Liza Garonzik on Teaching Conversation

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen talks with Liza Garoznik, founder and CEO of Real Discussion, about one of the biggest questions in education today: how do we teach and assess durable skills like communication, listening, and collaboration? Framed by the rise of AI and growing concern about a “conversation crisis,” the discussion explores why authentic interaction must be developed alongside artificial intelligence. Liza shares the origin story behind Real Discussion, explains the REAL framework—Relate, Excerpt, Ask, Listen—and offers practical insight into how schools can embed conversation skills into core academics while also measuring student growth, belonging, and engagement.

Outline

• (0:00) Introduction & Durable Skills Framework
• (3:40) Liza’s Story & Real Discussion Origins
• (11:23) The Conversation Crisis & Authentic Interaction
• (21:36) The REAL Framework & Teaching Discussion Skills
• (26:22) Assessment & Measuring Student Growth
• (34:19) Practical Tools & Future of Real Discussion

Introduction & Durable Skills Framework

Nate McClennen: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, and I’m your host, Nate McClennen, today. And, you know, here at Getting Smart, we’ve been thinking a lot about this broader framework of school transformation. And part of that, one of the key elements, is what are the outcomes for young people, and what do they need to know and be able to do and act like?

And certainly, this sits in standards that are comprehensive across all 50 states and internationally, across countries and things like that. But one of the big goals for us, and I think across the landscape, is how do we broaden these outcomes? And so the way we think about it is that you have core outcomes, you have technical outcomes, and durable outcomes.

And sometimes people call these skills, but all of them fall under this big bucket of what do we think students should come out with when they graduate high school, and then even beyond. So core will be your typical content and standards. Technical are those that are specific to an industry, specific to a particular job or occupation.

And then durable skills are these broader pieces, like collaboration and creativity and communication, and there’s a lot of talk about this right now. We know that employers want this. They show up in job descriptions. And where we would also argue, as Mason and I and the rest of Getting Smart are thinking about how students gain these, they gain these through experiences, and real-world experiences have become more and more important. But students also need to develop these skills. And so we know that employers want them. We also think that they’re good for humanity in general, and my brother Abel and I have written about this CHOICE framework and been riffing on critical thinking and healthy living and originality and inquiry. And this concept of connection has become more and more important.

And connection doesn’t necessarily show up in job descriptions, yet we think it’s really, really important. The third thing we know is that portraits of graduates are everywhere in the United States right now. It is hip and trendy. Everybody’s talking about how do you create durable skills, and there are certainly organizations that are building great resources around them.

So America Succeeds and their durable skills framework, that’s accessible and available to everybody. Carnegie Foundation just released a progression on collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. Redesign, XQ, and many, many other schools and districts individually have created their own sets of durable skills that are baked into these portraits of graduates.

So that’s all good. It’s all fine. It helps set up what these outcomes are, the targets we’re headed for. I have a driving question, and today’s podcast is around that driving question, which is: how do we teach and assess these skills? And that’s trickier. It’s much easier to assess single-digit addition than it is to assess communication writ large. So that’s why today we’ve invited Liza Garoznik to join the podcast. She’s the founder and CEO of Real Discussion, which is an organization and program that offers a real practical path forward to making conversation teachable and accessible as a skill inside the core content. And as we think about AI and screen time and students more and more interacting with technology, there is a sense that we need to actually continue to enhance their ability to communicate and connect with one another.

So, Liza, super excited to have you on the podcast today, and thanks for taking the time.

Liza Garoznik: Thanks, Nate. It’s great to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.

Nate McClennen: I have too. So I’m gonna start with the same question I start with all of our guests. So, what was your favorite learning experience? And by favorite, I mean when you were most engaged and you learned the most from your K-12 memories.

So what was most sticky in your brain?

Liza’s Story & Real Discussion Origins

Liza Garoznik: It’s a great question, and it takes me exactly to September of my fourth-grade year. I was a very quiet, kind of high-achieving, anxious 10-year-old who was switching to a new school. And when I got there, my homeroom teacher had me fill out a survey. And the survey was pretty run of the mill.

It said things like, what’s your name? Do you have a nickname? Do you have siblings? What’s your favorite food? What’s your pet’s name? And then there was this question that really threw me for a loop, which was, what kind of leader are you? And I looked at this question and I was like, I’m a mute 10-year-old girl.

And I wrote, I’m a non-leader, and handed it in, and I didn’t think anything of it. And then the teacher, Ms. Stanfield—I hope you’re out there listening to this somewhere—invented me in during recess to talk about my response to the question. And what she said was, “Liza, tell me, why did you write this? Why do you see yourself as a non-leader?” And I knew the answer, which was, well, I listen. I don’t really like to talk that much. She said, “You know what? I think that because you listen, you probably notice things that other people don’t. And what I would love for you to do, starting next week, is—you don’t necessarily have to talk in class—but what I’d love for you to do is, at the end of every class, can I count on you to share back one thing that you heard today?”

