Kevin Cripe was a teacher in Modesto City Schools for 27 years and during that time created an award winning after school chess program for students who came from socio-economically challenged backgrounds. He took students to 200+ tournaments and 14 national chess championships and watched as students used chess to become first generation college graduates. After retiring he moved to Central America, continued to teach chess and wrote a "Child Moral Development Trilogy" .

Takeaways:

• Kevin Cripe dedicated 27 years to teaching and created an award-winning chess program for underprivileged students, demonstrating a profound commitment to educational equity.
• Through chess, Kevin facilitated the participation of his students in over 200 tournaments, resulting in numerous students becoming first-generation college graduates.
• After retiring, Kevin continued his passion for teaching chess in Central America and authored a trilogy focused on moral development for children.
• Kevin emphasizes the importance of celebrating every student's progress, not just those who achieve the highest scores, fostering a culture of encouragement and resilience.
• Kevin's approach to education revolves around providing emotional support and understanding that effort is as important as the results, helping students to feel valued beyond academic performance.
• We highlight the transformative power of exposure and opportunities, illustrating how students can aspire to greater futures when given the right support and encouragement.

Chapters:

• 00:03 - Kevin Cripe: Transforming Lives Through Chess
• 01:30 - The Journey Begins: Inspiring Change Through Education
• 21:04 - The Impact of Parental Support on Student Success
• 29:20 - The Journey of Learning and Growth
• 36:23 - The Impact of Caring in Education

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Hello and welcome back to the Education on Far podcast.

Today I'm delighted to be chatting to Kevin Cripe and he was a teacher in Modesto City schools for 27 years and took that time to create an award winning after school chess program for students who came from socio economically challenged backgrounds.

He took students to over 200 tournaments and 14 national chess championships and watched students use chess to become first generation college graduates. After retiring, he moved to Central America, continued to teach chess and wrote a child moral development trilogy.

Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast. The place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world.

Listen to teachers, parents and mentors share how they are supporting children to live their best authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all. Hi Kevin, thank you so much for joining us here on the Education on Far podcast. It's great to chat to someone who I know enjoys the sunshine.

I think that's one of the great things about living either side of the pond, I guess from our point of view. Luckily the sun's out here in England as well today.

So thanks so much for joining me and really looking forward to having this conversation about chess but also in terms of that sort of wider learning and the implications of what you've been able to learn over the years.

Well, thanks, thanks for having me on and I appreciate it. It's just a chance to talk about how children learn and what I've seen and, and hope I can share something that helps people.

So take us into where this journey started.

So from being a teacher and I think most of us can remember from when we were at school that thing that happens in an after school club in a program which is slightly outside of the normal classroom I think often sparks a way of being and a bit of collaboration and an understanding amongst peers which I think is quite a special thing. And I think that's sort of where you're sort of your chess story starts.

Isn't is just a brief backdrop.

I, I was, I, I interviewed, I had an interview at a school called Shackford Elementary School and there were four teachers interviewing for two positions and, and the top two teachers who scored the best didn't want to teach at that school.

It's a school with some of the lowest test scores and children live in poverty and we, we refer to it as 90% free and reduced lunch and, and 90% Latino. So they didn't want the jobs. So I was actually candidate at fourth scoring can but they said do you want to be here?

I go sure, I'll take the teaching job. And in the first year of teaching, you get a lot of questions from people, teachers, other teachers have been there a while ago.

Who are your smart ones? Who's a smart one? Tell me who your smart ones are, and I go, okay, all right. I think so. And so one's smart. No, he's been retained. Maria's smart.

No, she's been retained. And you find that most of the children who come in who are Spanish speakers or English language learners had been retained. It was just a policy.

30 Years ago. You just, they don't speak English very well. Let's retain them. And I thought, these are pretty smart kids.

I'm not, but I like teaching children chess. And so I started this program and invited some students.

And we on there, we got to the end of the first year, and we were debating whether the school should provide money to fly children to the national chess championships in North Carolina, students who'd never been on airplanes before. And I had a Hispanic teacher, female teacher, come up to me and say, don't take these kids to nationals. They will only embarrass themselves.

And just something inside me went, like, I wanted to say something, but I'm sure it wouldn't be civil and appropriate in an educational setting. So I just said, thank you for that comment.

And I just inside went, I'm going to take students to as many tournaments and national championships as life allows me to do until I retire. We went to the nationals, and then we would go to tournaments in local tournaments and win trophies.

