Sarah with an H at sarah@swpr-group.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
Katie Lash:So far, there's been a lot of dialogue about evidence based tech products. So how do you approach evaluating tech solutions? And then how do you recommend that district leaders apply this with their own decision making? That's a process. I'm curious what you say here?
Bart Epstein:Well, the first thing is I'm so happy that you're asking about the process because 10 years ago if you asked 100 district leaders about their use of evidence in the process of purchasing technology, you probably get a lot of blank stares, and the very small number of people who gave lip service to The idea would have been virtue signaling and probably wouldn't have been doing much behind the scenes. I know that because in the run up to the EdTech, evidence, efficacy research academic symposium, one of our working groups went out and interviewed dozens of school and district leaders, and a working group that I helped lead interviewed more than 40 State Department's of education to ask them these questions. And we have made a lot of progress here, in making evidence part of the culture that people care about. And so what I'll say to start with is that nothing is more important than district's signaling to vendors that we care about efficacy. Asking vendors what evidence that they have that their product is effective, is tremendously important. I gave a presentation on this work at the White House back in 2018. And we had one of the nation's leading investors get up and talk about how he, in his experience finds that companies are either good at research, or at selling, not both. And he invests in companies who do selling. And over the years, we have seen that change, as more companies have been asked by school and district leaders for evidence. Once we asked for evidence over and over again, and we put it in formal procurements, and we make clear that we expect companies to demonstrate evidence that complies with the ESSA tiers of evidence, which I'll put a link to in the show notes, it makes it more likely that companies compete on the basis of evidence, which is what we all want. We don't want companies competing on brand names, and which fancy former school superintendents they hire for cocktail parties. We want them competing on the basis of I have tier one ESSA evidence that shows 23%, improvements in geometry across all these subcategories. That's what matters the most. And it's important to understand that you don't have to be a PhD in statistics, or in economics, or research. In order to ask for evidence, you don't have to be able to read every page of your research study. If you get research from multiple companies, and it's competing, and you're not sure which one to trust, go out to your local school of education, and ask any professor for themselves or a graduate student to read and tell you what they think they'll be thrilled to hear from you. But in general, we don't have much evidence at the federal level of what works. And so it's still largely up to individual schools and districts to make judgments about what's most likely to be effective. And so, to sum this up, I'd say there's very two important components. Number one, what is the evidence that the product works at all? Has the company done real research that meets federal ESSA standards? And if so, is it tier 1, 2, 3 or four? Next, ask the company for evidence that their products work in districts like yours, it might be nice to know that a certain product worked in Miami, under ideal conditions when they did a research study. But going back to the point of the EdTech Genome Project, if my district is nothing like Miami, from the perspective of demographics, teacher agency implementation processes, all the other factors, it's not very probative, to know that the product works there. Look for companies who can tell you our product works in districts like yours, if you take these particular steps to implement it.
Katie Lash:Sorry, that was you know, one of the bonding experiences between Sara and I was when about what companies say that is like mildly offensive, and they don't hear themselves. Like nothing sells to me when you say LA Unified. I had did this so well. Like that is awesome for them. I would love to talk to them about it. But that is not at all a sales pitch because that does it like clearly you don't even know who you're talking to if you're going to drop me some notes like that. Right. And so that's so interesting that you say that like show me folks out here in the middle of nowhere without broadband at home that have very, very tiny school population, I mean, we have some school districts I have a school district of 200 kids, right like that's, that's helped me LA
Bart Epstein:That's right. And by the way, Katie, there are Unified here. some products that work beautifully in a low bandwidth environment. They're engineered and built for rural districts. And those things are very different than products that were built for fiber classrooms for immediate, you know, with a low latency. But then they add on a feature that, you know, they call high latency or low bandwidth, push them on that don't just accept what the vendors say, and try to find, oh, I know she does, and asked to talk to your peers. In my experience, companies who are confident in their products can say to you, sure, here's three of our current clients who are similar to you. Go talk to them, and ask them what were the ups and downs of their implementations? What things did they learn? Back when I was helping to run tutor.com, one of the things that we struggled with was helping public libraries learn how to implement an online tutoring and homework help service. It never existed before. And we had libraries around the country that were trying all different things. And at the annual librarian conference, we would bring them together to learn from each other. And it was hilarious and productive to hear, you know, a school district in Florida, describing and showing pictures of the school principal wearing a chicken suit, handing out bookmarks that says, Don't be chicken, ask a question to a tutor and learning what worked where and what didn't work. Because it's all about context, it doesn't matter how highly regarded a product is, it isn't implemented properly. There's no point in doing it.