And in that moment, it was such a brilliant teacher move because not only did she make me feel seen, she followed up with curiosity. She then created space for me to express myself. She then made me feel challenged to speak up every class. Suddenly I went from a kid who wasn’t engaging to a kid who had a defined role in every class, and pretty soon, within several weeks I was speaking far more than that in class. But it was just such a powerful learning experience, far more than I think an orientation survey was ever designed to ignite.

But it was a really important moment for me.

Nate McClennen: Right. And you had some agency, you were empowered, and you had a teacher that brought that out. So just always thinking about these sticky moments, and that seems to connect directly to the work you’re doing today. So you have this organization called Real Discussion. You’re the founder, CEO, you’re trying to scale and make this thing broad to as many students as possible. So what’s the genesis of this work? What’s the storyline and the history of it to help develop discussion skills, which for me, as I said in my intro, is really about how do we help humans connect with one another effectively? So what’s the history and the storyline?

Liza Garoznik: I mean, you nailed it in that framing. I think I was an early-career teacher teaching English literature, essentially, and I wanted to use discussion in my class. I was somebody who felt like, maybe given my own experience, I wanted to make sure every student was heard and every student was engaged.

And this was at a time when—this was actually the year when kids started spending more than 60 minutes a day on screens—and the research world was freaking out with the question of, like, how is this gonna impact students’ social development? And I looked at this kind of discourse happening and I was like, I don’t know. But what I do know is that the students in my class, I’m asking them to have discussions about literature, and I think I’m not actually teaching them how to have a discussion.

And I have no idea what the research is gonna bear out, but I have this hypothesis that the more time we all spend on screens, the harder it is to communicate in person. And so I really said, before expecting students in my class to be collaborating productively with each other, what if I step back and what if I teach them what great discussion looks like? That was easier said than done because I hopped on Google and started Googling all these discussion frameworks and all of these activities came up, right?

All the things you probably know too, like Socratic seminar, fishbowl, all these structured debates, Paideia seminar, Harkness. And all of these things, though, were activities. They were about how to structure discussion. They were not about teaching discussion skills. So I went home one night and said, okay, if I were gonna break what I think is a deeply, uniquely human art of great discussion into teachable, learnable skills for this generation of kids who are gonna grow up on screens, what would they be? And I came up with these four skills, REAL: relate, excerpt, ask, and listen, and really started the following week teaching them in my classroom.

So that was almost 15 years ago at this point. So that was the very earliest iteration of the model, from my own experience. And from there, I mean, the growth path has been authentic and windy, but I think really focused on honoring what works for teachers and getting really clear on the classroom experience before we seek scale. I think that’s just been the North Star from the beginning.

Nate McClennen: Right. And early on, how did your students respond? I mean, it sounds like you were authentically saying, “Hey, I’m gonna try this out. What does this look like?” I mean, what was that early process? I’m always thinking about the design of new ideas, and so what did that look like?

Liza Garoznik: The kids were like, “This is so easy. We’ve never been taught this.” And they would say things like, “It always felt to me like adults thought we knew how to do this, but we’ve never been taught.”

And this was in the fall semester, and what I remember is that the school had kind of a day right before Thanksgiving that was a celebration of understanding, when parents, caregivers, grandparents even, all came to school for the day. And classes got to decide what they were going to do to kind of show off for all the visitors.

And my class voted to do a real discussion. And so they did it, and they used their skills, they used the routines we honed, and I’ll never forget, one, watching the pride of these kids in every single one engaging, calling each other in, disagreeing respectfully. These were 13-year-olds, right? So this was pretty amazing. But perhaps even more compelling to me was actually the adult feedback. So people were coming up to me saying, “Oh, I wish Congress had this. Oh, I wish my board at work had this. Oh, I wish my Thanksgiving dinner table had this.”

And in that moment, I think the kids realized, oh, what we just did here is something that’s gonna stand me in good stead for the rest of my life. And certainly I, as a teacher, realized this is much bigger than my classroom. This is actually about explicitly teaching and assessing foundational skills that we need not just for academic engagement, but that kids will need over their lifetime as they’re in relationships, as they’re engaging in their citizenship, as they’re engaging in the workforce.

So it was really that feedback on that visitors’ day that got me thinking way beyond my classroom.

Nate McClennen: Right. Yeah. As I was prepping for this podcast, I was thinking this is really a human skill. And yes, we need to teach it in school, but it’s also something that a lot of adults also need because all of us—we are not practicing our conversation skills and our connection skills as much as we have had in the past.

