Zooming In on Optimized Learning with Paul Solarz
Transcript
Melissa Milner 0:09
Welcome to The Teacher As... Podcast. I'm your host. Melissa Milner, a teacher who is painfully curious and very easily inspired. This podcast is ever changing, and I hope with each season, you find episodes that speak to you in your work as an educator. This is the fifth season of The Teacher As... and it's exciting to see the growth in how many educators are listening. Episodes are released every other week. If you enjoy The Teacher As..., please rate it on Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It helps the podcast reach more educators. Thanks for listening.
Paul Solarz 0:41
Well, Hi, Melissa, thanks so much for having me on again. This is our second time on The Teacher As... Podcast. I'm honored to be here again. You would ask me to give you a little bit of background. I'm a retired fourth and fifth grade teacher from Arlington Heights, Illinois. I taught 20 years in the district that I grew up in, and I've published two books. The first one was Learn Like a Pirate. It was published nine years ago, and I just recently published Optimized Learning, which are 180 mini lessons that transform today's students into confident, capable and collaborative, self directed learners.
Melissa Milner 1:16
That's not a short title.
Paul Solarz 1:18
That was the subtitle. Title, Subtitle.
Melissa Milner 1:20
No, it's very exciting to have you on again. You were on my first season right in the smack dab in the middle of the pandemic, and 2020 and it's great to have you back on. And of course, I loved Learn Like a Pirate. And now with Optimized Learning, you've just taken it a step further, like how to get the kids, how to prep them, like, that's what I'm enjoying about those early lessons, is just like, well, what is this? And like, actual lessons you can do. Like, if you have a social emotional learning time, you can do these lessons during that social, you know, that SEL time. So can you just tell us the genesis of Learn Like a Pirate, and then how you got to Optimized Learning?
Paul Solarz 2:04
Well, Learn Like a Pirate. You know, I never knew that I had a book in me until Dave Burgess reached out. He saw me tweeting on Twitter about the things that I do in my classroom. I just, you know, I thought Twitter was just the coolest thing at the time, and I was learning so much from everybody else. I figured I'd blog and put stuff out there. And he said, hey, you need to write a book about your classroom. And I'm like, really, what am I going to write about? I hadn't really read a whole ton of teacher, you know, books and literature on educational philosophies and stuff. So I'm like, Okay, I'm happy to try and and he said, yeah, just focus in on, you know, how you kind of directed your students to become leaders in the classroom and how they kind of lead the whole show pretty much at different points in the day. And I said, awesome. I would definitely be glad to start writing about that. And then that one just wrote itself in six months. It was, it was three months of writing and three months of editing, and we were out the door, and it was, it turned out pretty well. I had a great editor, but it worked itself out. Whereas Optimized Learning is the last five years of my life, I've been devoting to Optimized Learning, I retired in 2019 it was actually right before the pandemic when I spoke to you, yeah, that was news to me, like you had just...
Melissa Milner 3:16
Yeah. It was like, I think we spoke in like, July of 2020.
Paul Solarz 3:20
Yeah, and I hadn't, I mean, that would be right around the time I was announcing to my district that I was going to take a leave of absence, which ultimately would be, you know, retiring or resigning, I guess. But I had 20 years in my mom needed some help. She had had a stroke, so my sister took care of her for the first year, and then once I realized I really could retire on the earliest pension possible, not receiving it till I'm older. I decided to go ahead with it, and I've been taking care of my mom ever since, which has been great for both me and her. So so that's what made me retire early. I didn't know I was going to do that otherwise, but I always had this thought that everybody who's read, LearnLap, you know, different people would say things like, Okay, I totally see it. I get it. I want to do this. But do you have any like specifics that I could do? You know, yeah, exactly. I do the marble theory lesson. I'm going to do this lesson. I'm going to do that lesson that you described in the book. But boy, it would be great if you could just give us a whole bunch of these things for us to dig through and use as we need.
