Critical Thinking Podcast RWT

Allison Herrick and Renée discuss the importance of critical thinking and critical reading skills in our everyday lives and specifically in our reading lives. They highlight the need to be aware of the information we consume and the perspectives that are presented. They discuss the social media-driven science of reading movement and how it is important to critically evaluate the information and consider multiple perspectives. They encourage educators and parents to teach students the importance of critical thinking and provide strategies for developing this skill. They also emphasize the need to examine our own perspectives and be open to different viewpoints. The conversation leads to the announcement of a blog series that explores critical thinking and perspective in depth. Welcome to Read, Write, Think, and Listen with Renée. I'm Renée. Today, I've got my colleague, Allison Herrick, with me, and we're diving into a conversation we've been having the last several months. Well, perhaps one of the many discussions we have about serving educators like you as professional study thinking partners. Today, our goal is to serve you as a thinking partner by inviting you to think with us about the importance of being a critical reader and critical thinker. Critical thinking is important in our everyday lives, but also in our reading lives. Take a moment to think about being a human in the year 2023 and all the information you take in on a daily basis. We're surrounded by a lot of information day in and day out. Let's pause again to think about, number one, the amount of information you've accessed already today, and two, what's your process for understanding that information? What do you notice? We've noticed a heightened awareness of our need to use critical reading and critical thinking skills in the midst of a social media barrage of information on a very debated topic in education, the science of reading and the science of reading movement, a movement that's been stirred by journalists, politicians, and media influencers. We want to invite you to the discussion today, and perhaps more importantly, to the practice of being a critical thinker and reader and a teacher who models and teaches students to put into place critical reading and thinking skills. When we practice critical thinking work, we gift ourselves the tools to be empowered decision makers, to recognize the voices that are missing and the ones that are included. We want to raise up the current and next generations of students to be readers, writers, and thinkers who advocate for themselves and one another. Welcome to Read, Write, Think. Allison's got a big topic we want to talk a little bit about today. Here's the truth for all of you listening in. Allison and I have been talking about this for weeks, right? We get together every Friday to discuss ideas, and we thought one of these should probably just be recorded so we can get your thinking with this, too. But before we begin, Kent, I'm going to toss it to you to talk a little bit, and of course you'll come back for another podcast, a little of your story. Tell us a little bit about how you got started, which, by the way, you can read on our website, right? I like your page on our website. It gives us a little bit of background, but give us a little bit of your background and your story of becoming an educator. Okay. Hi, I'm Allison Herrick, and I live in the Atlanta, Georgia area. I'm originally from Ohio, though, and moved down to start my teaching career in 2007. So I am almost more Southern than I am Ohioan. As far as education goes, that was not my path. I was originally wanting to be an orthopedic surgeon and started my college career thinking that that's what I was going to do. That's how I applied to colleges, and then ended up tutoring a second grader who was labeled shy, and her teacher thought she was really behind, and it turns out she was not shy and not behind. Neither of those things were true. She was really very intelligent, a little slow to warm, but really intelligent, and once you got to know her, very, very open, and I was able to see the impact that I could have on just one student, working with that one student, and that changed the whole trajectory of my career, and switched from pre-med to teaching, and, yeah, came down to get a teaching job in the South because they were plentiful in 07. Here I am 16 years later. I spent the last 15 years in Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia as a teacher and instructional coach, and then just made the switch to read, write, think this year as a literacy consultant, and that's how I'm here with Renee. Awesome. So many things in that intro, in that story, but the one thing I'm hanging on, which is why I'm so grateful for you being on the read, write, think team, is it's so interesting to think about just story, right? There was a story in that teacher's mind of this child, this student being shy, but the real story was, nope, I'm just a little slow to warm. I can absolutely appreciate that specific example because my own daughter, myself, we've been labeled shy, and if you really know us, that's the furthest thing. We are not shy at all, but we will take a minute to take it all in. We observe closely. We know a lot about you before we enter into the conversation, right? And so when it's, I think we can kind of connect that to really what we want to talk about today is this idea of