And so it makes me think that this is a universal set of skills. It also reminds me that, as a teacher, and even as an adult operating in the universe, when you meet a young person who is conversationally adept, you notice it, right? You say, “Oh, that person’s really good with adults,” or can communicate well. But often it is something that either they’ve developed over time; they’ve not been intentionally taught. So I think what you’re saying is really intriguing. Let’s give everybody those skills so everybody has that ability to communicate well.

When you started doing this work, and now as you’re broadening and scaling to other schools, are people coming to you because they’re seeing a challenge? You use the phrase “conversation crisis,” that they’re saying, “Hey, our students actually can’t communicate with one another well, and that’s why they come to you”? What’s the observation, the data you’re seeing, as people come and talk to you about this?

The Conversation Crisis & Authentic Interaction

Liza Garoznik: Yeah, I think that there are several different entry points. And one of them absolutely is, we’re worried about our students. We see them not connecting in person, and we want them to. They don’t know how to have a conversation. They don’t know particularly how to have a conversation across difference. That’s certainly kind of one angle through which people come to us.

I would say recently we’ve also had many—we’ve worked with about a hundred schools, and this is the time of year when I’m getting to talk to all of them and make plans for next year. And one of the choruses that I’m just hearing again and again and again is, as schools are thinking about their AI strategy, they’re also saying, “But wait. What is our human skills strategy?” And that seems to be the entry point right now, whether or not they’re calling it human skills or whether they’re saying, “We want the emphasis to be on relationships.” There is this growing sense that as we’re leaning into AI, as we should, we also need to be pro-human and really thinking about how we’re creating conditions for human connection in our classrooms.

And I think that is where we’re seeing a lot of traction right now. However, I’ve been doing this long enough to say that there have kind of been fads. Right after COVID, everybody was worried about masks, right? And the impact of screen time on in-person conversation skills. Then it shifted to civil discourse. And now we’re really in this AI-skills approach. To which my response—I mean, I think a lot about REAL and discussion skills in general as being the other AI: authentic interaction.

So we try to push schools to teach authentic interaction alongside artificial intelligence, and that seems to be something that is giving language to what teachers are feeling in their class is lacking right now.

Nate McClennen: Okay, so that’s a little bit of a mic drop for me, just saying that this idea that AI can also be authentic interaction—and as we have a whole set of resources on our website about how do you create AI policy, how do you help teachers augment their teaching and learning, and so everybody’s thinking about that, and there’s a lot of confused people for sure, and then there’s a lot of solutions. But I too believe that—and I haven’t used it in precisely the exact way you have, which is brilliant—this idea that we need to do these things in parallel. Every AI policy that’s implemented needs to have within it—yes, I’ll use your words—an authentic interaction policy. What does that look like? How are we training? So, super interesting.

And then I’m also thinking about conversations across difference. So I was listening to another podcast this morning, and there is just such a negative perception of our world right now that, hey, we’re in an impossible situation. We have really divisive conversations going on, and that’s only amplified by AI and social media. So our bubbles get farther and farther apart and they get less and less permeable. So where have you found that, in this great REAL acronym, have you pivoted at all to think about that? Have you added that kind of work as the world has shifted? In terms of relating and excerpting, which are both skills, and listening and asking—all these things are skills about communicating across difference—has that been more of an emphasis lately, or has it always been an emphasis?

Liza Garoznik: My answer is two parts.

So one, one of my foundational interests in communication from the get-go is that my dad was in translation growing up. So I grew up in a very multilingual context where communicating across differences was a given. It was not something that was scary, and miscommunication was something that happened daily. And so I think from that, I grew up with this sense of difference isn’t something to be scared of. It’s something to be curious about. And if you don’t understand, you just need to ask. And there are many different ways to say the same idea. So I think that that’s certainly personally one piece of this for me.

When I think about REAL as a tool for civil discourse—which isn’t exactly the language you were using, but it’s certainly what a lot of our schools are saying—we really focus on, and I say all the time, before you teach civil discourse, before expecting civil discourse, you need to teach civility and you need to teach discourse. So we want to build these skills in moments that are not high stakes from an identity perspective.

And we find that so often with civil discourse programming, what happens is you sit students down to have a conversation exploring different viewpoints, and all at once you’re expecting them to master the art of conversation across difference as well as be engaging in the actual conversation itself. And I think that’s just too much to ask from a brain science perspective. We know that.

So we try to do the skills training in a core academic class where students are practicing these skills with content that isn’t super, super high stakes to them personally, so that then they’re able to show up and they kind of have muscle memory ready to go. They have habits and skills to fall back on for moments when things do get tense.

And I will put a pin on this by sharing: at Real, we’re obsessed with data. So yes, I love humans, I love emotions, but we’re also extremely data-driven. And we’ve surveyed about 20,000 students about their experience and how they learn these skills. And there was a ninth grader in Tennessee who said this better than I ever could. She said that what she’s learned from real discussions in her English class is that it’s possible to disagree with somebody’s idea, not their whole entire identity.