And I'd say to the students, you need to bring your trophies to school and show them to teachers, because I want them to know who you're competing against, which are the top public and private schools in the United States, and how you're doing, because that's important to me. And so that just became what I did and why I did it. And so I enjoyed it.

And most of the teachers and almost all administrators are very supportive of what I was doing because they liked the idea that someone's trying to help out children who most. A lot of people don't think we're very smart. So that's kind of how I got into what I was doing.

And I love that because, like you say, it's having those conversations. It's having those relationships that you really then understand what the collaboration and what the community of the school really should be.

It's not just the kind of you need to be in class and you need your test scores and it needs to look a certain way. That's just, you know, what people's perception of school is.

And, and recently G. Gauss series that we did, he went into many schools and asked many students, you know, why are you in school? And something like 80% turn around and said, because I have to be. And at that point you kind of think that's a really tricky place to come back from.

So, like say anything that we can do to give them that starting point of, no, this is what you want to be doing and we can inspire you and we can give you, like you say, some of those skills and that understanding is going to be a better place to start.

That 80% number that you mentioned is an interesting number.

One thing I learned early on, it took a while, is that schools, I'm sure it's true in the uk, true in the US and true in a lot of countries, focuses on the successful students, the top 15 to 20% and they get awards and they get student of the month or whatever it's called in different countries. And they're all, you know, look at this kid, he's getting 100%. And 80% of students feel like I can't be that student.

I'm just, I got this going on in my house or this whatever, and so they check out. And so one of the things I did in my classroom when we were working on things was I said, okay, we're going to celebrate success. Success.

Celebrating success is important, but I am going to celebrate that child who improved from 1 to 2 equal to the student who's successful. I'm going to celebrate that student who just showed up and is trying. Because I didn't know what they went through the night before.

I didn't know if their parents had been in fire or if they had witnessed a drive by shooting because there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the areas I taught. So if you just try, if you show up and try, we are going to celebrate that equal to the students who's successful.

And when you do that, when you make a school about successful, which is important, but the improving people improve a little bit, we're happy. And the people who are trying and they feel it, they buy into this concept of school. If all you're doing is celebrating success.

80% Of students check out and Go, I guess I gotta go today. And they might smile and sit there, be nice and go, okay, I get food and whatever. But why are they there? They're not in the top group.

So it's important to find all students where they're at and encourage them and try to inspire them.

And how did that as a philosophy sit amongst your other colleagues? Is it something which was sort of well respected, well understood, or did you find you a bit of an outlier from that point of view?

It isn't so much that they didn't like it or didn't respect it, it's that the entire bureaucracy of schools in the US and public schools, which I support, think do great things, are trying to do great things, is about celebrating the successful.

I mean, and I don't know how testing works in the uk, but we would have testing at the end of the school year where big standardized tests and, and for the first time in the year, the principal, we'd all get a big assembly and okay, if we do, if you do really well, you're going to get a bike or you're going to get some prize or classes. And so this. But the kids had never seen that before. And it's all about can you be the best on the test.

It wasn't about can you be the best for you or can you just show up and try hard?

And so that whole entire culture of public education seems centered around let's celebrate the successful and maybe somehow magically the rest magnetically will just become successful. What I was doing was not an obvious thing to other people. It was just my philosophy in the classroom. This is how I'm going to treat students.

This is what I want students. And that doesn't mean they were all perfect or that there wasn't times where I was like, this group is driving me crazy.

It's just when you value each child for where they're at and what they're trying to do, you get a, you get more of a buy in and you see more dramatic improvement.

And give us a little bit of an idea of the subjects you were teaching, the age groups that you sort of covered over your career as well, and any sort of differences you sort of noticed within that in terms of that philosophy or how you sort of gauged it depending on age and situation.

I started as a fourth grade teacher and then taught, we call fourth, fifth and sixth grade upper grades in the elementary school. And I then did some fifth and sixth grade combination classes, which is kind of a crazy combination to have.

And then I Was able because as you get to be a more veteran teacher, you get to pick the classes you really want. So I got to go down to second and third grade.

And the big difference in where I'm at in California as a teacher was that in upper grade classrooms you would have 36 students and in the primary classrooms for kindergarten through third grade you'd have 24. And if you ever just line up students, you can, okay, 36 is a much bigger line than 24. So I like the 24.

And my favorite grade was fourth grade, but it had 36. So like 24 third graders, 36 fourth graders.

