 Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below: In this episode, we chat with Angie Freese who is an educator, author, mom, and founder of the Meant for More Collaborative. Angie shares her transformative vision for creating equitable and inclusive learning environments, emphasizing the importance of focusing on strengths instead of deficiencies. Coming from a family of educators, Angie now travels around the country, working closely with educators and administrators. Her joy is in helping them deepen their understanding of strengths that they already have, and apply them to create positive learning environments and real change. Angie’s recent book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection applies her years of experience and insights to practical classroom settings. The Big Dream Angie’s big dream for education is to reclaim the dignity of the teaching profession and elevate the people within it. She envisions designing sustainable learning environments where people notice what’s working, why it’s working, and how to apply those principles to other areas. Angie dreams of schools and systems that honor and dignify the individuals within—spaces of inclusion and authenticity where each learner can receive the quality of education they deserve. Mindset Shifts Required To build these inclusive and authentic spaces, Angie believes it all needs to start with a conversation that looks at the inequities that exist for both the adults and the students. To start this discussion, Angie shares how we need to value the adults who facilitate learning experiences in our classroom, realizing that most are fierce, brave, and bold—they’re competent and committed to changing schools and education for the better. A key mindset shift in all this is realizing that no one person is responsible for carrying the emotional or organizational weight of this transformation—everyone is part of it, and everyone has important strengths to create real change. Action Steps Angie believes that educators want to create change and do what’s best for students. But, it can be overwhelming to implement change in a system that isn’t always set up for your success. So, here are three key action steps any educator can implement today: Step 1: Start with yourself. Spend some time reflecting on your unique gifts and talents, and how you can cultivate these into strengths. Embrace your authentic self and give yourself grace in the process. Step 2: Foster collaborative inquiry. We sometimes hold back from asking questions because the system constrains or stifles creative problem-solving. But educators can do anything they put their minds to, especially when collaborating effectively together! Create opportunities for meaningful dialogue and collaborative inquiry within your educational community. Use practical strategies, such as sentence stems for curiosity, to facilitate empathetic and productive conversations. Step 3: Believe in value, not just potential. Each person in the education system already has inherent value and worth, and they already possess strengths and skills. Identify them, recognize them, and raise them up. By believing in the value of every person, we can rehumanize our profession, rejuvenating educator’s passion and focusing on the good we can do rather than the negatives of a faulty system. Challenges? Angie believes that the biggest challenge is not the belief that it can be done—educators know, we know what we’re capable of. Instead, the biggest challenge is the shared commitment to implement the things that we’ve said we’d do. The challenge is acting on agreed-upon behaviors and practices that will move the needle on collective goals. This is why Angie encourages educators to start with self and start with strengths—it’s honoring where you are and what you can contribute to this collective effort. One Step to Get Started For educators who want to start the journey to strengths-based education, Angie recommends one simple step to get started: engage in a reflective practice. Begin by looking inward and understanding your own strengths and areas for growth. You can identify one strength to amplify and share with your team, using it as a starting point for a conversation about how to foster a culture of collaborative inquiry and continuous improvement. This builds confidence and empowers you and those around you to take necessary next steps for growth. Stay Connected You can connect with Angie on Instagram at Meant for More or via LinkedIn. To dig deeper into what we discussed in this episode, grab a copy of Angie’s insightful and practical book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Angie’s sharing reproducibles from her book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 191 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Soraya Ramos. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so excited you're here. 0:00:08 - Soraya Ramos Hi Lindsay, Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons I'm really excited for we were talking about, before we hit record like all of the ways that our paths have like almost intersected and I think our work aligns very closely as well. So really excited for our listeners to hear from you today, and I just want to know if there's anything that folks should keep in mind as they are engaging with this podcast episode today. 0:00:31 - Soraya Ramos I thought about this one and I think one of the main things for me that I try to remember is that I'm always a learner and that I'm always learning and that I don't always have it or need to know everything or need to have the answer. So I think that, being really forgiving to myself and gracious, I like I'm always learning, we're always learning and it's just part of like life. We're always evolving, making mistakes and then learning from them and coming back from it. So I want to, like you know, hold whatever I say now at this point in time might, might evolve in the next years or decades of my life. So I'm really excited to capture where I'm at right now with you. 0:01:09 - Lindsay Lyons I absolutely love that framing because just this morning I was looking back from like four years ago. I wrote a blog post and I'm like hmm, wouldn't, have done it the same way Would have changed that Like that's so true. I love the snapshot in time idea. 0:01:20 - Soraya Ramos It's true, it's true. I think it's what we want to do with kids too, right, we're always. They're always evolving and physically growing and like we, see the difference. 0:01:32 - Lindsay Lyons So, um, I'm glad that that you, that it resonates with you as well, deeply, yes, thank you for that framing, and I think it'll also be, um, really nice for listeners to hear it, just because I think in our days we can often be unforgiving of ourselves, and so it's a, it's a nice reminder. We're in it together, we're all learning. I love it, and so I guess kind of to think about the continuation of this, like the place we're all trying to go as we learn. I like to ground this or all episodes really and Dr Bettina loves the words around freedom dreaming, where she says you know their dreams, rounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know what is that big dream that? 0:02:09 - Soraya Ramos you hold for education. I love her work. I will say that this question got me thinking of like what my freedom dreaming was. Maybe 10 years ago is slightly different, but still similar to the core. But one thing that came to mind around what is that dream that I have for kids, for my younger self, for the kids that come after me, is that all children, all young learners, get to access high quality learning experiences that help them feel like they can shine and that they can tap into their brilliance and their their genius that's so good. 0:02:49 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and it really I love that there's like aspects of you know, goldie Muhammad's work in there and just like that the genius is part of all kids, right, this is not something that we as educators give to them, but like this is there and we're just like helping to cultivate and helping to shine and like I love that framing absolutely, and I think you're right. 0:03:08 - Soraya Ramos Like it's like where did I get all this from? I'm like I've learned from people who have, who have taught me right, or that I've learned in my roles in the past, and, um, I think one of the things that that would add to that is like how do we allow kids to just be kids, to learn to fumble and then get back up without them feeling like there's some kids have higher stakes than others and I'm just curious of like how do we just have them all feel like they can play and have fun? 0:03:39 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. That's, that's so, so good. Thank you for that. And and I think so, sometimes we maybe lose sight of the things, the reasons that we kind of get into education and that knowing that kids have this genius, they have this light, they have they, they should be able to be kids all this stuff and we get into like the nitty gritty and all the things on our plate right. And so I'm wondering if there are specific mindset shifts that folks kind of go through to be able to do the work that you do, for instance, around kind of equitable assessment and all of those pieces. Are there things that we may be no going in lose sight of along the way and need to really kind of reframe our thinking around that you've noticed either people be successful with or that you would just advise folks just entering the work to think about? 