How should schools respond when the conditions for learning—and for human interaction—are shifting in real time?

These questions are showing up everywhere.

Educators and school leaders are noticing the same patterns: Students are capable, thoughtful, and engaged in many ways, yet they are navigating challenges that make it harder to focus, communicate, and fully participate in shared learning experiences.

These are not isolated issues.

They reflect deeper shifts in how Gen Z and Gen Alpha learners process information, relate to one another, and make sense of the world around them.

If we want to respond effectively, we have to look beneath the surface.

In Conversation Comeback, we identify four core challenges that help explain what’s happening and what students need from schools now.

1. Technoference: When Digital Norms Disrupt Real Conversation

Technology has fundamentally reshaped how students communicate.

Today’s learners move seamlessly across texts, DMs, comments, and feeds, each with its own norms. They are used to reacting quickly, stepping away from conversations, or engaging without consequence.

But face-to-face discussion requires something different:

• sustained attention
• nonverbal awareness
• real-time thinking and response

Many students struggle to distinguish between on-screen and in-person communication. What feels natural online can feel uncomfortable or even risky in a classroom discussion.

2. Emotivism: When Disagreement Feels Personal

In today’s culture, feelings and beliefs are often intertwined.

This makes academic discussion more difficult. When ideas feel tied to identity, disagreement can feel like a personal attack rather than an intellectual exchange.

Students are navigating:

• heightened emotional expression
• polarized public discourse
• limited models of productive disagreement

As a result, many students avoid discussion altogether.

Without explicit instruction in how to separate ideas from identity and engage across difference, meaningful conversation is hard to sustain.

3. Diminished Attention: The Barrier to Listening and Learning

Attention is the foundation of effective communication.

But Gen Z learners are developing in environments shaped by:

• short-form content
• constant notifications
• rapid task-switching

In the classroom, this shows up clearly:

• difficulty tracking multi-step conversations
• surface-level responses instead of deeper thinking
• challenges with active listening

Cognitive science is clear: Multitasking is a myth. What students experience as multitasking is actually constant switching, which reduces comprehension and weakens memory.

Without sustained attention, student engagement in discussion breaks down.

4. Executive Function Gaps: The Hidden Demands of Discussion

Strong classroom discussion depends on more than ideas.

Students must be able to:

• organize their thinking
• hold multiple perspectives at once
• decide when and how to contribute
• adjust their thinking in real time

These are executive function skills, and many students need more support developing them.

In a high-distraction, high-pressure environment, these demands can feel overwhelming. For students experiencing anxiety, even entering a conversation can be difficult.

Why This Matters for Schools Right Now

Taken together, these four challenges—technoference, emotivism, diminished attention, and executive function gaps—help explain why classroom discussion is more difficult than it used to be.

If we continue to treat discussion as something students should already know how to do, we will continue to see uneven participation, shallow engagement, and missed learning opportunities.

And once we name the challenge, we can respond to it.

From Conversation Crisis to Conversation Comeback

The central idea behind Conversation Comeback is simple:

Discussion skills are not intuitive, but they are teachable.

When schools approach discussion as a core academic skill, they can begin to:

• explicitly teach listening and speaking
• scaffold participation and idea-building
• create structured opportunities for practice
• build a shared language for conversation across classrooms

Over time, discussion becomes more than participation. It becomes a disciplined, academic practice that strengthens thinking, learning, and connection.

This is the work of R.E.A.L.® Discussion. R.E.A.L. is not a one-off strategy or a set of discussion prompts. It is a research-informed, practice-proven approach to building communication skills with the same level of rigor we apply to reading and writing, built in partnership with more than 100 schools.

Build a Conversation Culture

If these challenges feel familiar, you are not alone. Schools across the country are asking the same question: How do we rebuild strong student discussion skills in today’s world?

Start with the book.
Conversation Comeback offers a clear, actionable framework for teaching discussion in today’s classrooms. You’ll find a version for K-12 humanities teachers and a schoolwide version for leaders, faculty, and family at conversationcomeback.org.

Start the conversation with us.
If you’re thinking about how to bring this work to your school or across your team, we’d love to talk. From classroom practice to schoolwide strategy, we help schools build a true culture of conversation.

Because this moment calls for more than awareness. It calls for a Conversation Comeback.

Liza: Welcome, Eric, to Destination: Discussion. We’re so glad to have you here today. We’ve seen your name all over the independent school world, and we think of you as kind of the AI Scout for K-12 education. How did you get there? Tell us your story. 

Eric: I’m an independent consultant now, and I’ve been on my own for about 18 months, but I started my career in the classroom. I was a middle and high school English teacher for about 12 years, then I spent a decade at Global Online Academy. When I was teaching, I got super interested in technology – specifically, technology as a tool that could empower students to become more independent learners and to do new things. 

My interest in that fit really well with what GOA has been working on for a long time. While I was there, ChatGPT came about. In everything I do, I bring the lens of “how do we learn about this technology in a way that can help schools and teachers and kids do better work?”

Liza: I really appreciate your teacher-first approach, because I think it’s so easy to opine on what kids should and shouldn’t be doing. To empathize with the teacher in terms of experimenting while setting clear boundaries is so important. And by the way, ChatGPT is not the only revolutionary technology kids and teachers will encounter in their lifetimes / careers! 

At R.E.A.L.®, as you know, we’re obsessed with what we think of as the deeply human art of great discussion, especially in an AI world. One reason I reached out to you was because you’d written a blog post sharing your experiences discussing with an AI bot. That’s something we know our students are also experimenting with. What’s it like to converse with AI? What are its strengths, and where does it fall short? 

Eric: It depends on the tool. One thing I have to say a lot in my work is that we tend to use “ChatGPT” the way we use words like “Kleenex” or “Xerox.” It’s really just one tool that’s come to represent a much broader field. 

When you talk about talking to AI, there are all different things you can talk to. I was talking to advanced voice mode in the ChatGPT app. In general, where the technology is right now is that you interact with a human-sounding, podcast-quality voice that responds to your voice almost in real time. There’s a bit of a delay, and it doesn’t, at least for me, replicate exactly what a human conversation is, but it’s certainly way better than I thought it would be. 