And so that's what I did, was I created Optimized Learning, and it literally is 180 mini lessons that could go 15, 20, 30 minutes, depending on how much time you have. And it focuses on six steps, really seven steps, but there's a six step process that your students need to basically understand in order to learn information without needing an adult to hold their hand every step of the way. And I know you've read the book, so it's so cool being able to talk with you about it, because you you understand what I did here. But I mean, I don't know that anybody's going to teach all 180 lessons, although. It's set so that you can, you know, if there's 180 school days, you could do one a year or one a day for the year. You could split it up between grades. You could split it up to just what you need. You could do the first instructional spiral is what I call it. It's a series of 25 mini lessons. And after each instructional spiral, your kids will be more and more ready to take on that ownership of their work and just not rely on adults to think and do for them all the time.
Melissa Milner 5:26
Yeah, as I was reading it, it struck me, you know, because I've been teaching for a little bit of time now that I sort of want to get to know my kids for a couple weeks before I start this. Because as I'm reading it, I'm like, Yeah, I need to kind of know ahead of time, what could go wrong with these lessons, or what could go really great. Like, know who my leaders, like my natural leaders are, and know who. So I think it that's, I think what I'm going to do, you know, I'm planning on, like, a couple weeks in, jumping, like, full on into it for the SEL time? Good. Yeah, I don't think people would naturally see this as SEL, but it actually is, because it's helping with anxiety. It's how it's it's helping with all of it, how to work together.
Paul Solarz 6:12
Yeah, it's all related. It's building a classroom community where everybody respects everybody. Everybody works together collaboratively. The teacher can work with kids who need it the most because they trust their kids to go do what they need to do. It's all together, and there's definitely a purposeful social emotional connection in here. I did that completely intentionally, but it's not intended to necessarily replace your SEL curriculum, although if you do this, I'll I'll say, in my 20 years, I never had an SEL curriculum till the end. You know, it was, it was whatever I put in. But I thought this style of Optimized Learning, even though the lessons I just created. But I've always taught these concepts, and I... our classes, figured out a way to get along with everybody really well because of the fact that we were just immersed in each other's business all day long by being collaborative and learning how you don't, you know, you don't look for ways to look better than others. You don't look for ways to get others in trouble. You don't like this is all about like helping the person next to you grow and improve. And in your mind, you can take credit for helping others, but that's you don't get to tell that to the teacher and say, Guess what? I just totally helped Melissa get to the top of the mountain, right? You don't, you don't get to say that, you know.
Melissa Milner 7:28
But yeah, no. I mean, do you want to jump into each of the you know? What do you call the modules?
Paul Solarz 7:33
Or, I don't know this. I don't know the steps of the student led self improvement process. That's what I call it. But yeah, I called it student led self improvement, because the idea is that once your students understand these six to seven steps, they can identify their own weaknesses and work towards improving those without needing the teacher to be a part of that process. Unless you know they're gathering resources or getting information or whatever, but you're basically teaching your children, your students, to meet their own differentiated needs within the class day. And it sounds a little bit out there, but that's that's entirely what I did with my kids, because I realized I was not able to meet every kid's need every time, all the time. I couldn't meet some of my kids needs, some of the time, and some of the kids, like, I just couldn't meet their needs. Some of the kids, there were more pressing needs, so they didn't get as much support from me, right? Like, you have to make choices as a teacher.
So I wanted to teach my kids how to take care of it themselves. And the way I started doing that in my classroom, where it was more purposeful than just this general idea was through the idea of, like, our flex time, we had RTI time. I don't know what everybody calls theirs, when what I need, when I need time exactly, we covered all three of those things. So the win time was the best way to make it work, because I would give each of each one of my kids a schedule that was independently tailored to them, and it would tell them when they're meeting in groups with me, when they were working with specific others in the classroom, they had choice of where they sat and different things. But in general, I told them what they were doing based on the clock. And it worked like it worked like nobody's business. So I realized they're more capable than we always give them credit for, you know, like they if you build that relationship with them, where you trust them and they want to work hard for you because they care about you and know that you're working hard for them, they're willing to go the extra mile and try to improve in those areas that aren't fun for them. You know, they don't want to work on they know they probably should. And then, you know, and you're still teaching small groups, and you're still giving the attention to the people that need it the most.
But, but, yeah, that's, that's just the background. So let me tell you the steps. I don't know that I want to do the long version of each of these, but I'll give you
Melissa Milner 9:52
No, people have to buy the book.