0:04:31 - Soraya Ramos My own mindsets have. I've had to go through my own and I'm still going through those shifts now and like really believing in those. I will say some of those mindset shifts that have inspired me in the last few years have come from the work at the National Equity Project around liberatory design, and I think they were able to provide a language to what I already felt to be true and some of those mindsets it's all about. I think the arc of it all is that it's human centered, that we're centering anything, any experience the design of a summer school program, the design of an assessment system on the state level or even a local level is that we're really truly centering humans and putting them at the center. So I would say one of the things that the Libertarian Design Framework says is one of the mindsets is building relational trust is how do we invest in relationships with intention and especially across difference, and we have to honor people's stories and practice empathetic listening. So if I'm going into your home, into your community, what is my role is to to be there as humble as I can, to listen to your expertise, because that is your lived experience. So I think that that's a really powerful piece that I always try to hold is that we're not the I am not the knowledge holder. I am here to listen and I am in your home, your home, and that is in my culture. There's something really important about I respect where, when I'm, when I'm here and you're in your space. So that's one build a relational trust. I think a second one for me is practicing self-awareness, is understanding like what mirror is in front of me, who am I and how do these experiences that I grew up with influence the way I see things, the way I'm understanding an issue, and our perspectives impact our practice. So I think that practice of awareness is constant and so necessary for me, because sometimes I feel like, oh, i'm'm the hero in this story and I'm gonna, and I'm gonna save, and I'm gonna save these kids, or like when I was, you know, entering teaching um, but it wasn't. It wasn't that no one needs saving um. So self-practicing self-awareness. And then I would say I have a lot that I could share, but I'm going to keep it short. But the one I really feel like that I haven't mentioned is embracing complexity, that the equity challenges are really complex and they're messy and they stay open for possibility. And one thing that I have the cards in front me and one thing that it says here in the card is that powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it, and so I think that's where sometimes we put pressure on our leaders to have the answer, that one right way. We actually respect people who speak with a lot of confidence in that one solution when it's actually a lot more complex. And how do we do this together to figure it out with the humans that we're trying to serve at the center? So those are, I think, some of the top, but I could keep going, but I'll stop there. So I would say building relational trust, practicing self-awareness and embracing complexity. 0:08:07 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, all of those are so good. And also just tying it to that liberatory design piece, I think is really important and food for thought for folks who are listening now and are like, oh, I haven't heard of that or I want to dig deeper into that. Like there's richness there to dig into. And I love the idea of the last piece really reminds me of both the complexity piece around, like adaptive leadership and recognizing that it is really messy, and also I think you're speaking to the like a shared leadership element as well of right like the leaders are not necessarily the people who have admin titles right, they're the people in the community and the students, right, and the people at the center who who, as you said, have a lived experience and are really informing the change. And to uh, think through how to navigate so many voices when we're talking about all the students and all the families is messy but so worth it, and so I appreciate that framing and that grounding in those, in those three specifically. 0:09:03 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, thank you, thanks for summarizing that in in such a in those three specifically. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for summarizing that in such a nice way. 0:09:09 - Lindsay Lyons I just love connecting it to like. Sometimes I'll use these like leadership reasons. My background is in leadership education and so I think through like things I've said in the podcast before. 0:09:17 - Soraya Ramos I'm like, right, here's the through line, right it's true, there's like these mindsets yeah, it could keep going on, because I'm also a leadership nerd and I'm like learning all these things. And how do we create a culture? Right, how does our leadership impact the culture that we're trying to build here? And I think these elements, these mindset shifts, have to be in there. Um, because we have to live it so that it can. It's almost contagious, it's part of the space that you come into. Yeah. 0:09:45 - Lindsay Lyons I like the idea of contagious. That's good, that's really good. So I guess, thinking about that right, like what does that maybe look like? Feel like what's you know the actions that we, we take to kind of cultivate that and and and live that out and make that contagious and I mean I think about the work that you've done with equitable assessment and like systems of assessment, I mean that's, that's really big work. So thinking about maybe a leader or a community who is like oh, this is such a cool idea and it feels big, it feels messy, it feels like like how, how, really, how do I get started and what does that potentially look like? Could you describe for us a little bit about those like brave actions required to get there? 0:10:29 - Soraya Ramos That's a really good question and I think that it's. I'm always in pursuit of figuring that out. This is a tangent which we can include or not in the podcast. But recently I started working the second, the second job with my mom and it's called. It's a delivery service and we're shoppers at a store and we're shoppers at the same store every single time. And so I started doing it as like a side gig on the weekends and just trying it out with my mom. And what I realized is like every single time that I went into the store and you let me know if I could, if I could tell you, but it's one, it's one of my favorite. So I go in there and I'm like I know people have such a good experience at Target and it's like a very much like a good experience, and so, but going in there as a shopper, I noticed that there was a pattern. I'm like why are the workers so disgruntled and unhappy? Is it just that one location? Is it just that one person? That one day, and I started noticing a pattern in the ones in my area where it's like no, I think there's something going on in the culture of this company. What is going on that? Are we treating our, how are people being treated while they work here? And it's almost and again it was very contagious and like my experience as a consumer versus a like kind of a shopper right beside these employees was a lot different and not as joyful either. So I think that also communicates into schools. Right, like, culture is everywhere. When we go into a place of business, when we go into a place of education and I know that this is something that you know many educators in the field have already said like the first, the first signal of what a culture is at a school is when you step in the front door and you and you experience what it feels like to be in that space. It's, it's like an energy thing. I don't know much about energy, but I could feel it. And right, it's like um. When you, for example, and no one really greets you, um, or when they do, it's it's kind of like what do you need? Um versus good morning, how are you Welcome to our school? You know, here's our protocol, sign in. And it's a different um experience when you go into these spaces. So I would just say, like, what is the culture in this, in this space? And so I would say how do you make the? I think your question was how do we start? What are the brave actions that we need to make sure is we really need to be the, the creators of that, of creators of that energy, right, like, if a school is off that morning, like how can I go in there and try to? I'm not gonna change it, but I can say just remind them like hey, I'm new to this space, what do you wanna show for your school and your community? But one of the things that the brave actions that needs to happen is the way that I work with other people, whether it's building an assessment system at a state level or building an assessment task with a teacher is what kind of, what kind of relationship are we building around my responsibilities, your like and our accountability to each other? I think the reciprocity is a word that I've used a lot in the work I've done with in the past few years is it's not transactional but it's reciprocal. Is, you know, if we do these for these things for each other, without keeping tab on what it is right, like tip for tat? And so one of the brave actions is really holding that reciprocity part. The other part is recognizing oppression, like always being aware that power can always come in, and being able to like balance that out and calling it out. I think there's something really important about calling it out. If we're gonna partner with each other, let's talk about what the power dynamic is or isn't. So I would say that's super brave action to mention it, because it's an uncomfortable and fearful conversation, especially