Nate McClennen: Hmm.

Liza Garoznik: Which to me was just such a broad way of thinking about it. And you can imagine that if a student is developing, if a learner’s developing, that kind of mindset within core academics, they can show up in a conversation in their community in a totally different way than if they didn’t have that skill set and that mindset coming out of their school-day experience.

Nate McClennen: Right. Right. Okay. Another second mic drop, I think, is this idea of disagreeing with ideas and not identity as a way of increasing ability to discourse, and then civil discourse. I really appreciate also this idea of teaching discourse before civil discourse, right? Just teaching people how to communicate across things that may feel mundane, whatever it is, the topic in social studies class or history class or literature in English, et cetera, et cetera. So it feels safe for students. So if students feel like they belong, all these fundamental foundational pieces that we know are important for students to be motivated and to learn, et cetera.

When you’re implementing, do you find it often—it feels obvious that it probably is humanities-focused—but are you having any traction in, say, science class or other technical-skills classes? What does that look like?

Liza Garoznik: Yeah, so it’s really interesting. When I go to a school and I work with a full staff, I often find that it’s math or science teachers who come up to me with tears in their eyes. And what they say to me is, “I’ve been teaching for 25 years. I’ve been teaching for 30 years. I have never had any kind of tool around structuring collaboration. I’ve been told to make my class more collaborative, but I don’t have any way of measuring the skills associated with that.”

So I will say that there’s absolutely an appetite. But from a change-management perspective, I mean, we’ve worked with a hundred schools, so I’ve developed a real kind of point of view on what works from a change-management perspective. Our idea is—do you remember, I’m not exactly sure when you grew up, but when I grew up in the ’90s, schools had computer labs.

Nate McClennen: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Liza Garoznik: Computer labs, learning how to write our basic code, or you’d go in and it was in front of the old DOS computer and you typed in your code, 10, 20, 30, 40.

Nate McClennen: Absolutely.

Liza Garoznik: And Oregon Trail taught you hand-eye coordination, right? And Typing Tutor taught you how to learn. You got scored in words per minute. Like, it was a phenomenon. And then once you learned those skills, you used those skills everywhere in your life. Like I would go home and get on AOL Instant Messenger and start using my typing skills to talk to my seventh-grade crush, right?

And what I think a lot about is, computer labs weren’t just fun. They were actually an answer to schools looking ahead at the future in the ’90s and saying the future is pretty uncertain, but personal computing feels like a revolution that’s here to stay, and we need to develop a very clear strategy for how to equip our students with the skills they’re going to need to use computers. Therefore, we’re building computer labs, and there’ll be explicit instruction and assessment in things like typing.

And the way I think about it is: schools need the conversation lab today. And I’m not saying conversation lab like this can only happen in a certain room in a school. What I’m saying is that the same way that in the ’90s schools said, let’s step back, let’s think about how to get every student in this school trained and assessed in this key skill set, and then expect that that skill set will transfer throughout the rest of their experience, that’s the kind of thinking that I think we need school leaders to take with the same kind of conversation skills.

So for us, what that has looked like is we embed primarily in existing core academic classes, usually English or social studies. We do that in year one, and then in year two there’s often transfer and training for the rest of the teachers and staff around common language and shared routines that they can use. But the idea really is that those English or history teachers, whoever the school has appointed, those are the folks who are trained in the research-based pedagogy. They are the ones who are responsible for explicit instruction and assessment of all of these skills. So not sometimes conversation can be everywhere and nowhere on a campus, and we’ve really tried to locate it in a very specific place.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and it feels like, if scale is important—which I think both you and I agree it is—this is an important human skill that individuals need. Embedding it in existing structures rather than adding it on is gonna be critical, right? It has to be part of something that they already do, but this is a way to do it better, so I appreciate that.

I was thinking about knowledge and content. And I have heard across the landscape the sense that especially Generation Alpha—and that’s the term that I use—

Liza Garoznik: Yeah.

Nate McClennen: And then Gen Z right behind them, a little bit older—that they can be good at talking to one another, meaning they’re willing to talk, but sometimes it’s knowledge-empty, right? So they are willing to defend an idea, but it’s vacuous. How does the REAL framework incorporate this idea that you actually need to know what you’re talking about in order to have a conversation with someone? And that doesn’t mean you’re arguing; it doesn’t mean it’s like speech and debate where you’re arguing something, but at least you have to have some understanding. And how does that play a role in the REAL framework?

The REAL Framework & Teaching Discussion Skills

Liza Garoznik: It’s such a good question. I am unapologetically committed to pretty high standards around this. And I understand the challenge. There’s a big, big challenge to be solved in that Gen Alpha and Gen Z students don’t necessarily have a lot of shared cultural context, since they’re living in such individually curated digital worlds that when they come together, sometimes they talk about these microcultures that only some of them know. And so there is a big question around how do you build shared content and context?