Paul Solarz 9:54
Oh, I don't even mean it that way, but Yeah, funny, the seven steps, there's. Six of them that are like chronological and then the seventh one is concurrent with all of them. So step one is planning. I just feel like it's important for students to almost prepare their minds to learn before they start an activity, a lesson, a task, an assignment, they need to tell themselves in their heads, like, here's what I need to do during this class period, and by the way, I should back up almost all of the optimized learning lessons are trying to help students when they're working without the teacher being on stage directly giving them instruction. So if you're lecturing or leading a whole class discussion or reading aloud to them, this is not necessarily when they're going to use their optimized learning skills, because they're not really needing to be self directed at that point. They just need to be like, behavioral, you know, like, you know, not misbehave. And so this is really when you're saying, Okay, I want Melissa to go work with Paul, you know, over there on this assignment. And now you're out of my sight a little bit. You might be in my sight, but you're basically out of my mind for the moment, because I've got other things to do, work with a group or get more kids going, and so you need to have all the tools in order to be successful. And teachers are often saying things to me like, Well, my kids can't do it. They they misbehave, they get off track, they they talk with their friends, and they ignore their enemies, and they, you know all these things, but that's what these lessons are for. It's to address those kinds of issues so that you can say, Melissa and Paul go work in the corner on this topic, and you know that if you tell them it's due in one hour, they're going to have a final product in one hour that you're going to be as happy with as you can.
For those two people you know, like, you know, everybody's limitations, but they're going to give you what they can and because you've taught them how to do that. So planning is that first step of just kind of like preparing for what I'm going to do, knowing what I need to get done, getting all my materials, understanding what the directions are, not meeting my teacher after this moment, you know, like, get it out of your system. If you can, ask the teacher what you need, but then go, you know, if you can help it, and that's step one. Step two is, is metacognition, and that's really just monitoring everything that goes on while you're working. So if I'm sitting over there in the corner with my partner for 45 minutes, because it takes a few minutes to get them ready and a few minutes to wrap up, then during that 45 minutes, I know about 25 things that I have to monitor about our behavior, our progress, our time efficiency, our accuracy, all these things that I need to monitor. And I'm going to own that I'm not going to rely on the teacher to monitor my behavior and attention and time on task and all that. I'm going to do it for myself and my partner, and if I need to, I can help other partnerships in a nice, kind way. And say, by the way, don't forget to, you know, do your metacognitive strategies here or whatever. That's also encouraged with my students, as long as it's always in a kind way.
Melissa Milner 12:53
I can already hear teachers going, Oh yeah, right. So Johnny, who has like severe ADHD. So first of all, you group students like you normally would. You're grouping students depending, sometimes you're grouping them by ability. Sometimes you're grouping them totally like in general, by maybe how they work, their work study habits and their attention. But even without, like, even with that which all teachers do, how, like, do these lessons help a student with the metacognition? Like, I remember some of the lessons, that's why I'm asking this question. Like, how to, like, check in on themselves and things to do, yeah, so could you delve a little.
Paul Solarz 13:38
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Melissa Milner 13:40
So a little bit, not too much, because everybody go buy the book.
Paul Solarz 13:43
Yeah, no, that's great. Like in the metacognition chapter, they I try to focus in on six categories. I think it's maybe even more time, flexibility, progress, effort, interactions, actions and inactions, and then accuracy. And I teach them different strategies. So I loved what we used to call a metacognition check, which is a very teacher directed baseline or not baseline, but basic level metacognition thing, where you basically just shout out, hey, metacognition check, and everybody sticks their thumbs up, down or sideways, which is so very basic, but it's just reporting to me how you think you're doing right at the moment, but how I might evaluate you, not necessarily how you should evaluate you. And then you can change it in midair as I'm looking and I'm not writing anything down and you're not being graded. It's more of a reminder to you that awareness one of you is probably more than I'd hoped even why I called a metacognition check. You know at least one of you is off, so would you please check that it's not you? And then that usually keeps them going for a while. And then when you teach your kids to call a metacognition check, and you say, don't abuse it. But you know, if you want to do one a week or whatever, when you're worried that maybe there's a couple groups off task, you can do it too, as long as you understand you're not evaluating. Each other. You're just doing it as a friendly reminder to the whole class. Hey guys, let's get back on track. And it works really well.