I’ve done sessions where I opened up advanced voice mode in a room full of teachers, and I explained to the bot that I’m in a room full of teachers, and I asked what questions it had for the group. The bot responds with questions that are aligned to the audience and relevant to the topic, and it answers teacher questions in a coherent, compelling way. It feels flat in the way that a lot of interactions with technology do, but it’s certainly better than a lot of other tools I’ve used. 

Liza: Can you say more about the flatness?

Eric: I just wrote a post about Annie Murphy Paul’s Book, The Extended Mind. One of the ways we learn is through nonverbal cues in our interactions with other people. When you’re interacting with a voice bot, you’re just getting the voice. You’re not getting a person, which is the first thing, but you’re also not getting expressions. You’re not getting physical reactions. You’re not able to assess – nor is it worth trying to assess –  the emotions of the bot. You’re losing a lot of the nuance that goes around the kinds of interactions you would typically have with a human being, which are huge. 

Liza: That’s something we think a lot about – the fact that conversation unlocks the deepest human experiences. Conversation is the foundation of friendship, partnership, leadership, citizenship. There are neurobiological elements of conversation that feel impossible to imagine AI replicating perfectly … ever! What do you think conversations with various AI tools could look like in 5, 10, 15 years? 

Eric: I can’t predict the future – that’s way above my pay grade. But I will say: we’re already seeing sort of realistic AI-generated avatars. You can speak with a very human-looking avatar with facial expressions who will react to what you say. 

We’re also seeing tools in the accessibility space that bring multimodal communication to folks who are hearing-impaired or visually impaired. One thing we should expect is maybe not that this technology will replace the value of human interactions, but that it will create a new category of interaction, where we’ll be interacting with bots for certain things. It’s this new category of conversation that we need to prepare for. 

Liza. That’s fascinating. The idea of transactional communication being outsourced or technologically enabled is intuitive. A new category of conversation and even companionship is pretty fascinating….

What do you see as the uniquely human skills that AI will never be able to replicate?

Eric: Have you seen the movie Her? It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a guy who lives in the near future and falls in love with a bot voiced by Scarlett Johansson. I think if you’re going to watch anything to try to understand what AI is going to do in 10 years, I think that movie is the best representation of where we are right now and where we’re headed in the short term. That movie is about vulnerability – and the thing that worries me about technology is how we’ll answer big questions like, what does it mean to be vulnerable with another person? What does it mean to be vulnerable in conversation? Bots eliminate that. 

My biggest takeaway from interacting with these voice bots is that it feels very private in a way that is reassuring in certain ways and worrying in other ways. There’s just not a lot at stake for me when I’m talking to a bot. I can tell it anything, and it’s not going to judge me. I can tell it anything, and I’m not really worried about how it’s reacting. I think that’s great for certain use cases, and it’s a real concern for others. 

Liza: Yes, appreciate that nuance and absolutely. Now let’s rewind and go back to your classroom teacher days – what do you think are some ways that AI can integrate or support class discussion? 

Eric: I’m already seeing English teachers that I’m working with try different things. One thing that predated ChatGPT is the idea of all these kinds of AI meeting tools that can record a discussion, track talk time, track filler words, and offer transcription and analysis of what’s going on. They can be your teaching assistant in tracking, monitoring, and getting quantitative data out of discussion. 

I’m also seeing teachers who run discussion-based, Harkness-style classrooms use AI in a targeted way to support students who don’t bring a lot of discussion competencies to class. They’re asking students to use these bots to practice for live discussion, so they can enter a discussion feeling more empowered to contribute. 

I used to run Harkness a lot in my English classroom. It’s a great pedagogy, but it’s also inequitable in a lot of ways, because it really does have a bias toward certain skill sets and personality traits. I think AI could be an assistive technology for students who maybe don’t naturally excel in that kind of format. 

Liza: We couldn’t agree more. We’re very excited about the ways in which technology can support making classroom discussions more equitable, more rigorous, and ultimately allow everyone to engage in the whole-group discussion as a deeply human endeavor! 

OK, two of our favorite questions as we wrap up. First: what is your greatest fear for K-12 education? And on the flip side, what’s your greatest hope? 

Eric: Specifically related to AI’s impact on students, I’m worried about the vulnerability thing. I think there’s a lot of discourse around how learning requires friction, and AI eliminates friction. That’s very real and very valid. But learning also requires vulnerability, and I think that’s harder to measure and design for. I’m very concerned about the ease with which we can retreat into AI tools, rather than take certain higher-stake risks. 

My other fear is that K-12 education doesn’t change in response to the advent of AI. I’m concerned that people will try to white-knuckle their way through this, and the meaningful changes that technology has been pushing on education would continue not to happen. I think that’s really a disservice to kids. 

I’m full of compassion for schools about this – it’s really hard and complex, but it’s also a call to action to change in certain meaningful ways. 

Liza: And what’s your greatest hope?

Eric: My greatest hope is that we start listening to students in all of this. When I speak to kids in my work, their perspectives on this are as diverse and nuanced as any adult’s, and I don’t think we’re talking about the student experience and perspective seriously enough when it comes to this technology. 

When I talk to students about AI, they do not ask me about cheating. They do not ask me about school. They ask me about their futures. They ask me about the world they’re going to enter. They ask me about the fact that for the rest of their lives they’re going to have to be making decisions about generative artificial intelligence. That piece of it makes me hopeful that schools will engage students at that level and make choices for students that reflect the fact that this is something that is going to affect the rest of their lives and ours. 

This is not like a SmartBoard. This is technology that is not just going to affect the school, but also society and the workplace and citizenship. I’m really hopeful that schools embrace the challenge and ambition of those really big questions. 

Liza: I love that. We really appreciate your centering student voice as your greatest hope for K-12, because we certainly agree that we should be doing that more than we are, and that there’s infinite possibility when we do. So, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing all of these thoughts. 

Eric: Thank you for having me. 

Catherine: What has been your path through schools? How did you end up where you are now?

Gwyneth: I grew up about two and a half miles from the Peddie School. That’s where I went to high school, and where I was in my yearbook voted “Most Likely to Return to Peddie as a Teacher.” All throughout college, though, I didn’t think I would become a teacher – I thought I would go to law school and do policy work. After I graduated, I was applying for legal research jobs. It wasn’t until I was offered one that I thought, “If I take this job, I won’t ever get to teach.” 