So I ended up doing a lot of second and third grades at the end of the year and I enjoyed it an enormous amount.

But when you're teaching at a school where, like I said, 90% of our students receive free and reduced lunch, which is a measure of poverty in schools in the US and in California, and then 90% of the students were English language learners. And then the entire school area around the school is surrounded by all the major Mexican drug gangs. So kids were coming in from crazy lives.

You know, like I said before, literally drive by shootings every weekend, crazy stuff going on and figuring out how to help them the most with what you can do in the classroom, with what I could do in the chess club, and what is it that they need most? And so chess became that avenue for me to say, I can get you out of this.

I can take you to a tournament at UC Berkeley or at Stanford, I can put you on a plane. If you are willing to do the work, I can get you out of this environment. And then most of the time those kids would go, we like this better.

Wow, I've never seen the house. This is really great. And they became first generation college graduates. So as watching that whole thing, it wasn't so much an age difference.

I mean, obviously a sixth grader is different than a third grader. But what you're trying to do ultimately is get that student to believe and to think, I want to get out of this. How do I get out of.

How can you help me?

Yeah, I love that. And like say they can only aspire to what they know exists, can't they?

So like say if they've never been to a different part of the country, or they've never been to a different type of school, or, or surrounded themselves with different types of people, whether that's class, whether it's ethnicity, or just sort of LOC based, then how would you know? And I love the fact that just gave you that opportunity.

Poverty is like invisible wall jail, literally, that most kids who grow up in those environments don't get outside those environments. And so that's all they see.

And if you, if your grandfather was in jail and your dad was in jail, call it generational incarceration in the US and all you see is people going to jail and, and all you see around you are terrible things. You assume that that's what it is, that's what life is like, and then you just deal with it.

But if you can get out, if you can take children outside of that, then they see, wait, I love my family, I love my friends in this area, but I don't want to end up here. I might come back here to help out, which I've had a few students do. They become teachers and go back and work in communities in poverty.

But I want to go do what I see. Other people, I, I've witnessed it for myself because you can watch it on tv, you can listen to it, you know, you talk. People talk everywhere.

But until you've experienced it yourself and had that experience of I got outside of this area using my brain, I want to do more of that. And that's what I was trying to get students to do.

Yeah, I really like that.

And are there any particular stories or particular students or situations that that kind of stand out, whether it's actually going to a tournament or a result or journey that one of them has been on that you'd like to share?

There's several of them. We could go for like three hours on stories. But first one, my best student was a girl named Julie, Julie Viscayano.

And so she got to the point where she could go to tournaments where she's playing against adults for prize money. And I would always move her up A section and chess, there's sections, there's D, C, B. A expert master.

And so she was a B player, but I put her in an A section. And we were at UC Berkeley. I took a group up to UC Berkeley for a three day tournament, right? And so it's two rounds a day.

Each game can last six hours. And she's playing all adult men who have played chess their entire lives. And she's a B player playing an A section.

So at the end of the three day tournament where I'm literally driving them up and driving them back and driving them up and driving them back and doing that, it's a kind of a long weekend for me. She's six zero and she's beaten every man in A section. And she wins first place, which is like $800.

And so as we're leaving the tournament, I'm about 75 yards ahead of the group because adolescents move slowly. And I'm just trying to get back. I want, I got to teach the next day. And this guy comes flying out of the Poly Ballroom and he's yelling, julie, wait.

And he's waving his hands, he's going, wait, Julie. And it's like, oh, man. I knew all my students knew how to fight, so they weren't in danger. She wasn't in danger in any way. They couldn't hurt her.

He wasn't going to do that. But your name's on the permission slip and you better go back and check and see what happens there.

So I trudge back towards this, towards the group, and it's dark. And the guy runs up to her, some interaction, I can't see. And he runs off. Okay. And I get to her, I go, julie Kippas, what happened?

She gets a big smile on her face and she says, he asked me for my autograph. And this is a girl who was retained in first grade. It's a girl that nobody thought was smart.

And by playing chess and by going to these tournaments, she has people asking her for her autograph because she's a genius.

And she became the first person in her family to, I think, graduate from high school and then go on to college and become a first generation college graduate. Her younger brother, who was also in chess, named Danny, did the same thing. He used chess.

And they got to go to tournaments, they got to go places and become first generation college graduates. And so watching that transition of like, I'm dumb, I'm dumb, I'm dumb because people say I'm dumb because I've been retained. And that's what happens.