there are lots of narratives that exist. Sometimes we've got narratives rolling around in our head, you know, that have actually become fictionalized. Sometimes there's narratives that we allow other people to tell or not, right? We can kind of set that boundary and make sure that they have a clear picture. Here's the story of who I am, and here's the story of who I want you to see me as. It's so important. So I appreciate that you having that chance to tutor that student. I bet you it changed the life of that student, too, that trajectory. But it makes me think about in all of our lives, but especially in education, words really matter, right? When we think about the weight that they hold and especially a core value, or I think a tenet of our team at ReadWriteThink is really kind of seeing the strengths, right, in every human being. And what's interesting as a team is we get to, we kind of are always looking at our craft growing our craft, supporting teachers in thinking about their craft, and centering this idea of being kind of in a constant state of evolution and looking critically at things and really stretching our thinking. And so what Alice and I have been talking about the last couple of times we've met, I was going to say, I was going to introduce this idea with like an elephant in the room, but I don't actually think the elephant is there. I think a couple of maybe months ago, there was an elephant in the room, right, about this idea of like pendulum swinging in education. But I think it's just here. I don't know, like, what's the opposite of elephant in the room? It's just like here. But I don't know, in some regions, like people aren't talking about it. In some regions of the country, there are the elephants still in the room, but I guess it also depends on how much you rely on social media being the information that you do. So we want to talk a little bit about, let's just get right to it. We want to talk a little bit about this idea of, I mean, it could be pendulum swinging, but I'm going to go ahead and toss out there that I don't actually think the pendulum swings. I just think it's a matter of what people are talking about. But the science of reading movement is an interesting discussion that's happening, that people are kind of chitter-chattering about this, like, oh, here comes the pendulum again. But really, is it the pendulum? I don't really know. But we've got a blog series coming out because we've really actually been thinking about this a lot. What does critical thinking look like in our daily lives? And what is the literacy work around critical thinking? A lot of you know that one of my core beliefs is literacy work is life work. So if we can apply thinking strategies to what we're reading, we can also apply those same thinking strategies to our everyday lives. So critical thinking is interesting, but what's happening with the science of reading social media movement, I'm just going to go ahead and say I don't think people are practicing critical reading. There's a lot of, it actually, like, makes my heart heavy is there are policies being challenged, right? There are big sweeping decisions being made. And I would, and I'm thinking that I guess the questions I'm asking are, are we doing our due diligence? Are we really peeling back this conversation like an onion and kind of looking at all the layers? Or is our listening biased? Are we only listening to one perspective? I'm going to toss it to you, Allison, to talk a little bit more about that or just talk a little of the blog series that we've kind of shaped up and that we've got coming out. Yeah, this has been an interesting year working here with ReadWrite and thinking about how is the science of reading movement really impacting the work that we do and, you know, thinking about what's happening in schools. And, you know, I'm going to agree with you that I don't think it's a pendulum swinging. I think it's a matter of what wording is out there that's going to, you know, capture the attention of the most people. And right now, the wording that's capturing the attention and pulling on the heartstrings is that of this social media driven science reading movement. Because at all of our cores, we want students to read. We all want that. That's why we got into education to begin with. And so when things get put out there that this is the way to do that, it's really easy to jump on board with that and to not really look much further past that initial lens of, of course, I want students to read proficiently. And of course, I want them to enjoy reading. But I think where our conversations have taken us is that we aren't looking past the emotional side of this and really thinking, what is the research that supports this? Is there research that supports throwing out frameworks that we've used, throwing out instruction that we've used? What is it that's there supporting this decision, supporting these policies and these actual laws that are being put in place around the social media version of science of reading? And so we keep kind of saying the social media version because there is science of reading. There is research science of reading that has been around for a while. What all social media does preys on our emotions and preys on the things that are going to get us to click and spend money. And so really where we are coming from on this is, are we thinking and digesting the information that we're getting in a way that is going