So I became a teacher, and I spent the first seven years of my career at Millbrook. I took a leave to go to the private school leadership program at the Klingenstein Center at Teachers College, and that was transformative. 

While I was teaching, one day my History department head told me I needed to teach philosophy. I had never taken philosophy, and my department head said, “I know the content scares you. That’s why I want you to do it.” That was the year I really learned how curriculum works – and how important it is to maintain your own learner’s mindset as an adult.

Catherine: You then transitioned into administrative roles, right? What was that transition like, as you went from primarily working with students to then working with faculty? 

Gwyneth: Yes, I became the 33-year-old Dean of Faculty at Berkshire School, which felt like a dream come true. People often asked me the biggest difference between being a Dean of Students and a Dean of Faculty. And I would tell them: when a kid is on fire, you have to put it out right away. When an adult is on fire, they make an appointment. 

I spent time as an academic and faculty leader at a few different boarding schools before coming here to Pomfret School as the Director of the Grauer Institute: the learning experience we create for adults at Pomfret on behalf of kids. 

Catherine: In your role as Director of the Grauer Institute, what education trends are you most excited about right now? 

Gwyneth: The thing I’m most invested in here is the shift to competency-based learning and teaching. It’s the radical idea that we should tell students what it is we’re trying to get them to be able to do – it’s sort of bonkers that that’s even considered innovation! 

Differentiation goes hand-in-hand with competency-based learning. We’re trying to figure out how to push the high-performers harder while also supporting the kids who are struggling. 

To make this shift, I first need to get our whole faculty on board, and that’s hard too – because independent school teachers are very focused on teacher autonomy. I think in general, teacher autonomy tends to help teachers, not kids. 

Catherine: Building upon that – what excited you about R.E.A.L. ®? Can you tell us about the partnership with Grauer? 

Gwyneth: R.E.A.L.® is such a great example of the possibility to teach things we thought couldn’t be explicitly taught. That, of course, is the power of Competency-Based Learning, broadly, but R.E.A.L.® tackles an element of pedagogy that has felt especially squishy  for many teachers for a long time. We have seen that impact first-hand in our 9th and 10th grade humanities courses. 

I love how R.E.A.L.® makes discussion skills  actionable to every kid – and calls teachers to be explicit in their expectations and specific in their feedback. It’s a living embodiment of a growth mindset – both for the kids and for the faculty. 

And in many classrooms,there’s an idea that if discussion is hard for you, we should not make you do it. What?! If calculus is hard for you, we don’t say, “well, that means you can’t do it.” No – we say, “step it up and learn to do a new thing.” Oh, you prefer to express your feelings in writing? Sorry – we’re not doing that today. Maybe next week. 

Catherine: Absolutely! Can you tell me a bit about your vision for R.E.A.L. ® at Grauer this summer? 

Gwyneth: One of the things that is so apparent to anyone who does work with R.E.A.L.® is how much you all treasure your teacher-community – which I know you often call a “nerd party!” At Grauer this summer, we’re tripling down on this teacher nerd summer camp vibe. I think that’s the thing that makes R.E.A.L.® and Grauer such a good fit for one another: R.E.A.L. ® is all about human connection and all about relationships … but it needed a host site to make an in-person opportunity actually possible! 

Catherine: We’re really excited that we’ll get to be in person discussing discussion. 

What do you feel makes Grauer Institute PD different from just a regular conference workshop someone might go to?

Gwyneth: I think, besides the community aspect, we’re able to help from a tactical perspective. We don’t just give the content then send you home to apply it – we make space for you to actually take the learning and turn it into something that will be useful for you. 

Catherine: Thinking about R.E.A.L.® and Grauer – who do you think should come to the R.E.A.L.® part of the Institute this summer? 

Gwyneth: There are three tracks of the R.E.A.L. ® at Grauer Institute, each designed for a slightly different profile. 

For new-to-R.E.A.L.® teachers, Level One offers certification and pilot materials. Even if a school has no intention of implementing a full R.E.A.L ® deployment, I think any rookie humanities teachers would really benefit from R.E.A.L.® Level One. I know a teacher at Blair, where I used to work, would always say “R.E.A.L. ® should be mandatory training for any first-year humanities teacher. It helps with classroom management, organization, equity, student voice, etc.” 

For Level Two, anyone who’s already doing R.E.A.L.® Discussion but wants to dive deeper into their discussion practice and engage with practitioners who teach at other independent schools across the country … and who wants to really cultivate their own leadership in R.E.A.L.® … they would be a good fit to attend. 

Finally, Level Three will be a think tank of people like me who are thinking big picture. What does it mean for our school to be doing this in the broader context? It will be interesting to see how these three levels play together.

Thank you, Gwyneth, for your vision and your partnership! Interested in nerding out with us at Grauer Institute this summer? Register here. 

“We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Sidra to the team,” said Liza Garonzik, Founder of R.E.A.L.® Discussion. “We are grateful for the mission-orientation, strategic mindset, academic leadership experience, and coaching expertise Sidra brings to the role. She is a dream partner  for our independent school community!”

Dr. Smith is an accomplished educator and leadership coach, with 30 years of experience fostering growth in others. She has experience in a wide range of school types across the US and internationally; she began her teaching career at an international school in West Africa, spent a year as a fellow in a New England boarding school, and has held faculty and senior administrative roles at various independent schools across the country. She joins R.E.A.L.® after serving most recently as the Director of Studies and Strategic Initiatives at Severn School. 

“I am honored to join  R.E.A.L.® and collaborate with my independent school colleagues to shape the future of learning and cultivate spaces where respectful and thoughtful dialogue thrives,” said Dr. Smith. “I look forward to championing civil discourse, supporting educators, and helping to  foster environments that empower students to become active, engaged citizens.”

To learn more about R.E.A.L.® Discussion or for a conversation about a skills-based approach to discussion instruction, please reach out – we’d love to chat!

Emily: Welcome Duncan! I’m thrilled to get to talk to you. Let’s start by having you tell us about yourself. Where do you teach, what subject, what grade level? 