And I'm just not going to go anywhere to. Could I have your autograph? That changes people's lives. And so it's an amazing thing to watch. It's an amazing thing to be part of.

And I always say that my students were my heroes because, you know, I grew up kind of middle class teacher. My mom and dad were teachers. I never met a Hispanic person until I was in high school. Right. I just. Very secluded. I didn't know what poverty was.

But to go and then see what happens to these children and these families on a daily basis just because of where they live and to see them fight and to overcome that is an amazing thing to watch. And. And it just inspired me to want to do my best every single day.

I love that. And I think you're right. I think we learn so much from the people that we supposedly teach.

And I think having that relationship just really, really supports everybody. Doesn't,.

Does. And, and I got really good parents who would. It's an opportunity for my child to go somewhere. They didn't know anything about chess.

They just went, yes. And like one of my last years, I had 72 students in my chess program and I had a room with 24 desks for second graders.

So I had, you know, just this enormous. I never shut off registration.

I just said, if you want to come in chess, we're going to figure this thing out, because I want, I want you to have opportunity. And so it was just fun to watch. It was always pretty good response and I had a pretty good group of parents and really enjoyed it.

And take me into the, the journey of the club because I know a lot of these things, like say you can be enthusiastic. You, you open it up, you know the benefits of it. And then you have one pupil start or two people start.

And like I say, by the end, you've got more people that always fit into the room. Is there an organicness to that? Is it word of mouth? Is it like you say, a safe place for people to come where they see opportunity?

And how did that sort of develop over time?

It. Once children saw and heard from other students, I can stand up in front of a group of students, say, come to chess club.

You know, beginning of the year, come to chess club. That doesn't sell anything. I mean, I'm not particularly good at selling things. I mean, when another student says, hey, come to chess club.

We just got to do this, that's like lightning, a bottle man, that just. Oh, really? You went on a trip, you got to go, oh, you went to McDonald's on a Saturday, on a. In, in the, in Oakland and whatever.

You know, just those sorts of things that sold the program. And then you had parents who come along. And I'll never forget, you know, I had a student, Liliana, she's in one of my last chess groups.

Bright little third grade girl. I think nine years old at the time. And we're going up to a tournament, two tournaments. One on Saturday, one on Sunday, same place.

And she goes up and she's playing almost all boys. And on the Saturday tournament, and she's won four games, she wins her fifth, she gets the first place trophy. And you can see the trophies.

I'll send you a pic later. And she makes A bad move, and she loses. And she comes out and she is just sobbing inconsolably.

And the mom who was there, who'd helped me bring up students, just puts her arms around her. It's gonna be okay. That's all you can say. Never got mad at a student for losing. Never. You know, you're not worse person because you lost.

You're not a better person because you won. Winning is more fun than losing, though. But I just said, hey, it's okay. We're gonna make it through this.

And about a half hour later, when it's time for us to gather up and go and then come up for the tournament the next day, she's still crying. She's just. Her mom has just put her arms around her and said, I'm gonna. I'm here for you.

And so I told the mom, I said, you know, I want chess to be positive. And this was a hard thing to deal with because she saw that first place trophy. She makes one bad movement, goes away.

And I said, if she doesn't want to come up tomorrow, just call me, let me know. We'll figure it out. She'll go to other tournaments. The next day, she shows up and she goes six zero and wins first place.

And I always thought I had nothing to do with that. That was the parent. That was a plus parenting. That was a parent who knew.

When my child has tried their hardest, when they've given the maximum effort and it just didn't go their way. My job is not to yell and scream like a moron. Right?

My job is just to put my arms around that child and love them and care about them, because that will allow them to succeed in the future. And I Refer to it, C.S. Lewis said, we fail forwards towards success, and you have to let children fail a few times.

And in when they're failing, you have to convince them, I care about you regardless of result.

And when they know that, when they know there's a safety net, this emotional safety net that says I can try something and do it wrong and people still love me, they will then take that and go on to do extraordinary things. And so Liliana is now becoming a doctor. She's at UC Merced, and she's on her way to med school and getting stuff out of it. But it's an amazing thing.

But it started with the parents. So I had to learn that those parents are enormously valuable resources.

But the one thing I said is, when we're on a trip, there's a bunch of kids and a bunch of parents. They're all our kids and when they come out, win or lose, we are happy. We're going to support them.

We can celebrate the victories and that it's fun to see a kid win a trophy. But we never look down, we never get on a kid for losing either. This is going to be a positive experience.