Sarah Williamson:Oh, the challenges of K 12 education in the US. It's so interesting, isn't it?
Bart Epstein:It is.
Sarah Williamson:Oh, thanks. That was so fantastic. Thanks Bart. So I am also curious, particularly because we run a PR agency, I would love to understand how your process for building your own profile. Many of the listeners of the show are looking to build or elevate the profile of their organizations and their C suite or even district leaders. I know many superintendents are looking to launch consulting businesses, how would you recommend they go about that? Any suggestions for these leaders?
Bart Epstein:That's a great question. And I do have a few suggestions that people might find helpful. The first one is to stay laser focused on the wants and needs of your intended audience. In a world of endless boring press releases and webinars, the way to stand out in my experience is to understand what people want and then give it to them. And if you don't know, ask them, people love to talk about their problems. Ask them what frustrates them, what else have they tried, what would fix their problem, what evidence they'd want to see what change they care about in the world. When I launched the University of Virginia's edtech accelerator, I interviewed hundreds of ed tech CEOs and district leaders to understand their respective pain points and frustrations. And education CEOs wanted to get in front of as many school leaders as possible to sell. And school and district leaders were tired of being bombarded with pitches from companies, they knew nothing about what they wanted, were indications of trustworthiness so that they knew they were worth talking to. So we built the EdTech accelerator to serve as a trusted intermediary, to say to school districts, we have looked at these companies. And we find and this was before essa evidence, tears came out. And we find that they have indicators of efficacy, and they have good privacy policy, and they're sustainable, et cetera. And so we set out to build what they want and need. It's far more effective to build what people want and need, and then tell them about it than it is to build something that they don't want, and to try to promote it. And so over the years when I have worked with PR agencies, the best PR agencies have been the ones who pushed me and my organization's in that direction, to listen more to incorporate feedback into product development. Because from their perspective, it is a lot easier to promote something that people want to hear. The second thing I would say So is to build or join a community of people who care about the things that you care about, and then use that as a vehicle for learning more about what motivates them. So using the example of tutor.com, and public libraries, at the annual librarian conferences, we kept in mind that librarians did not come to that conference to talk to us, they came to talk to and learn from each other. And so instead of hosting a cocktail party where they would hear me speak, we hosted cocktail parties featuring some of our most successful youth librarians and library directors from around the country. And we gave them a forum to talk about their successes and what they learned along the way. And our prospective customers spent 95% of their time talking to our existing customers, as opposed to talking to our sales staff. And that might have made our sales staff a little nervous, but it worked out great for everybody, because we kept in mind the motivation of our audience. Our existing customers wanted to be seen as innovative leaders in their field, they took a risk by bringing in a new program, and it paid off, and they wanted to brag about how many hundreds of students they were able to help. And our potential customers came because they had problems they wanted to solve. And they didn't want to just buy something without knowing about it. They wanted to hedge their risk by learning from people they trusted, that this program worked in an environment like theirs
Sarah Williamson:Oh my gosh, yeah.
Bart Epstein:So remember, it's never about you. It's always about them.