What I will say is that REAL plugs into existing course content, but what it does is things like—take E, for example. E stands for excerpt, which we tell students is a fancy word. It means take a little bit of something bigger. But it really has two subskills. The first is excerpting with efficiency. So that’s the idea that when you’re gonna share an idea, you need to have some evidence to back it up, and you need to not just have evidence. You need to be ready to direct everybody to your evidence. And that means not just saying, “Oh yeah, there’s the part in the book when…” or like, “Oh yeah, that speech about…” It means going and finding the specific line. So encouraging that level of close reading.

And then—I don’t know if anybody else, any listeners, were former humanities teachers, you’re going to know this well—for me, one of my biggest pet peeves was the quote drop, which was when students read a quote from the text out loud as if nobody else has ever read the text, even though everybody has, and then they just kind of stop, right? And they wait for somebody else to pick up the conversation.

So part two of excerpting is actually excerpting with editorial, where the idea is you help them care. You help your fellow students understand why you chose this quote. Why does it connect to the prompt? What did it make you think about? And just building a simple habit like that every time you’re using a specific reference deepens the level of engagement with any kind of topic. And pretty quickly, once you habitualize that in a conversation, kids start asking follow-up questions when both of those pieces aren’t present. And we find that that is a really effective lever to help students who otherwise sometimes exist in this very fast and sometimes superficial kind of pitter-patter across big ideas. It helps them pause and go deeper.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I appreciate that. So from excerpt, you have with efficiency—making sure that you’re talking about it with evidence, but obviously not talking forever, and directing to the evidence—and then with editorial, so that they have their own context and not just the quote drop, as I’m sure many of our listeners have experienced, and probably we’ve all done it ourselves at one point or another. I’m quite sure. I know I have, at least.

Okay, so that helps me understand where the content sits in. And I think that continues to be important, especially in the conversation around—if we take it back up to 50,000 feet, where I started—this idea of durable skills becoming really, really popular, and there is a danger. So for example, in New York right now, they’ve dropped Regents exams as a requirement for all public school students. Some will still take it, and they’ve said the portrait of a graduate, a New York graduate, is gonna replace that. We’re starting to see some editorials saying, “Oh, that’s a watered-down version of academics. That’s not really important.” But what I’m hearing from you is you’re training and developing a durable skill around this communication and discussion while continuing to enhance and amplify all the content and skills that they’ve learned in their core classes. Is that kind of a summary of the way you’re describing it?

Liza Garoznik: Yes, absolutely. And specifically, just to put a nail into what it looks like for us, students are developing a discussion portfolio.

Nate McClennen: Mm-hmm.

Liza Garoznik: So it can last multiple years. Sometimes it’s only one year, but it is a place where all of their work in discussion—their pre-work, their note-taking during discussion, and their reflections afterwards—live, which is a very visible and evidence-based artifact that I think makes so many of these big, beautiful words in portraits of a graduate come to life.

And sometimes—I mean, we’ve heard of schools even, for example, having students go back and approach their discussion portfolio like a primary source and having the kids annotate it for the various portrait skills where they’re demonstrating them. So I think that, to me, absolutely it’s critical that we think not just about what we’re trying to get students to do, but actually what it looks like on a daily basis and what it looks like year over year.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So this ties into assessment, because that was one of the driving questions for this podcast today. Right. I understand that you’re teaching, it sounds like it’s really well received. So I’m gonna ask about assessment on two levels. One is first the assessment of the student themselves. You talked a little bit about discussion portfolio just now and these artifacts and reflection. How are you helping educators see whether or not a learner—and help the learners themselves see whether or not they’re getting better in these particular skills? What does that look like in the program?

Shorts Content

Assessment & Measuring Student Growth

Liza Garoznik: So step one, I think, is helping teachers get very clear about the learning outcomes associated with discussion. So I think discussion can be used in so many different ways. I’ve interviewed thousands of teachers about discussion, and there are kind of teachers who are very invested in using discussion for academic purposes. There are teachers who love the social elements of discussion; they want students to develop their empathy, for example. And then there are teachers who are really interested in the societal application of these skills, who see themselves as nurturing citizens in their classroom.

So really helping teachers tease apart what learning outcomes are you looking for in this particular discussion, and why, is the starting point. And we kind of have a whole framework around that. But helping teachers get clear is important because otherwise teachers try to do everything in every discussion for every child.

Nate McClennen: Ah, yeah.

Liza Garoznik: Which is impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. And that was a frustration. I mean, the assessment question is why this has taken me 15 years to build.

Nate McClennen: Right, right.

Liza Garoznik: If I didn’t have to solve the assessment piece, this would’ve been done in two years. But assessment is what has kept me up, and really needing to figure out how to solve for that is critical and was step number one.