Duncan: Thank you for having me! I’m very excited to be here discussing R.E.A.L.®, which has been so great in my classroom. I teach at Nashoba Brooks School, which is in Concord, Massachusetts, and our school is all-girls from grades four to eight. I teach math in the fifth and sixth grades. In addition to being a math teacher, which is one of my favorite parts of my life, I’m also a dad. I have three girls, and my wife is also a math teacher, so there is lots of math in our house. I grew up as an avid athlete, and my main sport was downhill skiing in college. We also watch a lot of basketball. My wife played basketball, so family, math, and sports are our big family things.

Emily: That’s so neat. I had no idea that you were a downhill skier! It’ll be great to get your girls on the slopes in the future. 

When we talk to practitioners out in the field, we often start with the “why”. What are the reasons you are invested in discussion-based learning? Tell us a little bit about how you came to focus on discussion as a key lever in your students’ math journeys.

Duncan: Absolutely. I think “why” is such an important place to start. I’ve been teaching middle school math for about a decade now, and I really began looking at my teaching practices in the post-COVID  landscape in 2021. What I was seeing was that a lot of my students were engaged in outside math programs during that time, and specifically online math learning. I noticed that while their acceleration through some of the algorithm-type processes was getting faster, they were demonstrating what seemed to be less and less conceptual understanding. I saw that their discussion skills, within those conceptual understanding conversations, were lacking, so they were having a hard time centering curiosity.

Also, when they came away from group work, I was seeing a lot of frustration, and my students seemed to think that it would have been easier to do the work by themselves. Working in groups was frustrating and time-consuming, because they didn’t have the conversation skills they needed to come to agreement and consensus. That slowed them down.  

I started looking at how to make their thinking visible, and I realized that when everyone’s working on a desk on paper, it makes it difficult to have a conversation about the work they’re doing. I found that having the kids put their work up on whiteboards has been really pivotal in facilitating more math conversations around their written work. So I did that, and I also have been using visibly random groups. And those two things – the whiteboards and the visibly random groups – have done a lot to increase the volume of math discussion. 

Emily: For the visibly random learning teams, does that mean you’re setting the expectation that students are going to be in random groups? 

Duncan: Exactly. In my class we have four different pod stations, and they’re up on the whiteboards and named after women mathematicians. There is a color, a name and a symbol on each card. At the beginning of class, students stand outside my room and everyone gets a card. The student who gets the Sally Ride card, which is blue and has a “greater than” symbol, is the one that gets to choose if name, symbol or color will determine where everyone will go for the day – into which of the four pod stations. 

The research behind this approach is that it removes the expectation that the teacher has engineered the group based on either some social dynamic in the class or math ability. Researchers found that when you do that, students come to the group with a more optimistic view of their participation. 

Emily: That’s really interesting! 

Alongside this goal of making thinking more visible, you and I have had many conversations about the idea of self-silencing. As you’ve mentioned, this is the idea, especially in an all-girls classroom, that students would choose not to say anything, especially if they don’t understand something, or if they have questions. That self-silencing can really affect math learning in a lot of different ways. Can you share a bit with us about what that looks like and where you think it might come from? 

Duncan: Self-silencing is a really significant shaper of the dynamics we see in all-girls math classes. It can be hard to identify at first, because by definition it’s silent and at times invisible. Once you start to look for it, though, I think you’ll begin to realize how common it is – so common that many of our students, if not most, don’t actually realize they’re doing it.

I think we need a mindset shift from a fixed mindset of perfectionism to a growth mindset of curiosity to be able to grapple with math concepts. When we’re silent, it can feel safe, because we can be sure we’re not making a mistake. With girls especially, who receive so many messages about the need to be perfect, silence can feel like a safe choice, especially in a math setting, where you’re not going to get the answer wrong if you don’t say anything. 

One thing I noticed was that I wasn’t hearing from some of the students in my math classes who had really high assessment marks, and I knew from their written work that they had a lot to say. That had an  interesting impact on the class as a whole, because when many of your students aren’t speaking, it gives the whole class the illusion that no one else has thoughts or questions. 

On a deeper level, I think a lot of what’s going on is that we perceive math as an indicator of who’s smart, and there’s status surrounding intellectual ability. Students are worried that they’re going to sacrifice respect or status if they visibly struggle with the math material. We know that respect is a driving developmental need at the middle school age, so I think we need to be really careful about how we measure understanding in the classroom. It’s really important to stress that good questions actually do show a very deep understanding.

Emily: It’s such an important point, because students think if everybody else understands something, then I’ll need to ask somebody later or work through it on my own. There’s a risk in saying something when you feel like if you make a mistake, others will think less of you.  

Duncan: Yes, exactly. And also, when you ask kids to raise their hands and volunteer an answer, you’re creating such a stage for that type of competition over the answer. 

I think it’s really important for math in general to de-emphasize the performance aspect as much as possible. That’s why my room is mostly covered in whiteboards – it doesn’t feel like a stage, but it feels like a workshop. I think that kind of messaging can help shift the idea of math away from a way to show you’re really smart and toward a challenge and a way to seek understanding – much of which is facilitated through discussion. 

Emily: That’s a really good point. So tell me a bit about how you see R.E.A.L.® as a tool to address self-silencing. What are the aspects of the framework that have worked most effectively in your math classes? 

Duncan: When I first began using R.E.A.L.® this year, I did the orientation materials with our students, and they were really excited about it. We did the drills with the R, the E, the A, the L, they had their non-verbal communication symbols, they were ready to go! 

Then I passed out the DQ Prep sheets and the math journal entries that we were going to be analyzing. I saw that some of my students around the room started to look a little nervous. So I asked, “how’s everybody doing with this?” And one of my students raised her hand and said, “I don’t understand the question. I don’t understand how the second method generates prime factors.” 

We had been looking at two different methods for doing prime factorization, one that we had a lot of practice with, and one that was mathematically the same, but laid out differently. When she said that, five or six of my other kids nodded their heads, and it really caught on. All of a sudden, I realized, they’re using their skills! Yes! They’re doing the NVCs! After that she looked really relieved, because other people had questions too. So we turned back to the workbooks and started with “A is for Ask”. We talked about how all great discussions start with great questions. I had them write them out what they didn’t understand in the evidence column, then in the editorial column, they wrote specifically about what didn’t make sense. That gave them a lot of comfort, because they realized they could write down what they didn’t understand. 