if you're working with teachers all the way up to superintendents or state commissioners. So that's the brave action. So I'm thinking about another one. I think one is knowing the culture and like reading that Working from a place of reciprocity the one that's really challenging and it goes against maybe the way that our country works is and our system works is we need to come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. I think when we're trying to build systems or create solutions for education, we think that there aren't enough, like we're actually in some way conditioned or convinced in some ways, like some of us may be able to note why, but that there's always enough resources. This is really hard for me to actually understand it right, because in my own life it's like well, I grew up with very scarce resources, financial resources. So I think like understanding, like there are resources out there. We may not have access to them right now, but we know that they're out there. That's the thing. They just may not be right in front of us, and so I think, knowing that no one's here to steal my job, we're not trying to do the work of another organization in competition with them. It's we're all playing in the same sandbox and in service of the same communities, people, learners, etc. So those are just a few that come to mind, and I'm sure there's more profound other actions, but those are actually super hard. It's like the power, the power piece. How do I work with others in ways that are loving and actually honest and authentic, without my secret agenda, and while also knowing that, like, the resources are real, there's some. There's a perceived notion that there's scarcity out there, but there really is an abundance, and maybe the abundance comes from a different type of resource, not not the financial one. Maybe it, the abundance, is the community that we work in and that's our superpower. So that is where I'll leave it, cause I think that was a lot, but and I'm sure I'm sorry that it's a little bit scattered, but it was my best attempt to try to put them into words- it was perfect. 0:17:02 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this, and I think I mean even just the abundance versus scarcity. I love what you said at the very end of you know, maybe the resource is just something that's not financial Absolutely. Source is just something that's not financial Absolutely. I mean we even from. So the last few years I taught, I worked at a school with 100% students who were learning English at the high school level, and so a lot of times in like multilingual learner education spaces, people like, oh, you know that the scarcity mindset of we need to build English language proficiencies right, and it's like, look at the abundance of linguistic knowledge and proficiency in other languages. I mean some of these kids are trilingual. Like what on earth? This is nuts. Like that is incredible. And we just don't think of the abundance frame, we think only in scarcity. And so I love that you mentioned like it can be financial but it can be otherwise, that we think about these things and what a huge mindset shift to be able to to get to that side of abundance. 0:18:03 - Soraya Ramos And I love that example that you're mentioning, because that's where we miss it. We're conditioned to believe that these other metrics are actually more important than the richness in the culture, in the, in the multilingualness, in like the community, that that they come from, their worlds or realities is. It's like that's where that, that there's richness, there, that we I think the last part I'll say is like I don't know where this fits in the questions you asked me, but there's a, an element of critical consciousness that it's like almost seeing behind the like someone's pulling the curtain, that like these assessments are important but I could see through them that they are problematic, that they can cause harm, that they're imperfect, that they're a measure, but not the measure of our kids and our and our young people. So I think that's where I'm, my role is like how do we get people to see, recognize oppression? Right, but like within? That is like how does this assessment work within that Like it's not the ultimate truth? And, like you said, let's not ignore these beautiful like humans that we get to work with every day, and then their multilingualness and get them to shine. 0:19:15 - Lindsay Lyons I just want to double down on that phrase. Like a measure, not the measure, right, yes, and not the ultimate truth. Yeah, we put so much stock into things that we can measure and put numbers or letters on and it's like no, I'm a human child, like this is a person, totally yes, I mean, I'm curious, you've done such powerful work with so many communities. I'm wondering if there's maybe a success story or kind of quote unquote case study that we can use to just illuminate the possible, like what are the great things happening out there and what can we celebrate? 0:19:50 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate that question and it's the success stories. I feel like you don't see it in the moment. I feel like when you work in schools or in education, sometimes it takes years for you to see your impact as a teacher, for example, and then the kids come back, you know, and they let you know like this is the impact you had, or it could take more than five, ten years to see it. But I think in in I've been really fortunate to have this position as like third party kind of uh roles in my in education now. Uh, where I get to support school districts and I have this different viewpoint, a lay of the land where I can, I can kind of see who the players are and what the strategy is and the vision and et cetera. One of the things that I have not done this alone and I think I've been put into really wonderful teams where I've been able to co-construct these different ways of how to assess kids, how to think about assessment in a more human centered way. Um, you might have I believe that some of the previous speakers on this podcast um Ms Rita Harvey and Charlie Brown, they were. They're some of my uh, they're. We started our journey together as assessment design partners. Uh, in new England, and we had, I believe, a lot of really wonderful case studies that we got to see from the teacher level. So we got to travel to different districts across New England and design assessments, performance assessments, with teachers at an individual school, while also working with their superintendents to build a arc of learning around their pd. So that year, for example, what I I think this is um, we're getting to that that success story is what makes it successful is that you had buy-in from the, from the, from the teacher role all the way up to a superintendent role, and the board as well is how do we get everyone on board about around this one thing and that one thing for one district in particular was how do we get everyone on board around performance assessments? And so year one was what is performance assessments? What are we doing? Why don't we bring in students that have worked with our coaches hence me and my other colleagues to come in and share their experiences with a standardized test versus a performance assessment? And so they got. We have this all happened in one particular district in Attleboro Public Schools, and so that was one of the things is we have support from all folks we get to coach in individual schools and they all have design teams. So the admin at the school had already pre-selected some people that they felt were going to be champions of this work. So that was a huge element, while at the same time, we are facilitating meetings with a consortium of superintendents who are all trying to work towards the same goal, which is how do we build an alternative assessment system that we can apply for a waiver for in the state of Massachusetts? So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. We have assistant superintendents supporting us with designing an arc of learning for all teachers in the district around performance assessments year one, and we also have board meetings where that could be like our performance assessment per se, where teachers and students can come in and demonstrate their work. So I would just say like those are some of the levers that this district was able to pull and were super successful because after year two, performance assessments didn't go away. Performance assessments, we went deeper. We said rubrics 101. So part of a performance assessment is a rubric right, like how do we know that you've met? How do you know that you've met the target? So rubrics was like. We noticed that there was. Maybe we needed more literacy around that. How do we build everyone's capacity? So, yeah, every year the learning arc. So everyone was doing the same thing. During those teacher learning days we had multiple opportunities for them to come and present to the consortium and to their boards. So I would just say like those are some of like a really effective leadership moves and decisions that were created in this particular district in Attleboro that we were really proud of. They were so committed and people were not confused around initiatives. It felt like they all knew what we were doing and we were able to reach all teachers within three years around performance assessment. Unfortunately, things were paused because of the pandemic, but the fact that we have such good momentum and people were just like champions and it was like this groundswell of support I remember that's a word that Charlie would mention a lot. We need to get the groundswell of support and I think that was a really powerful thing, instead of it coming down as a requirement. 