Melissa Milner 15:05
Or even the small group, even a small group.
Paul Solarz 15:07
Oh, for sure, metacognition guys, and they all have to do it, and they can lie. But the whole point is that really, yeah, I mean, I'll look at somebody with a with a raised eyebrow if I think that they're giving themselves a thumbs up, and they were the reason that I called this one. I'll give them that little eyebrow, and they'll be like, Yeah, you're right. And I mean, they'll fix it. But you know, between peers, it's not really about that. It's more about just check yourself, make sure you're on the right track. But yeah, we have different things, like the learning pit. All the ways you can get yourself out of struggle, we have ways to choose places in the classroom wisely based on your distraction levels and maybe friends. You don't want to necessarily just sit nearby your friends, even if you're not partnered with them. And I do typically do random partnerships, but I purposely leave it open ended for teachers. I mean, more than anything, I recommend pulling sticks and randomizing your partnerships as much as possible, because every kid should learn how to work with every other kid in the room, and random is as fair as possible. So I say, if you got stuck with the same kid three times in a row, oh, well, it's fair. It's, you know, that was the sticks. And we never ever say, oh, you know, you got stuck with a kid. We never say it that way, because we always say, no matter who you are partnered with, it's so important that you make them feel like they're your favorite person to be partnered with. And we work on that. I always say smiles before I pull the sticks. And then that first stick, I say, Okay, I pulled Melissa's stick and you're going to be partnered with. And I pretend to pull my stick, and I go, Mr. Solarz. And they all go, hey, you know, because that practice is the smile of no matter who you get stuck with, you know, partnered with you, you gotta pretend they'll just love it and not make them ever feel bad
Melissa Milner 16:47
Right.
Paul Solarz 16:48
But there's a lot of other strategies in there. Was there one you were specifically thinking of that you wanted?
Melissa Milner 16:52
No, no. I mean, I just, I just remember reading through the..., because I, I'm the type that's like, I looked at them and I'm like, I'm going to metacognition first. So I read the whole metacognition thing first, because I'm big on that, yeah, you know, even just like in reading metacognition, but that I love that whole you need to know when you're not knowing, and you need to know when you're not, especially
Paul Solarz 17:14
Focusing on entry level, yeah. I mean, I definitely think middle school too, but elementary they need it like they haven't necessarily gotten that. And I was thinking, you know, a lot of these chapters work in isolation, with no problem. If you just wanted to do a unit on metacognition. There are 29 lessons in the metacognition chapter that you can do, and several more in other chapters that are like metacognitive synthesis and metacognitive goal setting. You know that goal in other chapters, but you can definitely teach these, these chapters, most of them in isolation, if you wanted to.
Melissa Milner 17:47
Yeah. Actually, that makes me think I might go back in and find some good lessons that are good for the very beginning of the year.
Paul Solarz 17:55
Sure, oh yeah, they're just replacing things you would have already done. But at the same time, this could also just be the thing that spurs you to remember, hey, I remember I used to teach this thing at the beginning of the class or the beginning of the year. I'm going to remember to do that now. I'm putting that in my notes, and you don't have to use my lesson at all. You can use your own. It could be just a classroom discussion.
Melissa Milner 18:16
Except you do have some really cool I don't like calling them worksheets, but you have some great workshopping the idea...
Paul Solarz 18:25
Graphic organizers, yeah, so like every lesson comes with at least one instructional poster that you would project in the classroom, or you can print out if you wanted to, but I don't expect that. And then there's a front and back student handout for every lesson so that students can actually write in while they're doing it. It's not at all. There's almost like no lessons that are that it's truly a worksheet, because there's not really, like that many answer keys. There's like, three or something. It's really like graphic organizers and brainstorm lists and all kinds of things like that, where it just gets them to dig deeper into the concept and apply it to their own learning. So that's really between behind the student handouts.
Melissa Milner 19:04
All right. So after metacognition...