When they asked if they were allowed to have a conversation about not understanding something – “Can I write in my notes that I don’t understand what the question is?” – it really struck me as a very profound breaking of silence. 

Through the course of the conversation, they completely co-created mathematically the conceptual understanding for how the first method related to the second, and they did it entirely by themselves. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the tools to get from the first method to the second method – it was that there had been a block that they had been unsure how to navigate. 

This is what good discussions do – they help you work through that block. The part I thought was so powerful was that R.E.A.L.® gave them all the vocab and the language they needed to get through the block. They sounded like mathematicians discussing it, and they heard each other sounding like mathematicians. When you find someone who has the same type of question as you, it’s so exciting, right? 

Emily: And all of a sudden you move from the discomfort of not understanding something to realizing that nobody understands that thing. In this way, the point of the activity is to work through the fact that nobody understands yet, as opposed to getting it right as fast as possible. 

Duncan: And to make sure everyone sees that I got it right. It was so powerful for students to show that they have the tools to talk about math like a mathematician – and that in itself shows understanding. 

Emily: What a huge shift. That is really cool. 

Duncan: One thing I noticed when looking at the survey data is that students might agree that they are strong math students, and they might also agree that strong math students do make mistakes, but they don’t necessarily see that their peers perceive them as mathematicians. When we’re looking at the metrics for self-efficacy, social persuasion, and vicarious experiences, all of which are reflected in the process of having a conversation with peers, building capacity in those areas is really powerful for students. They see themselves having confidence in their competency, which is a really important thing for identity development in math. So, I really can’t say enough about that kind of moment in itself, and what I’ve seen come from that moment. It is really amazing. 

Emily: It’s exciting, especially at the beginning of the year. I  mean, that was September, right? That conversation sets the stage for the rest of the year! 

Switching gears a bit – one question that we get a lot is how to write a good Discussion Question (DQ).  I’m curious what a DQ looks like in your math classroom. Walk us through your process of writing DQs for math. 

Duncan: Good question! For all the reasons we just discussed, the way you set the stage for conversation matters so much. I try to be responsive to the needs of what I’m seeing. When I’m doing formative assessments, when I’m looking around at the whiteboard work, I try to notice what issues are coming up and try to have my direct teaching voice enter the space as little as possible. Then, I try to write DQs that allow students to co-create knowledge. We call it peer knowledge mobility. Creating mathematical understandings that move through the room really helps them see each other as mathematicians and builds a pretty cool culture in the space. 

When writing these questions, I do a little engineering toward the kind of conversation I would love to hear. Some of the reference texts I’ve been using have been completed journal entries. In the first discussion question, I often have students compare and contrast methods mathematically. Then I have the second DQ build on something related to the conceptual understanding they would have built in the first DQ, and that’s worked out pretty well. 

Another example is with an order of operations problem with exponents that had a mistake. It was a problem where they were adding two exponents, and the mistake was that the person had added the base number of the exponents, then kept the exponent itself the same. The first DQ was, “What is the mistake here?” Then the second question was, “Why? How could you mathematically prove that?” That generated a lot of really rich talk about multiplication, expressions, exponents, and order of operations. It reminded students of learning the commutative, associative, and distributive properties. You have to draw on past math knowledge, and they made a lot of connections. I wasn’t expecting that one to be cut and dried but they did a really nice job with it. 

Another thing I see often is that they won’t say something because they think it’s too obvious. They might notice something, but they think everyone else has probably noticed it. I tell them no – we have to say the things we see out loud. 

They love the pass-off system. As they get going they get so excited about talking. And I can tell it gives them a grounded sense that they know there will be a fair system for who goes next. 

Emily: Where do you go from here? What will R.E.A.L.® look like for you in the classroom this year, and what do you hope to learn along the way?

Duncan: I’m trying to just stay present with what’s going on in front of me. I’m trying not to have a direction where I want it to go or have a specific outcome that I’m pursuing. The thing I’ve seen that has been really exciting is this potential for scaffolding: how to ask questions and how to ask conceptual questions. I was not expecting that to be such a powerful piece of this, and it kind of threw me off guard a bit that students realized they could ask a question about understanding. 

Thank you for the conversation and for all the work you do to equip students with the tools they need to grow, Duncan!

• We published 49 posts on our blog this year, including…
• 9 expert interviews with a slate of education dynamos, including Spencer Burrows, Grant Lichtman, Dr. John Austin, Penny Austen, Emily Weinstein, Jeff Wetzler, Susanne Carpenter, Dr. Sarah Bennison, and Dr. Ruth Braunstein
• 7 teacher features, including profiles of Hannah Higgin, Patrick Farmer, Sumner McCallie, Holly Silberman, Matt Tilford & Jack Fischer, Shaila Richmond & William Barry, and Sydney Freibaum & Jennifer Cordero
• 4 ruminations from our Founder, Liza Garonzik, including perspective on how our skills-based approach to discussion mirrors athletic instruction, a discussion about technoference, an exploration of what to do when discussion across difference gets difficult, and a gratitude-filled post for the R.E.A.L.® community
• 4 posts on AI and its growing role in our schools (and why its emergence will make discussion skills even more critical)
• An announcement of the launch of R.E.A.L.® Basics, our program for young learners
• A whitepaper exploring ways to design discussions where extroverts practice learning and introverts practice talking
• Our second annual student essay content
• A deep dive into the past year of R.EA.L.® Discussion data

We are so grateful to you for making your way to our corner of the Internet, reading our thoughts, and learning along with us this year. We look forward to continuing the conversation (always!) in 2025!

We kept listening, and we kept learning, and earlier this year we launched R.E.A.L. ® Basics: our program for students in grades 2-5. Today, we’re spotlighting this foundational program, which provides instruction in the most basic building blocks students – and people! – of all ages need to thrive in conversation within and beyond the classroom. 

Elementary School is for Learning the Basics

We’ve said it before: too many schools treat discussion like a pick-up sport. Kids show up to class discussion with various degrees of familiarity and preparation, and certain students have a big advantage over others. 