0:25:01 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, another kind of tied to that shared leadership piece. Right, it doesn't come from the top, it has to be that ground salt. That's so good. There is so much here that I appreciate you have just kind of laid out. I'm thinking of a leader listening who's like how long does it take and what happens each year? You've just laid out what is possible and I just really appreciate that clarity for someone who's kind of new to it. I also want to speak to if someone's unfamiliar with that consortium in Massachusetts, like New York has one as well. But just the idea of schools coming together to say like we can do better than standardized assessment, is this really great way to not do it alone? And so I'm wondering if there is. I don't know if this is speaking to the next question I was going to ask or not, but just thinking about the challenges of the work Sometimes I wonder if it's like oh, we're on our own and kind of this island of we think it would be a great idea to do this, but we don't have a consortium to tap into or something like that. Is there any kind of school model that you've worked with there where it's like they're not part of a larger organization, but they're just choosing to do it because they know it's what's fast and they're going to move forward. 0:26:07 - Soraya Ramos Absolutely. I think there's folks that are connected to a wider net and others are doing it within their own district. I think that it's really helpful when you are part of a group, a consortium, or whether it's a learning group or anything else. I know that there's some here in California as well, where you just get to learn around practice with each other. It's like what are you all doing? Oh, this is how we're choosing to implement graduate profiles right now is a really is a really big thing, and it actually is very trendy to have a graduate profile, or you know these learner outcomes of what we want kids to learn and competencies we want them to have by the time they graduate. But how do you know? And how do you know that? How do if you're doing it right, right, like? A lot of people are like, okay, great, we have really cool posters, now what? So that's where people turn to these communities, where they're like this is how we're learning how to bring this poster to life and it's super beneficial. I'm part of this. I'm really glad that I'm part of this group called Scaling Student Success, and then we get to learn from each other around best practices of how to bring graduate profiles to life and everyone's at a different stage, so there's different groupings of districts. So it is a really cool opt-in opportunity that I've seen on the West Coast. But what about folks that aren't connected outside right Like? We know that this is best practice period and I think that's why they bring some of these districts, bring in third party technical providers, and that's where people like myself come in third party technical providers and that's where people like myself come in and envision learning partners who we may not be creating the space for everyone to come in as a consortium or a learning space, but we are the communicators of oh, you have also shortages with subs. This is actually a trend that's happening across the country and people are actually some of the people are actually very surprised when we tell them that they're like really, I thought we were the only district, oh no, I'm like this is going on across the country. Um, you are not the only one. And how do we get creative so um around like pds, right, if you can't have everyone out on the same time? Like, how do we, how do we create this more flexible uh plan? So I don't know if I kind of lost track of your question, lindsay, but that was perfect. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons I guess are there any other like either challenges that folks have faced and you wanted to talk through, or is there just anything else that you wanted to share before we move to wrap up? 0:28:42 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, okay, so I don't. I'm like I was like thinking, I'm like how honest can I be? And and I think I've realized how naive I've been in most of my career as an, as an educator, and in the best way, like my, my naivete is more of like I don't think people would be capable of doing this or, you know, like we're all in it for the kids and and and it's a very naive way of thinking and and um, one of the things that I realized at a different level of is through, uh, bowman and deal, the, these folks have these, these four frameworks of what it means to be a leader, and one of the frameworks that they say that leaders have to learn how to navigate is the political, is the, and that's like they call it, the jungle, where it's like people have different agendas and people have different ideas of what they want from a project or from a collaboration or whatever it is. And I think that for me has been this language, this world, where I have to think about understanding humans in a different way that the political realm introduces a not so flattering side of of humans and our motivations and and our behaviors, and also attached to people's wellness, right, like if, like they are reflections of who they are internally is kind of what they project at work. So one of the things for me is like how do I read situations, what is being said that isn't being said out loud, and how do I move accordingly? Because sometimes being honest is not the way for me Speaking. Sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, especially when you have power involved. And so that, for me, is something I'm still learning is how do we navigate the political realm and understand humans and not letting it get too personal, like taking it personally is understanding, like what people are and aren't capable of, and knowing who to trust. I think that for me right now is how do I learn to build trust and who to trust in, especially when we're doing this kind of work in education? 0:30:55 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's such an important challenge to name because I think a lot of folks I've certainly been there felt that and I love that you trace the arc of similarly me but going and being like everyone's awesome and for the right reasons. And there is no political agenda, there is, and so I think it reminds me of Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky talk about in their adaptive leadership. Stuff is like naming the stuff, like having an activity as a leader where you kind of sit in the meeting and like, okay, observe what's not being said, like observe where the avoidance is happening, where a joke's being made to deflect, like that kind of thing, Right. And and so it's like that's a cool tool for for folks listening to this episode, like just try it, like try that out and just kind of notice, or invite folks to notice like what is not being said, right, what is being avoided. And I think that's a nice opportunity to kind of, like you said, it might not be that in the moment we shout it out, but it's a nice like jot it on a post-it note, hand it in at the end of the meeting, right, We'll like we'll get there because we should, Absolutely, I agree, yeah, and so I think just to close this out, this is a wonderful conversation. I don't want it to end but I recognize everyone has things to do and I'm sure you have a busy schedule. So what is one thing as we kind of wrap up that listeners have been listening tons of ideas shared but they want to kind of take one next step as they end the episode, kind of going into their day or getting ready for next week or whatever that they can kind of world do. 0:32:33 - Soraya Ramos I want to live in, how do I want it to feel, how do I want it to sound for for myself, for kids, for young people, etc. And how can I be the creator of that? How can I contribute to a world like that? So I think that self-awareness piece goes back to that is, if I'm walking into this meeting, how do I want to walk in, what do I want to contribute in terms of my own energy, my motivations? How is this contributing to the world that I do or don't want? And I think being that is a start and something that can feel like it's a forced, but like how can I be that light, or how can I be that positivity or that understanding mind in the workplace where I don't have to get to the point where I'm disrespecting people and I'm still living by my values? So I think it really begins with the self and the world that you want. So then, how are you going to start being that in that next meeting, in that next, in whatever collaboration you're in? So it's really difficult because we have difficult days, but like, how do I, how do I still stay with, with dignity, right, like dignity and respect is for me really important. So knowing what people's values are and making sure that they're actually living aligned to those values, and catching yourself when you don't, because we're also imperfect, so the misalignment will happen. But just knowing that, like what am I contributing to this world and how can I, you know, be self aware. 