It's either an opportunity to learn or an opportunity to celebrate. It's one of those two things. But that's what we did. But it was great to have the parents.

And then the parents go, like the kids go, hey, we went up to this tournament and some really cool stuff happened. And then other parents go, oh, I want to my kid. So if you involve parents and kids, it's a really fun thing.

And I think that's such an important message, isn't it? It's a global community and that we're all. I hate the phrase stakeholders, but I seem to use it a lot.

But that sense that if you have the child in the middle of everything that you're as a teacher, as an educator, as a parent, as someone who's mentoring or someone who's providing a club, whatever it happens to be, everybody's really influential in some way or another.

That sort of spoke analogy means that you need all of it to be working together to get the strongest sort of background and support that you need for a child to really thrive.

It is. And you need to all be on the same page. You can't have a parent or teacher who's in it for themselves.

Like who gets mad if a child's not, not successful. Why didn't you win? I can't believe you.

And I remember we're walking past a parent or as a coach talking to a child and I had a bunch of students with me and this, this coach or parent says the reason and not part of my group said the reason you lost, the reason you make stupid moves is because you're stupid to, to like a 10 year old. And I just want to, you know, I just want to grab the guy and just go, what the.

You are going to do so much damage to that child that she is going to hate you when she can turn 18. She is going to get as far away from you as humanly possible because you can't. Children make mistakes. Adults make mistakes. We do it all the time.

On average, it takes us eight times to learn something. The average person. That means you're going to fail seven times.

And you need to understand that children sometimes and the way children are learned is not the same Some children do the kind of steps, you know, up, go up and. But some flat line, go way up, go down, up. So there's all these different learning styles and your job is to be supportive.

Now that does not include poor behavior or like, you know, I always told kids at terms you can't run up the down escalators. If you do that, you're going to stay by me for a while because we have rules and rules are there for a reason.

So we're not excusing poor behavior, but effort, honest effort. Where they're trying their hardest and doesn't go their way, you are there 100% behind them. And that is just what needs to happen.

And the kids knew that. And so they felt safe in taking all those risks and trying and losing. And we would go up typically to our first tournament.

I mean, we're one of the lowest performing schools by test scores in the state of California. We'd go up to a school called Wye Bell, which was one of the highest performing schools where the sons and daughters of Google execs went to school.

Right. So different community of students. Right. Who are all tested for genius. I mean, half the school is 98% on a Stanford Binet IQ test or better.

And we'd go up there in the first tournament, they'd be nervous and they'd lose all their games. I was like, okay, you did great. That's exactly. Nobody lost an arm or leg. And we're going to go back and try this again and.

And you're going to find you're going to do better. And I'm proud of you guys. You did great. And they would have.

And the parents would go up and see it and they go, yeah, he was with the kids when they weren't doing really well and all of a sudden they start doing. And they would go up and would start to win tournaments and win trophies and do really well.

So it is a mentality that you have, but everybody has to have it and you want to turn a school around.

It's got to be administration, it's got to be teachers, it's got to be a group effort of we're all going to be here and we're going to focus on this things.

Yeah, I think that's so important. And I love the sort of the idea of having a soft landing.

Like you say, we're learning, it's a journey, but it's like if something happens, we've got you. Like you say whatever that is, whether it's the arm around the shoulder Whether it's just somewhere, just to kind of, we're okay here.

It's not going to be like, say, losing a limb, right?

You. You can motivate through fear. I mean, you see parents who do that all the time and at tournaments and everything. You win or else there's anger.

And you find that those kids tend to have higher incidences of drug and alcohol abuse when they become adults. They feel anxiety towards their parents and don't know what to do because they've always had to be afraid of failure.

And so when they're out on their own, it becomes a mess. So you can absolutely. And you see people do it, motivate through fear. But it is really unhealthy for children in the long term.

And so you don't want to do that just because it's harmful to kids. You want kids to have fun experiences, challenging experiences. You don't want to, you know, just have everything be easy for a child.

There is rigor, there is the pursuit of excellence, but in that, you want to be supportive and say, if you're trying your best, I am here for you. And if that happens, they're going to do great. Most of the time.

Yeah. And I think those learning ideas are really key.

I mean, as a musician myself, and certainly when I'm teaching drums and percussion, once my pupils start to understand that the. The way we go about.

It's the same way when you first started, then maybe when you've been doing it for a few years, you know, you have this sort of arc of learning. It's new. I don't know what's going on.