We don’t think discussion needs to be this way. Instead, we’ve designed our three programs to complement the skill level of each age group. Much like elementary school PE programs focus on instruction of individual athletic skills – skills like dribbling, shooting, and passing, for example – R.E.A.L. ® Basics focuses on training students in four essential discussion skills – Relate, Excerpt, Ask, and Listen – in a foundational way. We do that with a series of “Mini-Lessons.” 

“Mini-Lessons allow R.E.A.L. ® skills to be broken down into manageable chunks that can be taught at the lower level,” says Kath Moriarty, a Learning Specialist and Lower School Director of Academic Support at Nashoba Brooks School and R.E.A.L. ® Basics Trainer. Our Mini-Lessons offer direct, explicit instruction through teacher modeling, then provide active engagement opportunities that allow students to work together, before offering time for independent extra practice with a given skill. 

R.E.A.L. ® Basics Mini-Lessons activate several core principles:

• They provide focused skill instruction, which allows educators to teach individual skills as needed. 
• They’re adaptable, because we know each teacher knows what will work best in their own classroom
• They’re spiraled, enabling students to revisit skill-focused lessons to practice with different texts or subject areas at various points throughout the year.

In just a few months, teachers are finding that R.E.A.L.® Basics is making a real difference in their classrooms. Even at this young age, discussion skills matter – for reading comprehension and literacy support, for the development of inquiry and curiosity, for building metacognition and executive function, for facilitating turn-taking and strengthening relationships, for activating deep listening, for feeling heard and known, and so much more. Armed with these skills, the youngest learners are ready to approach discussion – in the classroom, in the cafeteria, and at the dinner table – with more confidence, nuance, and skill.

Interested in learning more about R.E.A.L. ®’s skills-based approach to discussion? We’d love to chat! Reach out to our team today to get started.

What can machines do better than humans? And what can humans do better than machines?

In the world of AI, this is a question on many people’s minds. And for those of us in education, it feels particularly relevant. Teaching has always been a fundamentally human endeavor, and the reason that most of us pursue teaching in the first place is to form relationships with the young people we serve. 

But teaching also feels harder now than ever before. Learning gaps have grown after COVID, teacher burnout is on the rise, and fewer college graduates pursue teaching every year. Might there be ways that technology can lighten our load, without compromising what we love about the profession?

Any technology can be used to enhance or impede human connection. Smartphones let us speak by video with friends and family around the world, but they also suck us into hours of mindless scrolling. This is true of online videos, AI, and anything else.

As a former teacher and the co-founder of an organization that helps teachers worldwide to use technology more effectively, I’ve seen classroom technology used in many different ways. I believe there are several ways in which the purposeful use of technology makes instruction more human.

#1: Digitizing Direct Instruction

When I was trained as a teacher, I learned to explain things to my students from the front of the room – and control their behavior while I did so. But this never really worked: my lectures were always too easy for some students, too hard for others, and inaccessible to students who missed class. Managing student behavior took a lot of time and effort too. My lectures dragged on, which just made the process worse.

Eventually, however, I learned how to record my explanations with simple videos. I simply started Zoom calls with myself, hit the record button, and explained something. Then I put the recording link in my Learning Management System and told students to watch it at their own paces, in school or at home.

This simple shift transformed my entire classroom. Once I made this switch, instead of lecturing and policing behavior from my whiteboard, I spent almost all of my time in class working closely with my students. Because they didn’t have to sit quietly and listen to me – and because my videos were usually only 5-8 minutes long – my students spent most of class working together to apply the skills they had gathered from the video. We all spent class simply helping each other learn. And it was magical.

#2: Efficient Data Analysis

Teachers are constantly collecting data. This data – attendance, completion of assignments, mastery of standards, student reflections, etc. – is helpful, but it can be hard to organize and analyze efficiently. There’s just so much of it! So we often end up making decisions based on our judgment or instincts, which can be subjective and therefore biased.

With tools like R.E.A.L ® Discussion’s Teacher Dashboard or the Modern Classrooms Project’s progress trackers, however, teachers can both collect data easily and analyze it to identify the supports that each individual student – and the class as a whole – may need on any given day. Then, teachers can act to provide those supports efficiently and effectively.

By providing accurate pictures of what students really need, without taking too much of a teacher’s time to create, data-analysis tools facilitate high-quality human connection.

#3: Immediate Differentiation

Say you’ve digitized direct instruction to free yourself up in class, then collected data that helps you identify what individual students actually need. What do you do then?

Finding activities that appropriately challenge and/or support students at different levels of understanding is easier said than done. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools – many leveraging AI – that help teachers create differentiated instructional resources with the click of a button. Tools like TeachFlows can help you create complete, fully editable, student-facing lessons on any topic in seconds. 

Once you can generate resources that are well-suited to individual learners’ needs, you can ensure that every student in your classroom is appropriately challenged – and supported – every day. All you need to do is encourage them! 

At the end of the day, tools like videos and data dashboards and TeachFlows are just that: tools. They can be used for good or for bad: to foster dynamic classrooms where students and teachers spend class working closely together face-to-face, or to create lifeless and siloed classrooms where students spend all day staring at screens. 

The choice, ultimately, is yours to make. But if you make it carefully, I’m confident that you can create a classroom that feels more lively, more personal, and ultimately more human than ever before.

I can’t wait to hear about it!

Robert Barnett is the co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project and the author of Meet Every Learner’s Needs: Redesigning Instruction So All Students Can Succeed.

It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2013: Grandfriends’ Day in my eighth grade classroom. The kids had decided they wanted to show their grandparents a R.E.A.L.® Discussion, and I had pulled together a packet of primary sources related to the first Thanksgiving. I remember going into that day feeling relieved: the kids would carry the day instead of my running a dog-and-pony show!

The discussion wasn’t perfect, but it was authentic. Every child talked. They related, used evidence, asked questions, and listened to each other. They showed up prepared and stopped to take notes. They managed their time without me – and they ended with shout-outs, thanking each other for bringing up ideas that had helped them see a new perspective. They ran all of the R.E.A.L.® routines effortlessly, as if by muscle memory, and I smiled remembering how clunky these conversations had seemed even a month ago. A case study in intentional practice leading to mastery, indeed.