0:34:09 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for multiple reasons. One just for the leader lens, but also, like this could be a guiding question for schools, like how do teachers engage with that question? How do students live out that question Right? Like how can we just be in community with one another in alignment with our responses to that question? So good. And so I think the final two questions I have for you one is super fun just could relate to education, but could totally not. So, whatever direction you want to take it, you mentioned, like we're all kind of learning. We're on a lifelong path of learning all the things about life. What is something that you have been learning about lately? 0:34:44 - Soraya Ramos Oh, have been learning about lately. Oh, I have not been learning any hobbies recently, but I think what I'm learning is just my role. As I get, as I'm getting older, my roles are changing in my life and who I take care of, and and and being a caretaker this past month. And for me it's just understanding that, like life will always be lifing, it's always going to be doing what it wants to do. But at the end of the day is, how am I centering myself to and my needs first, so that we're all, not we're all, so that I'm strong enough to care for others when I, when I can and I need to? So I think that's one thing that I'm really learning how to practice, whether it's an acupuncture appointment, whether it's that massage that I've been like thinking about months ago, a walk has been huge. I think learning how to slow down is the biggest lesson for me, because I used to be a runner and it felt like if I didn't do 10 miles, I didn't do anything like it, like it had to feel hard for it to feel like it mattered. And now I'm like a walk and being patient and being in silence, like that's actually hard for me too. So maybe those are some of the lessons that are coming Like. Life is always evolving, my role and my responsibilities are with that too, so how do I always remember myself though? And it could be, and a walk is enough, sufficiency, yeah. 0:36:14 - Lindsay Lyons Everything you said deeply resonates. Thank you for that, and I think, finally, folks are going to just want to get in touch with you or follow your work, so what's the best place to get in touch or see what you're doing? 0:36:25 - Soraya Ramos I am on LinkedIn, so that would be one way. I'm trying to be better at staying on it every single day, but that could be that is one way to reach me as well on LinkedIn, and I would say that's the best way. Like is more reliable way to reach me, so I'm happy to connect with anyone who's out there who'd like to just kind of be thought partners or like if folks are going through similar things that that I shared some of the things on this podcast. I would love to just even having like a mirror or a window into like what are? you experiencing OK, how did you resolve it? Or et cetera. So I would love to get in touch with folks if they're they're willing to. 0:37:02 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Sorry. I thank you so much. This was such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate your time thank you, lindsay. 0:37:08 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate you having us and me and my other colleagues that have also come up in the episode, but thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation. I really appreciate you absolutely. If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
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Leading change is challenging, and resistance is part of the work. To support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I’m turning a blog post I wrote 5 years ago into a podcast episode! Enjoy the (slightly adapted) original blog post below, and check out the podcast episode for additional ideas I’ve learned from brilliant teachers, coaches, and leaders in the field over the past half a decade.
Principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, team leaders, have you ever had an exciting idea that you just know will be so good for teachers and students, but the biggest barrier is a lack of buy-in from teachers or other stakeholders? The phrase, “but this is how I’ve always done it,” may have become your greatest nemesis, right along with “I don’t have time for this.” Getting buy-in to a new initiative is hard work. In this post, I share 4 research-based strategies school leaders can use to effectively lead change. The first few suggestions may sound familiar. I’ll repeat them over and over because they are critical to successful change management. Have one clear vision. Choose 1-2 goals for the year (or more years—3 to 5 years is ideal for major initiatives). Research on Massachusetts turnaround schools found the schools who did not make gains lacked prioritization of a couple key areas, instead focusing on too many things at once (DESE). These 1-2 goals should be data-informed, high-leverage, and co-created with stakeholders or a representative stakeholder team. Manderschild & Kusy (2005) write about vision, citing Kouzes and Posner’s finding that a clear vision leads to “higher levels of [employee] motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, and clarity about the organization’s values, pride, and productivity,” (p. 67). They also note it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluations. If it’s a priority, make sure your feedback to teachers and evaluation of their growth reflects that priority. Make space on teachers’ plates. We can’t add to teachers’ plates without taking something off. If it’s a priority, something else can go. I talk more about this in my post on how to support teacher leadership, where I share a free quick guide on how to carve out time in the school day for teachers to grow, learn, collaborate, and invest time in new initiatives. I’ve shared blog posts and podcast episodes to support teachers in re-thinking how they spend planning time to make space for individualized professional development. If it’s helpful, use the search bar of this website to find these resources and send them to teachers to help them make that shift. Connect with teachers’ hearts. The prominent adaptive leadership scholar, Ronald Heifetz, says, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss,” (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Teachers’ identities are tied up with their jobs. With the role of teachers shifting from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” it’s reasonable to expect there may be a bit of a loss of identity. Ultimately, we want to help teachers see the value of this shift—that students benefit more when we teach them how to be learners, not simply what to learn. However, immediately after introducing this shift, it’s important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss. Use that to paint a picture of how the new initiative or vision speaks to their passion for student learning (because, if it’s a good initiative, it definitely will). If teachers don’t seem ready for a change, Anderson (2012) says, talk (and listen) to them, share the data to let them discover the issue and urgency themselves, and share research on the topic to lend credibility to what you’re trying to do. Just don’t forget the heart! Kotter & Cohen (2002) warn that many change initiatives fail because they rely too much on the data end of things instead of inspiring creativity by harnessing the “feelings that motivate useful action” (p. 8). The image of the Kübler-Ross change curve below may help you recognize where teachers are, emotionally, during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. (Retrieved from Dave Saboe, 2018) Create dissatisfaction with the status quo. I love Dannemiller’s adaptation of Gleicher’s formula: change = dissatisfaction x vision x first step > resistance. This formula accepts that resistance happens, but it can be overcome as long as teachers can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are now, there is a clear vision for how this can change, and there are acceptable first steps we can take. These variables are multiplied, meaning if any one of them doesn’t exist, resistance will win (because any number multiplied by 0 is 0). If there is no dissatisfaction, leaders must create it! Mezirow (1990) notes adults need a disorienting dilemma to jumpstart transformative learning (learning that requires a paradigm shift and asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill). A disorienting dilemma forces us to examine our assumptions. Presenting teachers with information that makes teachers just uncomfortable enough to realize, “the way I’ve been thinking about this isn’t working anymore,” will help them try on other ways of thinking and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. This is most effective in the context of group dialogue, as folx are able to briefly “try on” others’ ways of thinking. So, go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma! Also, remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. You won’t shift mindsets in one meeting, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When teachers are sufficiently disoriented, they will be seeking new ways of thinking, and you’ll have an opportunity to introduce those new ideas. To think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers, consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold are in direct competition. For example: A teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete lesson plans and grade student work. This positions their personal well-being in direct conflict with their love for student learning. Let teachers recognize the discontent, explore the underlying assumptions, come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way to overcome the discontent, and start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making an action plan, testing it out, building capacity for this new approach (through PD, coaching, and other