Paul Solarz 19:06
Well, next one's synthesis, which I as I wrote the chapter, the real purpose of synthesis, to me, is learning, you know, like making what you're doing in class permanent and transferable. So the synthesis chapter is really just a lot of different strategies for students to take their new learning and combine it with their prior knowledge that was accurate and correct, to make a brand new understanding, or a better understanding, or a deeper understanding, and then it also teaches them how to filter out any wrong prior information, like misunderstandings, or when you learn disinformation, you know, and you think misconceptions, yeah, yeah, misconceptions. And then you combine that all into something real. And a lot of times, our final products that we have our students create are those synthesis products. It's you know, what did you learn, basically, but it's combined what you used to know with what you now know and and then. It's got a little touch of digital awareness and citizenship and making sure you're not trusting sources that you don't you know that you can't trust, or whatever it's it doesn't teach you how to do that. So I don't want to claim that, but the idea is in there where you're definitely teaching kids to filter out misinformation and and disinformation.
Melissa Milner 20:19
So yeah, and there's plenty of other places to find lessons on this.
Paul Solarz 20:25
Yeah, let's see. So then the next chapter is reflection. So this is where I start to think about the synthesis chapter kind of straddles the line between while you're working and after you're working. I want my kids synthesizing while they work, but I also want them to take a moment after they're done working to just re synthesize and make sure that they know what their final kind of understanding is of their learning for that day. And most people would call that reflection. You know, what did you learn today? And that's fine, but it's a combination of synthesizing and reflecting. So reflection is really the start of my next purpose with this, which are the next three steps. So reflection goes with self assessment and goal setting. So at the end of a learning experience, let's say you have some workers that are slow workers. You know, you have students that take the whole period to do the smallest amount of things, because it literally takes them that long even working at their best rate. Those kids may not get to reflection, self assessment and goal setting more than just a cursory kind of a glance at it, and that's okay. It you don't want to encourage it forever. You might want to start to build in a few more minutes into your lessons, if you can, so that they can get to it.
But the kids that are finished a little early or a lot early, this is where they're going to really have some impact on their learning. Which it might be your kids who are gifted, or your kids who are overachievers, or they might be your speedy ones that make silly mistakes and whatever. Hey, we all got those two. So the reflection chapter starts with just looking back on the experience. What did you do? What did you like? What did you dislike? What did you learn? What would you do differently? What would you do the same, which is a little different than self assessment, but admittedly, there's blending of those two. Self Assessment is more like, all right, I didn't like this. So what will I try to do in the future? And I didn't do well at this. So, you know, how can I, how can I make that go better the next time it's more of a What did I do poorly and what can be done about it in the future? Kind of look at it and it's not self grading. So it's not just giving yourself an A on this, or saying, Yes, I completed all the tasks, so I'm done. It's it's more. What could I have done better? What could I What? What What can I teach others? Because I did so well, you know? Or what am I proud of? And things like that.
But that all leads to goal setting, which is really the purpose of self led improvement, student led self improvement. So the goal setting chapter teaches students how to identify those weaknesses in that self assessment moment, and then write a plan for how they're going to attack those weaknesses. Now, some weaknesses you can attack very simply. You don't need a plan for it. You're going to say, You know what, next time, I'm not going to argue with my partner about this, I'm just going to agree, or politely, you know, dissent. And that could be what we would call a goal burst. You're just going to make it important the next time you get together, and that's good, but then they're the ones that take a lot longer to figure out, and that those are the ones that you have to write a goal plan for. And we call those smarter goals. Smarter is an acronym. I'm not going to remember everything now, but it's taking the ideas from smart goals, which I've actually got permission to use from the company that owns smart Oh, great. Yeah, they actually have a copy of the book. They loved it. That was great. And they SMART goals, is wonderful. But these smarter goals also ask kids to look at, is it ambitious enough my goal, and is it also attainable?