As we wrapped up class, a grandfather raised his hand. “Wow! That was extraordinary! Truly. You all did a better job than my Board of Directors does at my company. I can’t wait for you to run the world.” Other grandparents jumped in (they kept interrupting each other, which the kids thought was wildly entertaining): 

…“I wish you could teach this to Congress!” 

…“I wish we could do this at our Thanksgiving table tomorrow.” 

…“What would the world be like if this is how we talked to each other?”

…“We need this in every school in our country tomorrow!”

…“No offense, Anna, but I have never heard you talk in a class I’ve visited on Grandfriends’ Day … and now it’s been, what, nine years of them?! Your voice and ideas were beautiful and you were so confident!”

I felt the unadulterated joy of an exhausted first-year teacher encountering success at semester-end – and sent everyone on their way. When the kids came back after break and we got ready for our next R.E.A.L.® Discussion, one boy said: “Can I just say I didn’t realize we were learning skills for jobs and stuff with R.E.A.L.®? Like, I thought it was just for books.” A girl who was widely known to want to be a Supreme Court Justice said: “I know. Like when someone said that thing about Congress I was like THIS IS MY FUTURE!” A quieter voice piped up: “Yeah but also I don’t even know what I want to be and I feel like R.E.A.L.® is still helpful already. Even in little things – like, I’m a more respectful fighter with my brother.”

This made me smile even more widely than I did on Grandfriends’ Day. In that moment, I realized: R.E.A.L.® is so much bigger than my classroom. Eli was exactly right: R.E.A.L.® is not only about teaching kids academic skills for better discussions about literature and history … it is preparation for life and leadership. Discussion is how the most meaningful parts of the human experience – like love, friendship, faith, professional impact, community, democracy – actually happen. Kids deserve to know this as they practice discussion skills daily (as adults: we need to do a better job telling them!).

Every Thanksgiving, I feel grateful for that classroom of students and grandparents who helped me dream bigger. And in the intervening decade of building R.E.A.L.®, my gratitude has grown exponentially. It now extends to the thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of students who have used R.E.A.L.® Discussion. Their on-the-ground feedback, experiences, and brilliant ideas – and generosity in sharing them – have strengthened our programs and our community. Their continual discussion about discussion and commitment to what we call “pedagogical pioneering” – the project of developing the first research-based approach to explicitly teach and assess face-to-face discussion skills in school – is inspiring, authentic, and proof of why lifelong learning matters.

I am also grateful for the generosity of spirit and intellect I have found among leaders in education and social impact: their hard-earned wisdom, expertise, and tough-as-nails questions have helped me chart the “hockey stick” path for this fledgling organization. I left my full-time work in schools – which I loved and, if I’m honest, still miss! – because I felt called to this mission, compelled by the question of: “If I didn’t do it, then who would?” I stumbled into social entrepreneurship, but I have survived because of other leaders who help me think differently in the challenging moments. 

So, this Thanksgiving, my shout-outs are to everyone who has ever shared your thoughts with us at R.E.A.L.®. Thank you for your perspectives, questions, and great-big-ideas. They have taught me so much and kept me going, day after day, as I pursue the dream of providing discussion skills instruction for every young person growing up in our tech-centric, polarized world. Together, and through our extended conversation, we have kept the faith: by teaching discussion skills today, we empower the next generation to build a better tomorrow. 

Here’s to another decade of real discussions ahead – starting with those around your Thanksgiving table this week! 

Liza: Spencer, we are so excited to have you here. You are so committed to teaching and modeling discussion skills. You’ve been a teacher, an administrator in schools, and a civil servant. You live and breathe the skills that are at the heart of civil discourse. We appreciate your thought leadership, and we’re going to dive into some of the programs you’ve created. 

But first, let’s start by hearing about your story and how your personal background brought you to this work of teaching young people the power of engaging with each other. 

Spencer: Absolutely. I taught for a year after college in Los Angeles, then I started law school in San Francisco, at UC Hastings College of the Law. I realized partway through that I really wanted to bring that work back to education. When I graduated, I came back to LA to work with and help build charter school organizations. 

In my work with charters, I also started getting my students involved in some of the advocacy work at the local and state levels. Through all these different moving pieces, I really saw the power of teaching students effective communication skills. 

I was also coaching debate and mock trial and various activities that moved around the same space of effective, clear communication and public speaking. It made me think, we’re doing great work with these small subsets of students who are involved in these activities, but how do we scale that to whole groups of students? It was always a big question for me, and I’ve tried various methods, but the bottom line is it’s all kind of dependent on the situation. 

Fast forward to the present: I’m now the Equity and Civic Engagement Coordinator and 11th grade dean at Pacific Ridge. Over the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to engage our whole student body, grades 6-12, on different discussion protocols and taking on big topics and issues. 

I’ve gotten to speak with people who are also operating in the space, and that’s been very interesting and illuminating. For example, I got a chance to connect with Harvard professor Tarek Masoud last summer. He has been making a real push to teach his undergrads the civil discourse skills that they clearly were not taught elsewhere. 

That made me think backwards about how we are preparing, or not preparing, our students for those conversations. I feel like part of the progression is during this whole COVID phase, schools put on a lot of guardrails in a lot of different ways, because that’s what was needed in the moment. That being said, I don’t think all these guardrails are still necessary, and I don’t think they all help students. When we’re talking about civil discourse, students need to learn how to disagree with each other respectfully. And if we’re not letting students disagree, I don’t think we’re letting them engage in that work, and we’re really doing them a disservice. In some spaces, disagreement has almost come to be seen as a problem. In the real world, there’s disagreement all the time. If we’re going to have a pluralistic society, we need to be able to operate with people who we don’t agree with. Students need to learn how to have those respectful conversations, and I really think that is part of our job.

Liza: You’re singing our tune here. At R.E.A.L.®, we’re all about taking the art of discussion and making it teachable starting in elementary school and scaffolding it all the way up to high school. 

To zoom out for a second: I know you’re a civic leader in your local community as well as an educator. Broadly, how do these two hats work together for you, and what do you see as the purpose of education and teaching students about discussion in our democracy?