to actually help students in the long run? Or are we just kind of going along with what we're hearing and not pursuing it further? And so the idea of this blog series came out that we have a lot of information that we take in all the time in all the different ways through social media posts, books, videos, TikTok, whatever. We take in all this information. And I think sometimes what we forget is that the authors and creators of this information have perspectives about the topic. So something that I am always really hyper aware of is, are we seeing all sides of what's going on? Are we really seeing that my perspective isn't the only one that exists? Where we're coming from on this is that I'm not sure that that is what's happening. I'm not sure that we are seeing all perspectives. I don't know that we are critically taking in information. The blog starts off, really, why do we need to be able to see all perspectives of an argument? Why do we need to care about that when we take in information? We argue, of course, that being critical thinkers and really understanding that your perspective is just one of many is the thing that is going to, we posit, save the world. But, you know, it's a little dramatic, but it's fine. So we think that being able to really see all sides is going to save the world. But that's really big, right? That's really big and abstract to think about. And it's not everyone's natural stance to understand that there are other sides to arguments and that there is a broader world around us. And it's certainly not kids' natural stance to do. And so part of not only just our language art standards, but part of our work, like our life work for kids, is to help them understand that there are multiple perspectives and that there is ways that they can learn to grow that muscle, to grow that ability to understand someone else's point of view. So in the second part of the blog, we talk about some lessons that you can teach and take into your classroom immediately to help students understand what is point of view and then how to find it in the books that you're reading or in the content that you're consuming. The first two really talk a lot about your classroom and what you can do in the classroom to help students understand perspective and learn how to determine the point of view in what they're reading and consuming. And then the third part of the series really starts to talk about critical thinking. And it really starts to hit at how are we consuming the information that's around us and are we looking for bias? Are we intentionally trying to find what is missing in the information that we're getting? That's where a lot of our work as adults needs to come in. So kids need to be able to find bias and they need to think critically. But we as adults really need to do that. We really need to lead by example and understand that when we're watching a video or listening to a podcast, and we'll throw this one out there. While you're listening to this, please be thinking critically about the information that you're hearing from us. Don't just take things at face value. Listen like what perspective is missing from what you're reading? Whose voice is missing? Think about why that voice might be missing. Because really when we look at nonfiction text, there's a case that's being made. There's facts that are being given. And it's our job to figure out are the facts presented from all sides? If they are, great. If they're not, what side is missing? And it may not be for negative reasons. It's just that's the focus of the book. But we need to know that. We need to know that there's another side to it. And so in that third part, I give a lot of questions that you can ask yourself and have students ask themselves as they read. Our challenge here at Read Write Think for you is to think through, how can I take this into my personal life when I'm reading and digesting things? And then, of course, on that bigger picture of how is this going to impact the conversation we have and how I approach the changes that are being made in my school district? I've got my pencils moving very fast in my notebook on notes. So I'm thinking about, thank you, Allison, for all of that and the work that you've done in this series. Thinking about, yes, this podcast and this blog series is for educators and thinking about what are the lessons that we can strategically and explicitly teach students. But I'm going to broaden the definition of educators that if you've got a child in your life, we see you as an educator. So even if you don't have a professional degree behind it, right? If you've got a neighbor who's like a child, you're an educator. If you're a parent or a caregiver, you're an educator. So there could be teachers who are listening to this who are both parents and educators. And maybe we take a little bit of a different, you know, conversation for caregivers. Lots of parents have emailed me. Lots of friends have texted me in response to the buzz that's happening right now in social media. And it's such a good practice for us as adults to practice this before we teach it to kids, right, and let them in on it. It's tricky, right? Like, there are people's jobs to make things sound beautiful and look fancy, right? That's their job, right? Marketing is a whole career. And it's so interesting, right, when we teach kids to, not just kids but ourselves, like it's awesome to see kids realize that thing over there looks beautiful, but