support), and integrating this practice into teachers’ lives and ways of being. (The summary, “Mezirow’s Ten Phases of Transformative Learning” has a bit more detail on the transformative process.) Change is difficult, and it takes time. These research-based ideas will get you started, but the real work is in how you bring teachers into the change process. You’ve got this! To help you lead change using the principles of shared and adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership PD Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're talking about leading change and getting quote buy-in, and we'll talk about why buy-in is in quotes in the title of this episode in just a moment. So first I just want to name that leading change is challenging and resistance is part of the work, I'm sure, as a leader whether you are a teacher leader, a team leader, a school or a district leader, a leader of your community, a leader of fellow students, whoever is listening leadership is challenging in all of its facets. And to support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I'm actually going back to a blog post that I wrote five years ago and so we're going to turn it into this podcast episode today, thinking through the lens of both shared and adaptive leadership, which are concepts I talk about and try to think about how to apply in specific scenarios throughout this podcast and blog. So enjoy, feel free to check out a slightly adapted initial version of the blog post in the show notes or the blog post. There we go For this episode today at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 190. Okay so, leaders, if you have ever had an exciting idea that you just know it's gonna be so good for teachers. It's gonna be so good for students, but people are not buying in and the biggest thing you need to do is, in your minds, convince them right, get that buy-in. So this phrase buy-in is an interesting one and I've heard since writing this blog post. I knew at the time to put it in quotes because I wasn't a fan, but I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces. But I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces like co-create design together, thinking about the idea of shared leadership. But in more regular kind of verbiage, thinking about Ayanna Pressley is like the people closest to the pain it should be closest to the power, right, those are the folks who have the solutions, the ones who are living it. So when I think about this, I think about you know, the phrases that we also typically encounter that make us think well, we just need people to kind of come over to the good side and see the path forward and get in line right. So we often hear things like maybe this is how I've always done it and it's going to take a lot to change. I don't have time for this. Right, there's a lot on people's plates, particularly when we're talking about education. Right, it seems often that there is a scarcity of time, right, and we've talked about that actually in recent podcast episodes about kind of mind shifts around that. But I think looking at the research, specifically the leadership research, and identifying four research-based strategies that you can use to effectively lead change in a very, you know, sustainable but also really justice-centered and kind of shared leadership way, is where we're going to go today. So the first few may sound familiar and I'm just going to keep naming them because they're super important in the change management and what I prefer the term leadership in leading change literature. So first is to have one clear vision. So if you choose one goal for the year maybe two, you know, or even you know, not even just the year three to five years out, one goal for three to five years, the same one. That's really ideal we found in the literature from major initiatives. So research on Massachusetts turnaround schools actually has found that the schools who did not make gains it's in part because they lacked prioritization of a few key areas. So they actually were trying to do too many things at once, really. Now DESE, specifically Massachusetts Department of Education, is saying if you're in turnaround, if your school needs a revamp, a turnaround plan, whatever, one goal, one to two goals, right. And those goals, of course, should be data informed, they should be high leverage and here's the clincher they should be co-created with stakeholders. Or, because often we maybe lead districts or schools that have hundreds, if not thousands, of stakeholders. When we include students and staff and family and community members, right, and all the people, at least a representative even, are there a proportionate number of students or young people relative to adults? That is actually the case in the school or the district or the community, right? So if we actually are proportionally, as a school community, majority students, we should have the majority of students on our representative leadership team, right? Of course there's a lot of nuances to getting folks in the space for having those conversations, making sure that students are compensated for that work and family members are compensated and teachers are compensated for this work, and that's a whole other episode. Feel free to tap back into the archives to find that, but today we're going to stay focused on this piece, so also want to bring in the research from Mandischild and Kuzi, who talk about vision, and they cite big leadership names, kuzi and Posner, who find that you know the clear vision really leads, to quote, higher levels of employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps and clarity about the organization's values, pride and productivity end quote. So lots of things come out of that clear vision. We have this kind of energy surge that generates more energy and a ripple effect across the staff. I would also say this probably extends to stakeholders. They were writing specifically about leading employees in a business environment in this research, but also, just you know, stakeholders in general are going to be really excited when they co-create the vision, which means if you have students co-creating the goal, students are then going to act in ways that support the goal right. So we have less of a behavior issue or whatever issue, because it's do this, as I say so, and it's really hey, you co-created this thing that we wanna work toward together. Let's do it Like, let's do the thing you helped create this. You're gonna work harder, right? It is a little bit of seemingly like a duh kind of moment for lack of a better phrase off the top of my head, but also I think it needs to be said in the research for us to truly kind of believe it, particularly when we're working with young people. Like oh right, yeah, like just a reminder that this is how human motivation often works right. So that shared leadership base again, we're coming back and back to that. These researchers also note that it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluation. So if it's actually a priority, this is really our one goal. We want to make sure that your feedback as a leader to teachers and your evaluation of teacher growth, your evaluation of student growth, the kind of like observational criteria you're looking for or listening for or wanting to experience and witness in classroom spaces and school spaces, are reflective of that priority. So it's all in alignment and doesn't feel like the separate thing. People do get initiative fatigue. That is very, very real, particularly in the intervening five years since COVID has happened and lots of things have changed and we just want to make sure we're doing kind of the less is more idea that I tell teachers all the time. We want to do that as leaders as well. Ok, next, and again, I think this is an obvious one. That's the word I was looking for obvious Make a space on teachers' plates. If we are asking teachers to do things Similarly with students or with families, right, we want to make space for them to do that, right. So we already are overloading people with things to do. So we can't really add to teacher's plates without taking something off. Right, if it is a priority. Same for us, right, if it is a priority for you as a leader. Something else needs to go so you can devote the appropriate amount of time and energy and resources to it. We can't just keep adding on. That's a recipe for burnout and in a time right now where teacher shortage is a very large issue, we don't want to contribute to that problem. We want to make space for the priorities and not add to the to-do list. There are several resources that I've shared blog posts and podcast episodes about thinking about prioritization versus adding to your to-do list. How do you spend appropriate planning time making space for all the things that really help move the needle, and what does the research say are the things that move the needle? All of that? So feel free to use the search bar of my website, lindsaybathlionscom, to find these resources. Forward them to teachers, whatever is helpful, but I do think the big takeaway here is prioritization, not adding to the to-do list, right? We all have the same amount of time in the day, so it's really about what do you want to make the priority today? We're not going to add time to your workday leaders and teachers talking to everybody here, right, but we instead want to see what is the most important, I also think on a student level, on an instructional level. We don't want to just keep giving students more and more and more things and overwhelm them. We're seeing really high rates of anxiety and lots