When was the last time you were part of a conversation and you found yourself wanting a “do over” or another shot? I recently had one of these moments while recording an episode of the unearthED Podcast with Dr. Robert Marzano. I’ll drop a link to the show at the bottom of this post, but wanted to share where I think I went wrong (along with a quick backstory) first.
Here’s the backstory:
There’s been quite a bit of commentary on social media connected to a tweet shared by Dr. Marzano. In a nutshell, Dr. Marzano’s original tweet felt like an indictment against classroom teachers from somebody who is not a classroom teacher. The tweet has since been removed and an apology was issued. However, some of the conversations and blog posts that resulted from that tweet are still reverberating.
Here’s where I went wrong on the podcast:
1. My thinking wasn’t as nimble as I would’ve liked probably because I carried some assumptions into the conversation. For example, when we asked Dr. Marzano about his tweet he shared the origin and it was completely different than I expected. I wish I would have probed more when he revealed this to us.
2. I wasn’t as prepared as I like to be going into the interview. You might not notice this when you listen to the podcast, but the entire show was booked and recorded in record time. I was actually standing in the middle of a theme park in Disney World when we connected with Dr. Marzano for the show. At one point a Mariachi Band was approaching me while I was trying to ask a question, so I tried to speak really fast before the band was within earshot.
As far as preparation, it would not have taken me too much time to reference a really great thread deconstructing Marzano’s original tweet posted by John Spencer. Some of John’s insights could have easily guided our discussion and helped to take things deeper than we did.
3. There are probably several other things I missed, but I’m also interested in hearing from you. What questions would you like to have heard and where are you at with this conversation?
Here’s the podcast, as promised:
Feel free to listen to the podcast HERE and share your “stake in the ground” with us using #unearthED. As always, you can subscribe to the show in iTunes to have each episode personally delivered to your device by my co-host Ben Gilpin. :)
Thanks for listening and being part of an important conversation.