it's saying something completely different than this other thing over here. And so I think there's an interesting opportunity for us to study this in our curriculum. Like, lots of us, this is coming out kind of in spring, summer, when lots of us are starting to think about our curriculum for next year. Lots of school communities right now are thinking of their vision and kind of their professional study, like, priority next year. Can we imagine studying this as an entire community in our life work but also in our literacy work? There's a lot of things you said that are also written in the blog, but when we think about perspective of an author, I can't help but think about being equipped to examine my own perspective. We have natural perspectives on things that are influenced by where we live or what we listen to or what we watch, who we talk to. So it's really healthy. And a lot of us start our year with identity work, right? Who am I? Who are you? Who are we together? And just being able to be able to say, like, this is something I'm bringing to the text. I need to be aware of it. That's all I need to be. That's all we're doing. We're not judging my perspective. I'm just being able to identify that I bring some things as a reader to the text, but the author is bringing some things. And that's an interesting work to start to think about how they go together or how they're different or the argument that they're going to make. Something to add to that is being aware that there are other perspectives doesn't mean that you always have to change your own or that that's the expectation. That's not the expectation with the blog post. It's not the expectation with this. It's really not the expectation at all when you think about perspective work. What I have to recognize as a human is that there is another perspective and that it doesn't make the person wrong or bad or unintelligent or anything like that because the world is really vast and there's a lot of different things that go into our personal perspectives, what gives us that view. I'm thinking on this on so many levels. The idea of, you know, what we could there's a lot of classroom application, but also a lot of life application, right? There are probably several different perspectives on sharks. Sharks are beautiful. Sharks are dangerous, predators, what have you. We can engineer in our classrooms text that we read aloud that purposely set kids up to see multiple perspectives on a topic. On the level of your school community, you can take the science of reading movement and start to kind of create a text set. That's actually probably the number one thing is a text set. Could you imagine, you know, policy being made or district decisions being made on one single perspective? That's kind of where we want to push here a little bit. We want to be well read, do our own diligence here of let's look at the set of resources that we're getting from. And then we're just going to ask ourselves questions, the same kind of questions that we would ask of the shark book. Is there research backing this text? Who did the research? And, you know, any one of us could do research, but have they done their due diligence? Who's paying for the research, by the way? Whose voice is missing? And how is the information being presented? What emotion is it playing on? These are all really important, critical questions that we ask of anything. Next time you see a billboard, next time you listen to a commercial, next time you see anything, just start experimenting with how is this hitting me? What is, how am I taking that information in? And what's the craft? What's the move the author has done to do so? That's a really interesting starting place. And then you could kind of keep going from kind of digging that rabbit hole, so to speak, to kind of figure out, well, what, where, then where do I stand on this? And do I want my thinking to be changed or do I want to push back? I'm going to recognize that person's perspective, but I'm also going to push back. Where I think we as a team worry, or I don't know if worry, or maybe it's a cautionary tale, or maybe this is, call this what you will, is that I think our hearts are breaking because massive decisions are being made to what appear to us without thinking critically. Anybody has permission to give us a call and talk through it, and I would love to know how did you critically go through this decision-making process? Talk me through all that you've read. Where did the research come from? Who's paying for it? Say more. Say more what you mean by, because I think what's accidentally happening is we're just kind of jumping on that bandwagon because it's big. I'm also thinking of our teaching identities and kind of grounding our perspective in, like, what is our own core belief? What are our core beliefs and how does that impact how we receive a text or how we view an article or how we hear something? And then even, like, even perhaps our teaching identity could be part of our pushback, if that's the direction you want to go. Yeah, so it's interesting, you know, you're talking about the science of reading and, you know, policies being made and wanting to know what's the research behind all of this, and I am positioned out here in the world where the science of reading was really starting to be implemented into policy very early. I've gotten to watch it roll out, and I think what ends up happening is, yeah, we make this really