You know, like, you don't want it so hard, but you don't want it so easy. So a happy medium, and then it focuses them on gathering resources. The smarter the R at the end is, is gathering your resources before you go any further, which I know that's not really part of, like the smart plan, but too often kids in my classes, at least, would write these goals that involved materials that we didn't have and, and, you know, plans that never could be done. So if you include the resources part in that initial planning step, I think you weed out some of the goal plans that aren't going to work or or that you're gonna have to really work hard to make it work, right? So that's, that's the gist of the six steps. And then I told you that there was one step that kind of happens concurrently with all the other steps. And that's the idea of feedback. It's giving each other feedback, asking for feedback, but also giving help and asking for help support. You know, it's in our classroom I mentioned the mountain. You know, no one in our class was allowed to stand atop the mountain alone. So if. You finish your work and it's all perfect, and you're like, Haha, I'm done. You guys have to deal with it, you know, like, well, you're not at all doing what we do in our classroom. You know, in our classroom, a you shouldn't probably be done that fast, because you should have been helping people all along the way. And I know you there are going to be people who yell at me because they say, Well, my gifted kids shouldn't be the teacher all the time. No, it wasn't always my gifted kids who were the ones doing it right. Every single person is good at something, and when they're extra good compared to their their peers, they need to take moments to realize, hey, I'm really ahead and getting this so fast. It's really easy for me. I'm doing well at this.
I'm going to check in on my peers and make sure that nobody's sitting there having a horrible moment, you know, struggling, and nobody notices. I'm going to keep an eye on everybody you know, in a way, and just make sure I help them, that if they need it, and I'm not going to go around saying, Hey, do you need my help? I'm just going to, like, mosey on, check out, look for something that might trigger me, and then I might say, hey, you know what? I was having trouble with that, too. But here's what I thought I'd do, you know, or give some kind of, like, way of entering into that person's work and suggest something that might get them to the next step. And doesn't mean give them the answer to number six. It just means, you know, saying, you know, like, oh, this resource was great for me, or, oh, yeah, that one was tough. I found that if you skip that one for now and go to the next one that's going to be easier, or whatever. Those are math examples in my head. I don't that's what I want my kids doing. But in general, ask for feedback, give feedback, take time out of your busy day to help others, and that makes the classroom work really, really well when that happens.
Melissa Milner 26:38
So when I started doing some of your learn lap stuff originally, way before the pandemic I struggled with here. I've got them really working independently, and now they're going to go on to teachers that don't do this. It's not their fault. It's, you know, they either don't know about it or they haven't chosen to do it. How do you make sure kids keep these skills. I mean, I guess doing it every day, all year, yeah, you hope they keep them.
Paul Solarz 27:06
I'll just say that I don't know for sure, because I don't have them again to assess, to find out if they actually...
Melissa Milner 27:13
that's, that's your next, uh, next research.
Paul Solarz 27:19
I do know that I ended every year with a discussion with them, and where I said, Listen, I teach. It's the same as the beginning of the year conversation. To be honest with you, I teach a very different way than most teachers you've ever had. And then I just say, than most teachers you will ever have in the future. You know, just change the perspective and say the way we do it in here. You might love it, you might hate it. I don't know. I mostly see my kids loving it, but I'm going to give them the chance to say that, yeah, it wasn't my favorite, if that's what they want. And I say we're going to enjoy this year doing it a certain way. Next year, it might be a different way. It probably will be a different way. It might but it'll probably be more like something you had last year, the year before, the year before that. It's not like you're going to have teachers doing it their own way every year, where it's just different from each other, but what I want to see from you is respect for the teacher, understanding that their way is what they're comfortable with and what they believe is the best way, and it might be the best way, because I've never taught sixth grade, and which is where I'm sending you, I student taught it, but doesn't count. I never was a teacher of that. So they're doing it the best way that they know how, and my way might work for them. Might not work for them, but you never you don't get the right to tell them to or or criticize them for any of the ways that they teach. You just going to need to learn. So I tell my kids, what's more important is learning with every teaching style that you encounter more so than learning in this way that I taught. I just feel like this year was a very valuable year. I definitely watched my kids make two to three years growth in certain areas all the time, so I knew that there was that kind of, what I believe is permanent learning and growth, but I didn't worry so much about it being different. What I what I'll also say, though, is the middle school teachers did tell me we always had to meet with them at the end of every year about the next year's class. Yeah, they always told me, Paul, we can always figure out which kid was a solar kid. And they meant it as a compliment, like it wasn't like they got attitude or something like that.