One of the other pieces of research we have done is really diving into why discussion feels so challenging for kids today. And it’s not just that they’re scared they’re gonna be wrong or that their idea is bad. It’s actually that when they’re engaging in conversation, they’re faced with some other challenges like executive function, attention management, agile thinking, perspective-taking. These are core skills that, if they’re not scaffolded, can sometimes get in the way of a student’s performance during discussion.

So you really need to make sure that in a discussion kids are prepared to be able to do the skills that you’re looking for and that they’re not gonna be struggling with their attention management, for example. So our materials have been developed to help students really focus in on the task at hand, and then that also helps the teacher focus.

And the last thing I’ll say is that, to me, the other thing I realized pretty early on was that there were a lot of students who might have the excerpt with efficiency skill or the excerpt with editorial skill. They also might sit through a class discussion and not say a word.

Nate McClennen: Hmm.

Liza Garoznik: And the reason they’re not saying a word might have to do with the fact that they might not think that they’re being listened to when they talk. Or they might not feel a sense of belonging, they might not trust their peers. So we’re very invested in measuring sense of belonging alongside growth in academic skills. Because what we know is that if students don’t feel as if they belong, then they’re not gonna be able to demonstrate these skills.

So when we think about assessment, it sounds very complicated, but we’ve worked hard on these indices that measure multiple things at once. But it’s really thinking about what is going on in discussion from a student perspective, clarity from a teacher perspective, and then from an administrator perspective, you need to have visibility into the student experience in these discussions so that you’re then able to direct future PD as necessary.

Nate McClennen: Right. Right. It feels like there’s some foundational work that you’ve incorporated in, and we talk about a lot as the sort of elements of motivation. And you hit on one of them, which is that they have to feel like they belong, they have to have self-efficacy, meaning—and you’ve talked about this—they have the skill to do it.

Liza Garoznik: Yep.

Nate McClennen: They have to have some sort of choice and some sort of agency in that, and see purpose, right? So these are all these pieces of motivation. It feels like you’re tapping into those as foundational. If the kid doesn’t feel like they belong, they could have all the skills in all four of the elements of the REAL model and still won’t use them. So that’s important.

And then, as we think about this assessment, have you started to—I guess I’m curious how technology might play a role here. Have you had students record their conversations with one another and then reflect on those based on the model?

Liza Garoznik: Yes. I mean, we absolutely have. Kids love watching game tape. Game tape takes a really long time, so I don’t know that that’s a scalable intervention beyond a day or two.

Nate McClennen: Right, right.

Liza Garoznik: Though it’s certainly fun. And younger students love watching older students they know from the hallways. But to me, that’s the really big and exciting frontier here, Nate: how do we assess these skills at scale? We know that society needs them. I was pumped about the announcement that came out last week from ETS and Carnegie and really starting to develop assessment tools around the skills for the future.

And my hope is that something like Real Discussion offers a proven ground-level framework against which technology can be built, that is based in what we know about the human experience of discussion and what’s developmentally appropriate for a second grader versus a sixth grader versus an eighth grader versus a 10th grader.

Nate McClennen: Right. Yeah. And I could see that your program and the model, if you incorporate, say, an AI partner along with that, and a student can then—instead of game tape, which takes a lot of time—they actually get the report back. They see excerpts. My daughter plays soccer, and they do a lot of video, and they can pull out the highlights from exactly the video, and she can go and look at any game—this is at the collegiate level—and look at any game, and then she can see where she interacted with the ball, right? So I can imagine that in the future, probably the near future, there are some possibilities for your organization to be able to tap into some of that, either in partnership or in work you’re doing on your own.

Okay, so now that’s assessment of the students and the framework. What about broader assessment of the program’s success? You talked about that you’re data-driven. You like data. You and I both agree on that. I think it’s really important to measure efficacy. What are you learning from the broader implementation? How do you know it’s successful, other than the feel-good stories, which—I think those are good—but what other data are you collecting to help understand efficacy?

Liza Garoznik: Yes. I mean, I think the thing that was the most important thesis for me to prove was that these skills are teachable.

Nate McClennen: Yep.

Liza Garoznik: And the good news is—because I think there’s this question of, are conversation skills a given? Are they nature or nurture? And for me, I really wanted to set out to prove that they’re teachable. And I feel as if we have seen that at this point, across a hundred schools. They are teachable. And that gives me so much hope. These skills are teachable. We just need to teach them. So that’s takeaway number one.

I think also, there’s nothing better than teachers loving PD. And we have taken so much care to design PD, and people routinely say, “I’ve never been to PD like this. This is the best PD of my career.” I mean, it’s funny, I had a history department lead who didn’t even—when I asked him kind of like, what was your experience about Real Discussion?—he told me nothing about Real Discussion in the classroom. What he said is, “My teachers didn’t complain, and they said it was a good use of their time. Thank you.”