broad, like, science of reading is something about teaching phonics. Teaching phonics is really good. Let's do that. And then we put all this policy into place on something that, like, no one can really define because there really isn't a definition. We as a team are really doing our due diligence in catching all sides of this argument. People who are really pro science of reading, the science research science of reading, and people who are against the broad sweeping changes. What's interesting is when a lot of people say science of reading, they're really just thinking, let's do some direct phonics instruction that really nobody has ever been against. There hasn't been an instructional framework or curriculum that has said no teaching of phonics. When we zoom out and make just this, like, it's something about this, or it's just this one word thing, we miss so much. And so what's happening is we're taking that kids should learn phonics. Decoding is very important. Great. Let's do that. And then we put all this policy around it, and we put laws in place that outlaw other forms of teaching reading. Where is all of this coming from? And so having a little bit of pushback on, like, okay, like, help me understand all of these decisions. Help me understand how all of this makes sense. Give me the research. And what I'm finding is that there isn't research to go with it. We're taking sentences from here, there, everywhere. We're using a lot of anecdotal data while dismissing decades worth of data. Just to add on to the idea that if we actually, again, if we really do look at the empirically, scientifically research, I don't know if I said that correctly, right, but there are people in the field of education that are practitioners, but also, right, kind of go through, I'm going to air quote this kind of correct way, I'm not one of them, but they have, like, I respect their work in the field. Again, like you said, Allison, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of research. And in it, this is a gross summary, kids need to be able to say words, say them fluently, and think about them. Nobody is arguing that there's parts to teaching reading. And if we knew the one way to do it, we'd all be doing it. That's the thing. We would all be doing it. And this is where it gets a little bit conspiracy theory is because people also make money creating materials, right? Textbook companies, you know, I get it. We all have to be able to make a living. But if you, like, kind of start connecting the dots, it's very interesting to see what districts are set up to do, what assessments they purchase, and then what companies are attached to those assessments. I'm not saying anything wrong with assessments. I'm just saying, again, explore what you're being asked to do because our brains are so beautiful and complex. There isn't just one way, right? There's a lot of ways. And again, a lot of the research we have been looking at, again, for lots of years is all humans need a balance of it, right? We need all of it. We need to see ourselves as readers, choice factors. And there's so many different layers that kind of go into this. So I think as educators, it's hard. Teaching is amazing and complicated. And so this kind of sets us up with some more work we're going to have coming up in the very near future is how are we raising up our teachers? How are we supporting our very important field of educators in growing their practice of kind of understanding the things that are not going anywhere? We know these things, that there's a lot of thinking work you have to do to be a reader, and you've got to be able to figure out how that little mark on the page does work. What are we doing to, one, get teachers' voices heard? Are we talking to teachers? And maybe shifting away more from, like, the thing, like, the thing in your hand to really, like, studying your craft and studying how our brains work. I'm not saying that you can't have a thing in your hand, but sometimes, like, that's where the pendulum is, right? Like, it's the new thing that's packaged kind of appears as the pendulum versus, like, I'm not going to say it's an, maybe it's an and, not an or. And I'm also raising up educators to look at their practice. You can't really ever be done studying your craft or studying the content, but it's just interesting to think about how are we supporting parents in this? Of course, parents are being loud about this because it's their children, right, that this is impacting. But I think we can maybe do better, we can do a better job at supporting parents and understanding the bigger picture. I'm going to trust that parents can handle the bigger picture. I'm going to trust that teachers can handle the bigger picture. Yeah, a couple of things on that. Yes, the parent aspect of it. You know, part of me really loves the outcry that from parents right now because they're getting involved in their child's education and they're passionately getting involved, which I will never be against. So part of me really loves that. And then the other part is because there's just this social media driven part of it that is playing on emotions, a lot of really broad sweeping comments get made about what is happening in classrooms. Now, for teachers who are listening to this that teach in a school, I think that you can understand that it's really hard just in a school of like 40 teachers to know exactly what every teacher in that school is doing. So to