of things from students that we don't want to add to it, but we want to maintain that curricular challenge. The thing there is again prioritization Do fewer things better, right. The thing there is again prioritization do fewer things better, right. As I have heard the brilliant folks say Angela Watson, there we go at her podcast. So that's two, all right. Just to recap, these are have one clear vision make space on teachers' plates. Now. Number three is to connect with teachers' hearts. I'm consistently referencing teachers here because I think in traditional mindsets around leadership, it is feeling sometimes like teachers need to buy in and the resistance leaders face in leading change is with teachers, but I actually am talking about all stakeholders here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. So the prominent adaptive leadership scholar, ron Heifetz, says, quote what people resist is not change per se, but loss, end quote. I think this is hugely important. Even just a recognition of this fact is important. So I've actually had someone comment on this blog post just to say that this is the thing that resonated with them and to just say you know that's. I really appreciate that being brought up right. This idea of resistance is lost huge in the adaptive leadership space. And again, that just that simple acknowledgement that teachers' identities are tied up with their jobs right when they shift, for example, from like stage on the stage mode, when they're talking at the students, when they're imparting knowledge right to a more effective pedagogy of the quote guide on the side approach right, or coaching students. I'm helping facilitate student ownership of the learning. That's hard and for a lot of teachers there's going to be maybe a feeling of a loss of identity. Well, what am I even doing if my students can do it all by themselves? Right, but we ultimately want teachers to see the value of the shift, that it is not about their loss as kind of the sage on the stage of the imparter of knowledge, of the kind of know-it-all person, but actually you're moving into a more important and challenging. Really, you got to be like on your feet to do this. Well, you have to. That's not a great phrase. What am I thinking? On the ball, on the you know, on top of things, ready for anything, just kind of quick to respond. And you have to have this confidence and breadth of experience to be able to respond to what's happening in the classroom. Right, we can't prepare for it all when students learn the learning. So we want to coach teachers to see the value of this shift specifically and that students actually benefit more here when we teach them how to be learners, not just what to learn. And it is important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss of that right. So again, we just want the humanity coming through here. We can use that empathy to kind of paint a picture of how the new initiative or the vision or the change. Whatever is happening speaks to their passion for student learning. Right, because of course we won't be doing things that are bad for student learning in terms of our change efforts. And you know, ultimately we are going to connect with why they became a teacher in the first place and just helping them kind of co-create that vision of what that looks like in their classroom, with the research backing, but also with kind of their hearts as part of it, kind of their hearts as part of it, and so we can kind of counteract that loss of identity and almost like recreate a new, better, stronger identity, if that makes sense. Now, if teachers don't seem ready for a change, anderson says talk and listen to them, share the data, let them discover the issue and the urgency themselves. So kind of share that research, share the student data, kind of create that disequilibrium of oh okay, I want this, but my current actions are producing these results. Right, I see research out there on this topic that's saying we should do this and then write that the kind of path is created for them. You're basically just bringing them up to speed with what you have witnessed, seen, reviewed, whatever, and making sure that you're kind of showing. This is the stuff in front of me, this is the stuff that I'm noticing, that I'm learning about, like, join me on the journey and, of course, don't forget the heart, right? So leadership scholars Cotter and Cohen warn that many change initiatives fail because they just rely too much on the data. Fail because they just rely too much on the data. They are incredibly data focused to the extreme so that they actually lose and don't inspire. They fail to inspire the creativity that is necessary for change initiatives by quote, harnessing the feelings that motivate useful action, right? So when we're motivated to do something, when we're excited about the possibilities for change, when we're feeling really creative and feeling like we can affect change efficacious I believe that word is then we are motivated to action, we are motivated to co-create the plan. It just kind of erases any of that resistance or at least drastically reduces that idea of resistance to change. So again, pulling people along, not pulling people go creating kind of lifting each other up, inspiring each other, motivating each other, connecting with our hearts and our creativity, is the way to go. So in the blog post I have added an image of the Kubler-Ross change curve so common in kind of leading change spaces and it may help you if you want to take a glance at it. It may help you recognize where teachers are emotionally during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. So I'm just going to narrate this so so folks who may not have access to the blog posts or have difficulty viewing the image can understand. So we have kind of this change curve that starts with like denial and our impact kind of is going to go kind of down and then up in terms of negative, positive. So we are in kind of in a denial state. We're kind of like medium impact. We are in a state of kind of maintaining the status quo. Our reaction is kind of shock, it's not happening. The approach here the recommendation for leaders at this stage, when people are in a state of denial, is to communicate information. Next, after communicating information, people might move to a frustration space where the impact is even less right. We're not impacting much. We may have kind of a state of starting to enter a state of disruption, though still perhaps in a little bit of a status quo state. We may see some of that remaining shock and denial, but we're also entering anger and fear territory. The approach for folks entering this space is to really watch, listen and support. We're going to continue watching, listening and supporting when folks may move into the next stage, which is depression. That is kind of the low point of the impact. So we're in kind of the negative swing and then we're going to start going back up. So imagine, kind of like a U curve here, we're at the bottom of the U, we're going back up the other side. Now people are moving into the experiment phase of the change curve and this is a state of exploration. The reaction is okay. I've accepted that this is what's happening and as a leader, you want to give time and space here to explore, for people to test out things, really truly experiment, have that informed risk-taking be celebrated, not penalized right, and then folks will move to decision, which is where we're just starting. We have a little bit of that exploration stuff but we're just starting to rebuild. We are in a state of rebuilding. We are committed that is folks' reaction. We are committed to the path forward and your approach as a leader is to celebrate. We are celebrating that co-creation that's happening. We've had folks co-creation that's happening. We've had folks kind of move through all these phases. There's a lot of emotion involved. We're kind of connecting to their joy of learning to experiment, trying things, taking risks and kind of coming to that decision I'm going to co-create and eventually move to integration. We're like, yes, this is the path forward, it's part of how we do things. I am fully so. That's the Kubler-Ross change curve. Again, speaking to that idea of connecting with teachers or, more broadly, stakeholders' hearts. Okay, the fourth strategy here, that is, research informed is create dissatisfaction, create dissatisfaction. There we go with the status quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula which states that change equals dissatisfaction, times, vision, times, the first step. All of those three things dissatisfaction, vision and first step need to be larger than resistance. So what this formula does, just to break it down, is it accepts that resistance happens but it can be overcome as long as teachers or stakeholders more broadly can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are. Now there's a clear vision for how it can change, how it can be better. We know it's possible and there are first steps that are acceptable to us that we can take. So the fact that the formula for our math folks out there is includes multiplication right. Change equals dissatisfaction times, vision times. First step is all greater than resistance, right? Multiplication then means that if any one of those dissatisfaction, vision or first step is zero, like it doesn't exist, then resistance will win, because any number multiplied by zero is zero, and so of course, any resistance will be greater than zero, right? So I love that kind of formula, noting all three of these things are critically important