And so it’s interesting to me because when I think about what does success look like, yes, I want these skills to be measured, absolutely, and confirmed. But I also wanna make sure that we’re serving teachers because I believe so deeply in both the importance of teaching, but also the real challenges that teachers face right now. And I’m so attached to the teacher experience that that has been a piece that has mattered immensely in the build so far, and I think will continue to do so.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and probably there’s some sense of engagement. I often find that professional development that people can contextualize to their own lives is really resonant with teachers. So not only are they learning a skill for what they can work with in their classrooms, but they can reflect on, hmm, this is helpful for me to have better conversations and to have communication across difference because, as we know, in any school there are always differences. There are tensions and factions and all these kinds of pieces.

So, all right, as we’re nearing the end, I wanna think about a couple different things. So number one, just one or two practical, low-lift strategies—things that, I mean, you have tons of resources. We’ll put them in the show notes. People can go to your website and partner with you, et cetera. But what are the teasers? What are a couple things that teachers and/or administrators could think about that they could implement, say, next week as a small tool?

Practical Tools & Future of Real Discussion

Liza Garoznik: Okay. I’ll give you a micro tool for next week, and then I’m gonna give you a macro one that I think will be hard.

Nate McClennen: Okay.

Liza Garoznik: Exciting for teachers. The micro one is something called in-real-time notes. One of the things I learned when I was building Real Discussion is that the K-12 literature wasn’t gonna be enough, that there wasn’t actually research on what I was trying to figure out. So I looked beyond K-12 into places where I know conversation skills are taught, like business schools or medical schools or law schools.

And one of the things that I found was this finding out of a group at MIT around social physics, and they’d tracked idea flow in meetings for a long time. What they discovered was that the best insights came from the watercooler conversation after the meeting, not during the meeting itself.

Right. So from that study, what I said was, wait a second. I only have kids for 45 minutes. I gotta figure out how to make the watercooler happen mid-discussion so that we surface that insight as fast as we can. The result is a tool called in-real-time notes, where in any discussion, make the students stop—you can do this in a meeting too; it works just as well with adults—make the students stop after a given amount of time, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, five minutes. Make them write down the name of a peer and summarize an idea they heard from that peer. And then here’s the kicker: write down how that idea changed or challenged your thinking.

What that does, in a single move, is not only increase active listening because students anticipate that they’re going to have to do this, but it also reinforces intellectual humility and that mind-changing is a part of learning. So use in-real-time notes. They are the number-one hack. Whether you are doing this in terms of active listening and circle time in a second-grade classroom, or whether you’re with 10th graders who are preparing for AP History in 11th grade, in-real-time notes works like a charm. So that is the micro-level intervention.

At a macro level, we were talking about PD earlier, and I’ll say that this fall I ran what’s been the most meaningful professional development experience of my life. And what we did was—I was feeling a lot as if schools were moving forward with AI policies without first creating space to develop AI philosophy and to be thinking about why they were using AI and what that actually looked like instead of just how they were going to use it.

And this felt particularly acute to me in humanities classrooms, where the rollout would often be, “You need to use AI in this many lessons over the course of the semester. Here’s your login to the platform,” that kind of thing. And humanities teachers and leaders were feeling very much like, “But wait. This is like an existential crisis for me. This runs counter to everything I believe in.” And as a result, I just kept hearing this in the ether.

And I created a cohort this fall to really name it. I’m a big Brené Brown fan. I love the idea of creating essentially a processing space for humanities folks to come together and ask the question, what does humanities instruction look like in an AI world? And there were tears, there was laughter. But ultimately what we arrived at was a manifesto that’s been co-written by a group of educators from across the country and that has both kind of big ideas and then concrete practices to consider for reading, writing, discussion, and the teacher experience.

So if anyone out there is looking for a summer read, check out our manifesto because I think it certainly relates to today’s topics and will reinforce the importance of humanity in our humanities classrooms. But it’s a good starting place.

Nate McClennen: Love it. We have a macro tool, a micro tool. I love the in-real-time notes. I think I’m gonna try that at our staff meeting on Monday. We’ll see how it works. So I’ll report back.

And this macro tool is great. This idea that we’re seeing across the country people adopting MagicSchool or whatever the different platforms are because it’s easy, it deals with security and safety and all those things, but they’re just AI tools. And then they get embedded in a set of docs that says, this is what you can and can’t do. But your argument is, hey, we need to think about our AI philosophy first.

So now, for those of you who are listening out there and are building AI policies or have them, we’ve got two additions for you to think about from this conversation that Liza has suggested. One is AI philosophy, and then the second is what are the parallel human skills that are being developed while you’re embedding and implementing your AI philosophy. So that feels like a good place to sort of wrap.