Spencer: As a commissioner in the city of Carlsbad, I not only get to interact with my fellow commissioners, but also with the city council and our mayor. This role is actually a great connection to a lot of the work I’m trying to do with our students. To repeat the old phrase: all politics is local. I think on the positive end, that connects to one of the best ways to teach our students about politics and civics: at the local level. It’s something I’ve been pushing for, especially over the past few years. Not only do I think local politics is far more tangible and reachable for students and their families, it also avoids some of the more contentious issues that make these discussions so hard at the national level. 

In my role as commissioner, I’m now able to bring a lot of local issues to my students and involve them in work with our city council and mayor and other agencies that are very eager to work with our students, which I think is a double-plus. It’s a pretty symbiotic relationship: our kids learn a lot about civics and government, and we are doing something for the community. Everyone wins. 

Liza: I love that emphasis on local community, particularly in this hyper-connected age.

I love the idea of helping Gen Z understand where their activism is going to matter most. I think that’s a really extraordinary and powerful perspective that I have not heard articulated anywhere else. So thank you for that. 

I know you spend basically all day every day with kids. It’s clear that discussion is hard for kids, and discussion across difference is particularly hard for kids right now. What do you do to scaffold civil discourse in your classroom and across your campus? 

Spencer: I think we need to look at discussion skill-building as literally that – building a skill. When you learn math, you don’t start with calculus: you start at the base level and build yourself up. 

I think part of the problem that teachers have with engaging with some of this work is that we often don’t have discussion frameworks in the same way we all learn math the same way at some point. We know how that progression should look. Discussions are the Wild Wild West. 

Liza: Exactly. That’s why I built R.E.A.L.® 

Spencer. Yes. And to your question, how do you scaffold it? I think breaking down the mechanics of the conversation is really important. But now you’ve got to look at the topics. For me, the end goal is tackling some pretty divisive, controversial topics that are the discussions they will need to have as adults.

When they learn discussion protocol, we start with easier, lower-stakes topics, then we build up to something harder. By harder: every community is different, and good teachers have a good pulse on their class, their kids, and what sets them off. Not shying away from discussions where there will definitely be some friction is important. We want to help students through hard conversations. The overarching message can be: you didn’t walk away from that discussion feeling great – and that’s okay. If you understand where someone else is coming from, and they understand where you’re coming from, that’s a win. 

I had some really good discussions in my economics class with juniors and seniors about the presidential debates earlier this fall, and we’ve been going through various campaign issues. Obviously, students agree and disagree about different aspects, but having those discussions continually builds their muscle memory and their level of comfort with handling these kinds of issues. 

Liza: I so appreciate that. At R.E.A.L.®, we believe you can’t expect kids to have hard conversations before teaching them how to have a conversation. And the way to learn is through repeated, intentional practice – and that does not mean a high-stakes discussion once a month. You wouldn’t expect kids to show up and play varsity-level basketball without practicing, but it can be so challenging for teachers to step into and feel confident in their role in allowing time and space for that learning to happen. 

In an earlier conversation, you were telling me about how you created different spaces for different kinds of discussions to happen in your classroom. How have you differentiated opportunities to engage in deeper, perhaps more difficult conversations – particularly at a moment when we have such heightened polarization in our national discourse?

Spencer: Part of what I love about the work I’ve been able to do over the last two years is the ability to create programming for the entire school population. I think the best way to hit all the areas you’re trying to hit is to realize that all the students should be receiving some kind of information or content about the election and civics and government – enough where they can at least make sense of what they’re seeing on TikTok. 

We’re in this election space, doing election programming in classes, at least on the level of how things work. Classes are having some simple discussions about different events and the flow of the election. But I did realize that I needed to give some space for students who really want to dive into these issues in depth, to the point where a) not all of their classmates are probably going to want to talk about that and b) not all of their teachers will, either. Instead of trying to force that on classes and have a fairly negative reaction, I’m offering opt-in sessions for students during lunch, where we gather and only talk about the election. 

In these conversations, I could tell that some students were sharing things they’ve probably been holding onto for a bit. And it gave me the chance to dive into some pretty esoteric areas of debate strategy. I’m really trying to explain that there are reasons behind why candidates are saying certain things. 

When you think about effective discussion, you really need people to buy in – and I think you need to be cognizant of what discussion topics people are going to buy into. However, if you’re posing a discussion topic that is going to turn off three-quarters of the participants, it’s not going to be a good discussion – period. If that’s the case, maybe you should just have discussions with the students who are super fired-up about the issue.

I think offering those two ends has been super helpful. On one end, all students are receiving baseline programming. And, almost like enrichment, we also have space for the students who want to go above and beyond and really dive into this topic.

Liza: That is so important. I often talk about how campuses treat discussion like a pickup sport. I really like the idea of doing intentional skill-building in the classroom. And for the varsity speakers, who might also be varsity listeners, it can be game time. I think building that self-awareness while also creating a space for kids to run as hard and fast as they can is amazing. So often those kids don’t get the outlets they need, and that can cause trouble for the whole community. 

You’ve given us so much to think about, Spencer. My last question is very concrete. Say a Gen Z student is inspired to get involved in the democracy around them. Where would you recommend they start? 

Spencer: Watch TikTok – and then do the exact opposite of whatever the message seems to be. That’s step number one. 

I’ve been pushing my students to get involved with local campaigns. When I was in college, I interned for the governor of California, and that was an incredible experience. I learned more about politics in that role than I ever would have in any class. I also saw that government is built on student labor. There are a lot of opportunities for kids to get involved, and the big advantage to being involved in local races is that students will get to know their communities in ways they never would have otherwise. 

We haven’t talked a whole lot about social media, and maybe for good reason. I think part of the problem with students getting sucked into these echo chambers on social media is that they’re not actually communicating with anybody: they’re just piling on or agreeing. And if they see something they disagree with, they can just unfollow. That is the opposite of what you need to do in a democracy. I think in-person contact with your community is a really powerful way to get students involved.

Liza: I agree. I think there’s nothing better than students realizing the impact they can have, and the way to do that is to get out from behind your screen and start talking and listening to people – whether or not you know them, whether or not you agree with them. 

Spencer, I’m really thankful you took time today to share the myriad ways you’re helping students not just build the skills to do that, but then actually facilitating opportunities for them to do that and reflecting on it. Thank you for the work you’re doing.