have some sort of assumption that you know what every teacher across the nation is or isn't teaching in their classroom is a really big stretch for me to take that somehow this social media part of science reading knows what is and isn't going on in every classroom, every literacy classroom across the U.S., and that that's what's leading to, we'll air quote this, the reading crisis, right? And so if I can't even know what's happening in every room in my own building, we should probably do some thinking that like it's also not possible to know what's happening in every classroom across the nation. From the parent side of it, like what can we do as a school, as educators, as people in the field of literacy who have the degrees, what can we do to help understand like all the different ways that we're teaching their child to be readers, writers, and thinkers? Like what are, how can we help them understand these are all the components that make up a reader and that this is how readers learn to read and these are the steps and this is what goes into it. So can we take a bit more care in how we communicate with parents and caretakers, letting them know that like this is what we're doing, like this is helping your child, and if this thing isn't the thing that is working, then we have all these other things on backup that we're also going to try. Being a bit more up front with our caretakers on this is what we're doing, these are all the things that we can do, just being more explicit. A lot of things we can continue to think about, part of me wants to say, who are you going to share this podcast with and talk to them about it? We'd love to hear your thoughts. We have a few more, but we are going to start to think about some big ideas coming out of this conversation. Clearly, this is not the first time we've had this conversation, but it is important to have a team with you, like who are your thinking partners that you can continue to think about big ideas, big ideas in your parenting, big ideas in your caregiving world, or even in your professional world, if teaching is a career, I imagine that you're listening to this, or even in your leadership role. The other thing to think about is how are policies made in your immediate community, how are policies made in your classroom, how are policies made in your grade level, your school, your district, your state, and to think a little bit about what are the current policies, how do they fit with you, what needs to be disrupted, how can you disrupt it in ways that have been vetted and that are like kind of sound and logical and kind of see, again, multiple perspectives. We teach students in writing, one of the text types we teach is opinion and argument writing. We teach them to have a claim and to have viable evidence to back up that claim. Here's a chance for us to practice this, right, in our professional and everyday lives. It's also interesting to start thinking about like how am I practicing critical thinking in my reading work too, just in my writing, all over. What we don't want to do is stir up, I think my brother would say like if you have a bee in your bonnet, that's something he would say growing up in Pennsylvania, but if we've got a bee in our bonnet, awesome, but the worst thing we can do is become a victim of the bee or complain about the bee, right? But what we want to do is think about that bee in my bonnet is going to inspire some further information or some further thinking, and so that's interesting to start thinking about that as well, like what's your journey and how, because sometimes I think as teachers we feel like I'm just going to close my door and do my own thing. I get it. We completely understand, but what we're talking about here are like generations of children kind of being raised through the struggle adults are having, and so what are we doing to support children in becoming independent decision makers who think critically about their everyday lives? It's interesting to think about this. I'm just going to add a little bit to what you're saying because, you know, you're saying to disrupt and, you know, to cause some gentle waves, which in general we as a company are fans of. That's what we say we do, right? We go into schools and we disrupt practices, and something that Renee and I were talking about before we got on to this call was about the idea of, okay, so like you're a teacher in a classroom and things have been handed to you. A curriculum's been handed to you. Your school is now moving away from balanced literacy into structured literacy. You're doing all science reading all day all the time, right? And so the idea that Renee just brought up of I'm just going to close my door and, you know, do my own thing, yes, of course we understand that. What I would say as a person who doesn't like to disrupt just for the sake of disrupting and I'm also super conflict avoidant, so if I'm saying these things, then we can all do it, but the idea that, you know, I'm just going to be handed something and I'm just going to bite my tongue and quietly comply is really what ends up losing a lot of passion for teachers. It's really what is kind of the proverbial nail in the coffin on what's going on is just that quiet, I'm just going to do what I'm being told even though I don't agree with it. And so I think if you have an option between asking some really gentle questions and disrupting the thinking a little bit or just kind of like showing