So from your perspective, you’ve given us some suggestions. Let’s talk big picture one more time. Where are you headed with this? What’s next? You’ve spent 15 years, probably a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, making this thing work. You have a hundred school partners. I’m sure you want more partners, which hopefully some of the listeners will reach out and ask for. What are your other big ideas? What else is in your head, other big ideas, things you’re thinking about? Where do you wanna take this?

Liza Garoznik: I mean, I’m really interested in how multidimensional conversation truly is, and I think that we have started solving for it. I hope that we’re able to embed conversation-skills instruction into every school in the country. That is certainly a goal. And I think what’s up next for me is attention management.

I think that thinking about what we need in order to be able to be present with each other is something that needs to be solved and is similarly something that, like conversation, is truly multidimensional and is something that we’re going to need to explicitly teach, practice, and measure in schools. And I think that once we do that also, we’re gonna be a heck of a lot better at not just talking with each other, but also listening, which, as we know from the very opening of this podcast, is my default mode. And it’s something that I think is sometimes a lost art in today’s world.

Nate McClennen: I totally agree. I think maybe it’s because I’m doing a lot of podcasts these days, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to become a much better listener than talker. And I love the quote you just said. I just jotted it down in my notes: what we need to be present with one another, right? Like, what are those skills to actually be present in a conversation? And relating to this attention-management idea, where we know research is now showing that our attention spans, for all of us—not just young people—have decreased because we’re scrolling more, we’re flipping through Netflix shows, we’re reading faster. Students aren’t able to read entire texts anymore—or sorry, I should say, they are able to read entire texts; they choose not to read the entire text. And so then we’re adapting around that rather than saying, okay, we need to think about what it is we need to do to have and be present with one another.

And I think the REAL model really helps with that. So, Liza, super interesting conversation. We could go on for a long time. I wanna just summarize a couple things that I felt were interesting, and I think I’m kind of following your framework, so this is pretty interesting. I have a meta experience going on right now that I am thinking about.

So going back to the beginning, this idea of authentic interaction and connection is really important, and we need to explicitly teach those skills. And before we teach the civil discourse, communication across hard differences, we need to just teach discourse first as a way to connect and share humanity with one another.

And I love the one reflection you had a student say to you: we can disagree with ideas, but don’t disagree with identity. Think about idea disagreement. And that you’re addressing this idea of a conversation crisis, and how do we get into these conversation labs across all schools where it’s just the norm that humans can have conversations with one another.

And I think I would finally say that, like almost every durable skill—all durable skills—whenever I go and work with a district or a school and they’re talking about portraits of a graduate, I really try to have them reflect on this is about portraits of humans and the skills we need as humans. Right? And discussion and discourse that you’re helping elevate and amplify and teach to young people—it’s good for those that are actually teaching it as well, because we’re all losing that art in the age of technology embeddedness, and we know we’re all spending more time on it.

So, really appreciate the work you’re doing for the world, the work you’re doing with students, the work you’re doing with adults. And Liza, just wish you the best of luck. And listeners, make sure you jump into the show notes to get more information. A lot of great resources on Liza’s website. So thank you, Liza, for your time today, and thank you listeners for listening in.

Liza Garoznik: Thanks, Nate.

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Guest Bio

Liza Garonzik

Liza Garonzik is the Founder and CEO of R.E.A.L.® Discussion, a research-informed model dedicated to explicitly teaching, measuring, and celebrating face-to-face communication skills in K-12 schools. Drawing on a decade of classroom-based iteration, Liza developed R.E.A.L.® to address what she terms the “Conversation Crisis”—a growing struggle among students to engage in productive dialogue due to an increasingly polarized and screen-centric world. Her expertise, rooted in her prior roles as a teacher, student life administrator, and education entrepreneur, focuses on making conversation a teachable discipline within the academic core, strengthening skills like critical thinking, inquiry, connection, and emotional awareness in context, not in isolation.

Liza is the author of Conversation Comeback: A Teacher’s Guide to Class Discussion in a Distracted, Divided World and Conversation Comeback: A Schoolwide Guide for Discussion in a Distracted, Divided World, and she has partnered with over 100 schools since R.E.A.L.®’s launch in 2021. Her work provides a comprehensive structure, including shared language, student materials, and assessment tools, to help schools align their mission-critical goals—such as Portrait of a Graduate or competency-based learning—with daily classroom practice. She advocates for educators to become “oracy and discussion skills experts,” ensuring that students are equipped with the foundational human skills necessary to lead and collaborate effectively in an AI-powered future.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn
• R.E.A.L. Discussion
• Liza Garonzik on Teaching Tomorrow’s Human Skills
• Grade Discussion Skills, Not Discussions
• Humanities and Humanity in an AI World: An Educator’s Manifesto
• Conversation Comeback