Melissa Milner 29:19
No, because they probably worked hard. They worked well in groups.
Paul Solarz 29:23
Yeah, it was all that in leadership and just, it was self direction, was a lot of it, even though we didn't say those words, that wasn't what we called it. It's like your kids just know what to do in school, and they're willing to help everybody around them to get there. And that's, that's great. If that's my legacy for those kids, I'll take that.
Melissa Milner 29:41
Yeah. So they did retain it. They did retain it. That's great.
Paul Solarz 29:44
Yeah. I mean, I just don't know if it ever drifts off after that. I just know that middle school teachers noticed it, and that's, that's a good thing.
Melissa Milner 29:50
So what else do you want people to know about your book?
Paul Solarz 29:52
Well, I... it's, it's available on Amazon, Optimized Learning. It's for grades three through eight, but you could definitely. Modify it some other way. I tried to think of my fifth graders as I was writing the lessons. I also thought fourth grade. I know all my lessons would have worked with my fourth graders. Oh, so the thing that I think is most unique about it, each lesson has those instructional posters and those students handouts, and they're all editable on Canvas, so every lesson has a QR code or a bitly, so you don't have to scan it with your phone or your iPad. You could type it in with your computer if you want, and it'll take you to a Canva page. If you're not used to Canva yet, you've got to definitely get on that. Every teacher gets a free account, and it's like a pro account. And within Canva, you can edit every slide. So let's say I have a really good idea for a lesson, but you don't like some of the things that I put in it, maybe the characters or I gave the example of I have one lesson called Fake it till you make it. And I can picture somebody not liking that lesson because they don't want their kids to fake it till they make it, or whatever. And that's fine. Go into the lesson, change those little words around, make it yours, and you've got a whole lesson that's pretty much complete for you, and you get to tinker to make it work exactly for you. That's right, yeah, and so, and you'd have, you have access to every slide. There's over 600 slides. I'm looking at a binder right now.
It looks like a three inch binder, maybe, and it's filled with the 600 printouts. You don't ever have to print them out, but it's every instructional poster, every student handout. There's some teacher guide pages where I give you, like a 12 page teacher guide to understanding the background of this and all visual all in color. The book itself is in black and white, but all the visuals are in color you would project or print out. I mean, that's the gist of it. I think it's, I think it's really unique in that you can edit everything. I know other places are starting to do stuff like that, but I thought that was a big deal when I was making the program for the last five years.
Melissa Milner 31:50
Yeah, five years. Wow.
Paul Solarz 31:52
It took forever. And I loved it, but wow, I couldn't like I just kept coming up with more lesson ideas that I really needed, and then I had already hit my 180 and I didn't want to go over that, so I had to delete lessons. So there are actually bonus lessons available online. And if you go into the drive folder, which has slides for everything, they're that you wouldn't, you wouldn't know they're a bonus lesson, but they're in there. So...
Melissa Milner 32:13
That's funny.
Paul Solarz 32:14
I figured I'd give them to you still, even though I don't, I don't have them in the book. Yeah.
Melissa Milner 32:18
Well, I am thrilled that you took five years and this, because this is quite a beneficial resource. I can't, I don't even know how I'm going to use it yet, like I have some ideas, and, yeah, I'm really looking forward to to implementing some, all, I don't know yet.
Paul Solarz 32:38
Right. Thank you for providing an endorsement. Let's see if I can find so the quote I took out of it, it was a nice two paragraph endorsement, but I wrote, Solarz has created groundbreaking units that will lead to classrooms of truly independent, self directed learners. So that was the quote that I pulled out of your your quote.
Melissa Milner 32:57
So I just want you to know you, you still, you still sound like Jim Henson,
Paul Solarz 33:01
Oh my God, just like you said last time.
Melissa Milner 33:03
Yeah.
Paul Solarz 33:04
That's funny.
Melissa Milner 33:04
You still have that Kermit sound. I love it.
Paul Solarz 33:06
Kermit the Frog here.
Melissa Milner 33:08
Oh my god. You don't even have to like you sort... you already have it. It's a great voice to have. It's a great voice. Yes,
Paul Solarz 33:16
I am sitting at a glass table that echoes too, which probably isn't helping, but, yeah,
Melissa Milner 33:20
No worries.