up to work, I think the better option is to disrupt a little bit because you know what it feels like as a teacher to come in and not love what you're doing and you know that your students also know that feeling. And so when we're in our classroom and we're teaching things because we've been told to teach them, but we don't have personal passion or personal stakes in them, that reads to kids. As you're watching policy change and as you're watching things change in your district, you may not have the ultimate say on whether or not things change. It may say the exact same. But what you do have power in is you have power in the questions you ask. You have power in how you think about it. You have power in the voice that you have on your team with your teacher bestie, with your administrator, and with your students. There's a way to find things within whatever you're being handed to find passion and purpose in. And there's ways to tie the things you love and believe in with the things that are being given to you. So my challenge, or I guess my invitation to you, is to like not just be compliant with it. Do what you need to do so that you can love what you're doing and want to walk into school every day. Beautifully said, Allison. I'm sitting here quiet because I don't, that's pretty, you know, that doesn't happen often. We do have some questions, right, that if we kind of threaded them throughout, it kind of came natural in our conversation. But get your pens out. Or if you're driving, don't do that. But we're also going to put these questions in the episode notes. So here's some questions to consider. Allison, you want to start us off with our ode to Ted Lazo? Yes, yes. We both love Ted Lazo so much. We will not give you any spoilers. But one of our favorite quotes from this season, season three, comes from Higgins. He says, to find out before you flip out. So before you get all worked up in a tizzy, and this is not just about science reading, by the way, this is everything. Before you flip out and really just get worked up and create this whole narrative that shoots you like five years down the road, find out a little bit more about it. Ask some questions. Decide where is all of this coming from. If it's a piece of information you're reading, read a little bit further. Do some extra work. One of my favorites is just simply say more. Say more. Say more about what you mean when you say, fill in the blank, current policy. Say more of what you mean by science of reading. Just say more is a great, great question that sometimes quiets the response I'm already thinking about in my mind. It just is a reminder of, let me just hear more. So just say more, I think, is another question. I'm almost 100% sure that you've got an opinion on this subject. Specifically, it could be sharks. It could be science of reading. You've already got a perspective. You've already got an opinion. So before we share it, say more. Say more. I want to hear more of where. And most people, when it comes to science of reading, I let the cat out of the bag, don't actually have. They don't, they just have, they read it on a social media post, and that's all they've got to say about it. So, okay, great. Now we know our next steps is let's find out more. Another question that we have is kind of a bundle of questions is, is there research, so Renee hinted at this one in the last one, is there research that you're using to base this on? So again, is that about sharks? When was this research done? And who's funding the research? So when we're looking across any part of our lives and we're thinking critically, anything that we read, anything we digest, is there research? When was the research done? And who's funding it? There are many great things about being an educator, one of them being every year we get a clean slate. Every year we get to start new with a new community, a new group of students, knowing all that I've accumulated in the past years in the field. So one question I like to ask myself at this time of the year is what's my vision statement for my own journey next year? How is my own teaching identity going to evolve and grow? And sometimes I double check on my core belief. Like, let me think about how can I, my vision statement for my year should grow out of my core belief. So I always come back to checking in on those core beliefs. And a lot of times in terms of this conversation, when I think about bringing, taking in information critically as a critical consumer of information and giving information even, I think about sometimes those core beliefs impact the perspective I bring to the text or how I hear things because I've built my career on a foundation of core beliefs. So to come through and just kind of wrap it all up in a nice little bow, a nice summary, we have a blog that's coming out. We have a blog series that's coming out. So we want you to read the blog. The next thing to think about is that, you know, just as we approach information in life, we really want to challenge you to always have those critical thinking skills really sharply in tune and asking yourself lots of questions. We just want to encourage you to think critically all the time, teach it to students. We can teach it to students. Thank you, Alison, for joining the Read, Write, Think, and Listen podcast. And until next time, let's keep reading, writing, and thinking together. Check out this blog series and many more resources at ReadWriteThinkWithRenee.com.