I'm learning some skills, I'm practicing, I'm getting better, I think I can do it, but then I don't quite manage it. And then before you know it, the thing that was hard is suddenly easy. And then we're doing. We're doing something different.

And when they start to think, oh, yeah, I know where I am on this journey for this piece or this particular skill or whatever it is, but like you say, they needed that rigor and that understanding to begin with in order to then take that next step and then put themselves in the same position again to challenge themselves.

Yeah, I remember I told you before we started, I saw Coldplay at Wembley Stadium this summer and. And one of the songs they start and it just goes bad, right? It's.

They were off and Martin, like, 10 seconds, Chris Martin's about 10 seconds, goes, hey, this is going terrible. We're going to start over. And so they. It Wasn't like the end of the world, right? It was. It went bad.

They're some of the best in the world at what they do, but it went wrong at that moment. They didn't panic and leave the stage and go, we can't do this anymore. They just went, we'll start it over. Those things happen.

And if you can approach it with a sort of, it's going to get better. We're going to do this. You know, mistakes happen. Kids see that and they react and then they can really do amazing things.

They have to be afraid of everything. They might do some really good things because they're terrified. But in the end they just, it's. You see it, what happens to them as adults.

It's just a mess.

Yeah. And I love being able to articulate the two sides of that coin like you just did there so well. And.

And I saw a clip actually in the last week or so and it was. I think it's Christian Limburg that is a fantastic trombonist. And he was doing like a master class.

And they were talking about really being able to play, really putting yourself out there and doing your best. And I was expecting it to go down the route of some sort of technical thing or a way of standing or those sorts of things that you often hear.

And what I loved about what he said was the fact that essentially, and I'm very much paraphrasing, it's not life or death. It's that kind of think about what's important in your life. Think about how you're living your life.

Think about all the things that are really positive. And therefore whether you split a note or you make a mistake really isn't in the end, isn't the end of the world.

And then you're relaxed, which means that you're more likely to be a better performance or you're more likely to get it right. And then the positive starts to snowball. And I thought you don't hear that so often from. From people like that.

Often it's a much more technical thing. And it came from very much a human standpoint.

And it really sort of made me think that that's the sort of message we really do want to be sharing more and more often.

Right. I just. An example from the classroom. A story from classroom I would get. At the beginning of the year I had a third grade class.

I looked at the third grade math curriculum was just kind of new, but same thing, the kids had to know their multiplication facts. A lot of the math was just centered around multiplication facts. And I gave them a little test at the beginning.

I'd had this happen before, and literally not a student knew a single multiplication fact. I mean, 2,200 answers of 22 students were all wrong. And so if I'm going to be successful in math, they got to learn their facts really quickly.

And I had a way of doing this with multiplication. It was a little four week plan and we were going to practice stuff pretty much every day. And at the end, we were going to have a competition.

We're going to line up students against a sixth grade classroom. So kids who knew their multiplication facts and we're just pair them the fastest down to the slowest.

And if you won your pairing, classes that won the most in their pairings would be the winner. And so I had a girl who was unbelievable. She could do 100 facts in like 49 seconds.

And she was going to beat whoever the sixth grader, it turned out, because there's more sixth graders than third graders. The top student had to be the top two sixth graders, top third grader.

So anyway, this girl who's going to win her pairing easily comes up to me a week before and says, my family's going to Disneyland. I'm not going to be here next week. And so I was like, okay, go have fun in Disneyland and we'll figure it out.

So I call in a group of students who are kind of in that next group, and I said, who would like to take on the top sixth graders? The way it worked out, you had to take on the. And they're both boys. We knew who they were. And I had a girl named Adriana say, I'll do it, Mr. Kreit.

And I go, okay, we got about a week left. Just practice, do your best, and we'll see what happens.

So the day of the competition, I get to go to library for what's called prep in the US A half hour time. I get to prepare my classroom. We're going to be switching students around.

And so as I'm about to leave the library, Adriana comes up to me and says, Mr. Kreip, I don't think I can beat both those boys. And I look at her, and it's these moments in life where you define who you are.

I just look at her and go, you know what I see when I look in your eyes, Adriana? She goes, what? I see greatness. And greatness isn't about a result.

Greatness is about the fact that you are the one that raised your hand to volunteer. Greatness is about the fact that you've worked so hard to get this thing done. I don't care one iota if you win or lose.