Paul Solarz 33:21
I was gonna say it's a 444 page book. That's what I wanted to say.
Melissa Milner 33:25
Yes, it's heavy. It's full of stuff. It's physically heavy.
Paul Solarz 33:31
It's over. What is it over a pound? Or two pounds?
Melissa Milner 33:33
I think so. Yeah,
Paul Solarz 33:34
I think that was the number that I remember.
Melissa Milner 33:36
Oh, and also, it has little sections on the side for you to put your post its it's like, got a little, like, a little, I don't know how to describe it, a little rectangle, yeah, yeah.
Paul Solarz 33:47
I put four little tabby areas on the left where you could put your little three by three tabs, or three by two post it sticky notes. And then on right, it has the actual darken tabs, so you know what chapter you're in, so you can find what you need. And I don't know. I just knew that if I was going to make a book from scratch, and I was doing all the production on it, which I did, I had no staff for me. I figured I knew a way I would want a book to be. So this is how I would want to book with these sections for post its and, yeah, all kinds of things. So, but yeah, I had to do all the production, which I loved. I now know how to write a book from start to finish pretty much.
Melissa Milner 34:22
Wow, that's amazing.
Paul Solarz 34:24
And before you wrap up, I want to say thank you again for all your help with Learnlap at the start. And...
Melissa Milner 34:29
Oh yeah.
Paul Solarz 34:30
Last night was our last Learn Lap chat. I retired it yesterday.
Melissa Milner 34:35
Okay, so can I tell you, I get the reminders. I get the reminders. And I'm like, you know, it's been like, three years, and I'm like, he's still doing this. Stop, stop.
Paul Solarz 34:44
Well TLAP is still going too right after me. So...
Melissa Milner 34:47
Wow, we're talking talking about Twitter chats. Well, X chats now, but yeah.
Paul Solarz 34:53
Hashtag LearnLap ended yesterday. So we had a nine year run every Monday. The only Mondays we took off were... were the holidays like I don't we didn't always take off Memorial Day, but we took off Christmas and New Year and stuff like that. But...
Melissa Milner 35:05
So what Paul would do is he'd put out a spreadsheet, and he'd asked us different educators to moderate the chat. Because doing that for nine years every Monday...
Paul Solarz 35:15
I wanted the different perspectives. Honestly, more than anything, I could have redone the chats over and over and over. I never redid a single chat. I had enough people interested in moderating that, yeah, and and then educational trends changed so much, enough, you know, enough that we could perspectives on similar topics, like we had artificial intelligence probably 10 times in the last year, but they were from 10 different people, so you got really different perspectives, you know, yeah, valuable.
Melissa Milner 35:38
That's awesome. That was fun. I think I did a couple of those. Those are fun to moderate.
Paul Solarz 35:43
Yeah, you moderated several for me. At the beginning, you were one of them, so thank you for that.
Melissa Milner 35:48
Of course, of course. Well, thank you again for taking time out to chat about your book. And I can't, I can't endorse it enough. It's funny because it at first I was like, Is this one more thing? Is this extra? But then I'm like, No, it's going to make everything you already do more efficient. The kids are going to be... they're just going to be able to do it. Doesn't like take away from your curriculum time. It's going to add to your curriculum time.
Paul Solarz 36:16
Yeah, and I mean, we don't teach kids how to learn, and this supports the idea of how to learn and but yet, it also has social, emotional components. It encourages collaboration. It encourages how to accept feedback and appreciate feedback like there's so many things in there that it's life lessons, it's learning skills, it's interpersonal skills, it's so many things that it definitely fits in with what we're doing. And I tried to make them short enough that you could do them in 1520 minutes. 1520 minutes, depending on the age group of your kids and how much you want to get into it. But like, you could easily teach a lot of these and make a big impact on your kids. Even if you just teach that first instructional spiral, your kids are going to know an awful lot about what you need to do. As far as like, learning goes.
Melissa Milner 36:58
Absolutely all right. So thank you again.
Paul Solarz 37:00
Thanks so much for having me, Melissa.
For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner, and I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. Thanks for listening, and that's a wrap.