Sarah Williamson:Yes, amen. I have a podcast title. And it's not about you. That's one of my earlier podcasts. Because regularly we remind clients, no, no, this is not about you and your product. It's not about you. It's about elevating the voices of your customers elevating the value you can offer and the problem you're solving. It's never about talking about the product, almost never in PR, we almost never want to talk about the product, unless we're doing a press release. Okay, fine, whatever. But it's never about you. Thank you totally agree with that
Katie Lash:Feels a lot like the breakfast that you came to Bart like that was our agenda right?
Bart Epstein:Yeah, that breakfast was awesome. I mean, the purpose of that breakfast was to bring together the Indiana superintendents to talk about their shared problems, to learn from each other, to feel not alone to empathize, to share resources. We need much, much more of that. And I would love to see more investment in regional service centers, having the capacity to go into the districts and collect feedback and aggregate it in ways that reduce the burden on superintendents and their teams who spent too much time reinventing the wheel.
Katie Lash:Yes, I will tell you, I mean, we still run the traditional workshops, right, like a person, an expert from far away saying some things that they should, but by far the most successful things that we ever run is really like, put them on stage and let them talk like the attendees like that's it. That's the whole thing. And by far, that's the most successful every single time.
Bart Epstein:And why did the people agree to get on stage and do it?
Katie Lash:Well, yeah, you're right, they want to share, they want to be thought of, like you mentioned as innovative and a leader, but also, I think that they've now seen value of learning from other people. So they're like, I know how valuable that was when I saw so and so. So even if I am of the personality type that doesn't want to be on stage, but I can see the value of why my story can help other people, you know, and so we actually had a student panel a couple of weeks ago, it was like, oh, one of the best things we've done. And we had the student who said that she was gonna get up there and not say anything, because she was nervous. And she was like, I'm, I'll be on the panel, but I'm just gonna sit there. Oh, well, then she was rocketed. She did fantastic job. And afterwards, I was like, You did such a great job. And she goes, Well, they needed to hear what I had to say. That's like, exactly why we had you up there. But yeah, so it was fantastic. But I'll stop rambling about all those things. But as we close out the 20 to 23 school year, what are you most hopeful about? What do you think we can expect in the year to come?
Bart Epstein:Well, I think I'm most hopeful that we'll continue to make progress towards learning how to use technology to better support students and teachers. We really need it to perform. The average school district now has something like 700 product licenses, and many of them aren't being used properly. And it's time to figure out which things actually help invest in learning how to use them and put them to work. There is no point in spreading ourselves. too thin and frustrating and tiring ourselves out. Technology is here to make our lives easier. And unless we're going to hire another 500,000 teachers and tutors, which we should do, we need technology to better support differentiated instruction. And through the work of numerous groups ASCD, ISTE, SEDA, The Alliance, the National Student support partnerships, so many folks, teachers unions who are working to better understand how to use technology and to learn lessons from each other. I'm confident that we're moving in the right direction. Never fast enough, but we're on the right track.
Sarah Williamson:Thanks, Bart So I'm curious where our listeners can learn more about you and connect with you.
Bart Epstein:Well, first, let me say thank you so much, Katie and Sarah, for having me on today. It was wonderful to be with you. And I look forward to keeping in touch and happy to engage with your listeners. The easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn. Bart Epstein, there's only two Bart Epstein's on LinkedIn. The other one apparently uses DNA to solve crimes in Minneapolis. So if you're in the Minneapolis area, and you have a crime to solve, you can connect to him. But otherwise, look for me and you can also find me on Twitter where I'm @Bart314, presumably the math lovers in your audience will know the significance of that number. And I can't thank you enough for having me. And thank you so much for continuing to do this awesome podcast. I love to listen to it almost every week.
Sarah Williamson:Whoa, thanks, Bart, I appreciate the shout out and such a pleasure to have you on today. Talk soon. Thanks, Bart. If you're looking for more of this thought, leadership goodness for your organization, you're in the right place. Visit us at swpr-group.com To learn more about how we work with education organizations and their leaders, superintendents and influencers to increase your impact. Again, that's swpr-group.com. Thanks for tuning in today and we will see you next time on Build Momentum.