I care that if you keep approaching the things you do with this kind of effort, I'm going to try stuff. It could be hard. I'm still going to try it and I'm going to work hard to do it.

If it doesn't work out one time, you're going to get it right more often than not. And great things are going to happen in your life. So then I leave and I'm not sure if she's convinced or anything, but I go set up the room.

And so we get all the kids moved around. And so there she is half hour later sitting between two rather large sixth grade boys and she has to beat both of them to get a point for our class.

And everybody gets one point if they can beat their group, that little partnership that they're in. And so I go over the rules. I said, we're going to turn over this paper. You're going to finish the paper as fast as you can. We're going to grade it.

Whoever gets the most right the fastest gets a point for their class. And I say, ready, set, go. Turn over the paper. And you could hear a snap. And I've done this a lot. I'd never heard a snap before. And it was her pencil.

Her pencil broke as she put it on the paper. And I throw her a pencil.

Which by the way, if you're in the UK or you're in the United States and your teacher don't throw pencils at students, it's not good, but it worked this time. So I was happy. And the best way to describe what happened after that is what happened at the end.

At the end I grabbed the papers and we kind of go get the results. And I go to the teacher's room and I say, what did your students think about this? What did they think about coming to my room?

The teacher looked at me and she said, you know, they really had fun. This was a fun competition. But they all said the same thing.

There was this third grade girl and when we started, her pencil broke and she still beat everybody in the classroom. She was the fastest on that day.

She did her fastest time that day after her principal broke because she knew the guy standing up there, me in the classroom, didn't care if she won or lost, that I valued her vastly beyond the results she could give me on that day. And every student in my class, we won and we had a Pizza party. And we did all kinds of cool things because we tended to win competitions like this.

But every student knew that they were valued in that event beyond whether they won or lost. We were a team. We were working together. We did these things together. And to see, to look into her eyes and tell her, you're going to be great.

I see greatness in you and then actually mean it. It's an easy thing to say to a child, but I have to mean it.

And I have to put that in practice every day as a teacher, or they're going to find me to be a hypocrite and phony. And so to see, and then to see what goes on in their lives after they're convinced I can do great things. It's an amazing thing to watch.

And, you know, you just see kids, like I said, they're my heroes. They do amazing things.

I absolutely love that. It's such a great story.

And it, I think when you do it over a number of years as well, and you start to see the patterns and you start to see, I want to say, sort of growth, because it almost sort of goes wider does that, because, like, say each. Each pupil has that experience, but then as a group of people, it sort of multiplies more than beyond the individualness of them all.

It. It does.

And, you know, given where I taught, the demographics, there's a lot of poverty, lot of crazy family lives, you know, stuff going on that's just bad and terrible for children. And they're coming to you.

And so even some of those kids who came to you and were your worst students who like to cause trouble, just, they come back to you and they remember that person cared. That person wanted, had a standard for me in the classroom, we have rules. But that beyond that, that person cared about me.

And when a child senses that, it changes, it can change their sense of direction. You know, with parenting, parents are the single most important influence on their children.

But when there's not really great parenting, schools are probably the second greatest influence or can be. They can choose to be nothing.

And then you get, like you said at the beginning, the 80% of students who just go, well, I go there because they have to.

But if they go there because they want to, if they go there because they find a value and they someone that school is finding a value in them, it can change their direction of their life.

Now, the acronym FIRE is so important to us here at Education on fire. And by that we mean feedback, inspiration, resilience, and empowerment.

What is it that strikes you when you see that, whether it's an individual world or a group of words there. And I think you've talked about some of these things in great depth already. But yeah, interested to hear your take on it.

So I do have a chess book I wrote, It's 500 pages long, called the Learning Spiral. And I had run a bunch of education ideas, things I saw in teaching English language learners chess by some people in the research community.

And there's a guy named Dr. John Hattie who wrote Visible Learning for teachers, very popular researcher in the United States. And I said, I've seen all these things. And we had this kind of dialogue back and forth, email dialogue.

And I said, could you write the foreword for my book? Which he did.

The Learning Spiral and his big thing, one of the big things in his meta analysis was feedback that the kinds of things that kids are getting feedback can be something like, hey, you did a great job. But it can also just be the environment of the classroom. It can be the environment of the school.

What is it that a kid feels, feels when they walk into a place? Do they feel secure? Do they feel valued?

So all of those ways which we give feedback, sometimes overt through words, sometimes not so much, but just through act, through just the environment that is an incredibly important thing on day one to me. The rest of the stuff, as I mentioned, it's how does a school and then how does a teacher look at a group of kids?

Because we are so test driven and we are so who's the best?

Who's going to do the best for my classroom on the, you know, when I started teaching, we had one week of testing at the end of the year, one week of testing. Okay, all right, fine. By the end of the year, by the end of my career, almost a fourth of the school year was dedicated to some kind of testing.

And so how do you get kids to think that they are valuable beyond that result? And that comes back to how do you value them in the classroom?

If you want kids to be resilient, you have to be there when it's not, when they're not at their best. And how do you give them that opportunity? So all of those words to me reflect something I try to do in my classroom.

Most days I had some bad days, I had some bad classes, some classes I didn't really like teaching.

Sometimes it happens as a teacher, but I always tried to say to a child, I'm here and you don't have to be like Mario if he's the best in the classroom. You have to be the best version of yourself and try to be working on yourself every day.

And when a kid gets that message, they will fundamentally respond to it because they know it's up to them. And you give them a few pointers, here's what you could do. They'll take off and they'll go, and they'll be amazing.

When we did our multiplication facts thing, we'd always have someone who started out as the best. And when the kids realized all I had to do is improve myself, the person who was the best never ended up as the best or the fastest.

You'd get caught and passed by other people and he'd still do really well, or she would do really well. But it was always someone going internally, I don't have to beat that person. I just need to improve myself every day.

And if I do a little bit better every day, I can catch. And then all of a sudden, they're doing really well, giving them that internal belief that I can do better and I improve myself.

And I'm not going to hear, well, you didn't do as well as Juan over there. Well, then, if they know that really good things are going to happen, yeah,.

I think that's fantastic.

And one thing that just struck me as you started talking about feedback and also the regularity of things, I mean, we were talking about testing there as well. But I think feedback's one of those things that people can get very nervy about or they feel like it's a criticism sometimes.

But I think often it happens because it happens just every now and again.

And I think if it's a continual, ongoing dialogue, if it's a continual, just conversation about how we can improve in what's going on, that then changes the whole essence of it, doesn't it? And I think it's a really much more positive thing then right.

There is feedback you have to give adults sometimes. And children like, no, you can't do that. That's not right.

You know, you can't be talking too much in my classroom because other people are trying to do a lesson, or you out on the playground, you can't shove another student. That's wrong. I mean, so feedback can be negative sometimes. But if I go back to the thing is, is a student trying?

If it's something they're trying and they're just not getting it, negative feedback is a really caustic, horrible thing, then, okay, so we have to distinguish between poor behavior, which we need to work on, and try to do better, but then effort that is just not hitting the mark. And, and when, and when you see that, that always needs to be met with positive feedback.

And if you do that and schools understand that, you're going to find that you have a lot less behavior problems. If a school is dedicated to, I'm going to notice improvement. I'm going to notice a kid trying really hard.

And yeah, success is important too, but we're going to, we're going to notice all these things. And it's a team effort from administration to teachers, you'll find you have far less behavior problems. You can eliminate a lot of.

Not all of them, but most of them.

Yeah, I, I absolutely love it. I love all the stories that you've managed to share today. And I, and I think you really took us on that journey with it.

And I think it's so easy to talk about education. It's so easy to talk about what could be or what is in a perfect scenario, but to be able to have it in a real life.

This was my experience, this was my example. This is what I did.

These are some of the stories, these are some of the outcomes and, and a sense of sort of community feel, like you said, pupils, staff, parents. And the difference it makes, I think, is. Is. Is so inspiring. So, Kevin, thank you so much for joining me.

And, and do make sure that people know where to, like, say, get the book and, and to find out more about what it is that you offer people.

Right. I will get. If you haven't got that link already, I'm gonna email you.

You know, my website, public speaking and the books and that kind of stuff and where people want to find me. And I, I don't mind jumping across the pond to go talk to people. My, my English is pretty good.

I don't know about my British, but I don't have a lot of other languages. But I like travel and I have no problem going over to the uk so people want me to come over there and share, I gladly do it.

So I'll get you that information, but I appreciate the opportunity to come on.

Amazing. Yeah, we'll have the links in that in the show notes and everything. So, Kevin, thank you so much, indeed. Really appreciate chatting to you.

And yeah, I think we've inspired so many listening and I think having those stories is just a great way to do it. So, yeah, thanks so much, indeed.

All right, talk to you soon.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.