for change dissatisfaction, vision and first step. If there is no dissatisfaction, if people are like, yes, I'm good with the status quo, they're in that kind of denial stage of the Kubler-Ross change curve, then leaders can create it, and in fact Mesrose says they must create it. Right that adults actually need a disorienting dilemma that's what he calls it to jumpstart transformative learning. So this is learning that requires a paradigm shift, like a totally different way of looking at a problem or engaging, I should say, with a problem, and it asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill, right? So imagine I'm thinking of a parallel here to curriculum. You give your teachers a new curriculum and you say, okay, learn it, do it. Okay, that might be fine if that curriculum is the same kind of pedagogy, the same kind of way of teaching they've been teaching. If that curriculum is actually drastically different they've been lecturing history lessons, reading from a textbook, and now we're learning through inquiry whoa, that's going to be different. That's actually going to require a paradigm shift. It's not just like a new skill that. It's like okay, boom, boom, boom. It's like I need to view learning and the act of teaching differently than I have before, right, so it's got me critically examining assumptions. It's got me in a disorienting dilemma, right, like I see the way I've done things and I see the way I'm going to do things and I see the research saying that actually, that new way is going to generate student learning, more student learning, better student learning and I need to kind of have that moment of whoa, okay, change needs to happen. I need to recognize that. I need to examine my assumptions. That's what the disorienting dilemma does. It forces us to examine our assumptions and so presenting teachers with information that makes them and this is the key just uncomfortable enough to realize that quote according to Mesereau, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. End quote that idea, that aha moment. Oh, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. That's going to help them try on other ways of thinking Again. Think about that experiment phase from the Kubler-Ross change curve and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. So this is the most effective when we're actually in group dialogue in a context of like a team, for example, a whole staff, where folks are just able to briefly try on other ways of thinking. Sometimes it can be really, really challenging when you do anything with adults, with students, that is brand new and you're like, okay, go ahead, do the thing. We're like I don't even know where to start, like I've never had this opportunity, I've never tried this thing before, I've never even witnessed other people doing this. So I'm not sure how right and so being in that group space is going to give folks just time and possibilities to kind of experiment and be in that experiment phase of trying on other ways of thinking. Okay, so go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma for your teachers and remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. So you won't shift mindsets in one meeting, you just won't. So reduce that, lower that expectation of this is going to be real easy, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When everyone is sufficiently disoriented, then they're going to be seeking new ways of thinking and you're going to have an opportunity to introduce those ideas right. So, again, we're presenting the data, we're creating the disorienting dilemma, we're presenting the research and we're remembering to connect with people's hearts and we're going to invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Try on different ways of thinking, experiments, celebrate the risk-taking and to think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers. If you're like I'm not sure what that even looks like, lindsay consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold, or stakeholders again more generally hold where those two values that teachers hold or stakeholders again more generally hold, where those two values that they hold are in direct competition. For example, teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete their lesson plans, graded student work, all the things they have to do. This positions their personal well-being, which is important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning. So let teachers recognize the discontent there, right? That's not good. I want to be personally well and I want my students to be helped. Explore the underlying assumptions. Example this is the way it has to be. There's no way I can be personally well and help my students Aha, let's explore that, critically, examine that. Let them come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way. We need a paradigm shift. We need to do something differently to overcome the discontent and then start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Share what other teachers who do have a better balance of well-being and student learning right. See what other schools are doing structurally right. Start exploring different ways of thinking. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making that action plan collectively. Make it. Don't put it just on the teacher right. But how can I help? How can the structures help? Test it out, build capacity for the new approach, provide support, provide structures, provide coaching, pd, whatever is needed. And then it becomes integrated again Kugler-Ross curve integration into a daily practice of the teacher's lives or ways of being or the person's lives, right? So I'll link to Mesereau's 10 Phases of Transformative Learning if you're more interested in that in the blog post. But that is kind of where we're kind of pulling a lot of this stuff from is Mesereau's work with disorienting dilemmas. In conclusion, there was a lot there and change is challenging, it's difficult and it takes time. And these research-based ideas they're going to get you started. The real work is in how you bring teachers, students, families, all stakeholders into the change process right. The process is just as important as the final action plan or whatever is implemented right. It is about the process. It's about community shared leadership, adaptive leadership. Get at those underlying beliefs, do it together, co-create right. And to help you with this, to help you kind of build up your shared leadership, adaptive leadership muscle, I'm going to share with you my leadership PD playlist. It has videos, it has podcast episodes, it has templates and resources and activities that you can grow your leadership capacity. So to grab that resource you can go to lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash one, nine zero. Until next time, everybody.
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In this episode, we speak with Jason Tate, who is from the UK and works in an American International School. In this conversation, he dives into the critical aspects of creating safer and more inclusive educational environments by actively listening to student voices.
Jason brings a unique perspective as an educator and co-founder of The Student Voice, an innovative reporting tool that helps students share their experiences of harm so educators can implement appropriate interventions. This tool works to fulfill the UK’s statutory requirements for safeguarding—ensuring student safety at school, online, and in the community—but its concepts can be widely applied in all educational settings. The Big Dream Jason’s big dream is to cultivate an educational environment where we safeguard students by doing things with them and listening to their voices (instead of telling them what to do and ignoring their perspectives). He believes this can be accomplished by building strong, trusting relationships between educators and students and deeply understanding the lived experiences of each individual. Mindset Shifts Required One key mindset shift for educators is to shift from a traditional top-down approach to one that values and integrates student voices. This involves recognizing that listening is a process aimed at understanding, and interventions should be designed collaboratively with students. Additionally, educators need to see safeguarding students' well-being as an ongoing, cyclical process that requires continuous learning and adaptation. Action Steps To create an educational environment that prioritizes the student voice, Jason recommends the following brave action steps: Step 1: Focus on ways to include the student's voice and commit to the process. This requires authentic buy-in from leadership, teachers, and all educators in the system. Models like Laura Lundy’s pathway to encourage student participation or Hart’s Ladder of Participation can be an excellent starting point for schools to prioritize this. Step 2: Implement practical tools and models in your school and classrooms. For example, Jason shares a discrimination reporting tool used at his school, where students can offer information about their lived experiences at home, school, or in the community. This lets students have a voice and share when they feel comfortable and the information they give helps educators understand patterns and implement interventions. Step 3: Develop and execute interventions collaboratively with students. Harm can often happen away from adult supervision and in the community, and it’s not always realistic or practical to simply increase supervision in community spaces. Often, it’s equipping students as active bystanders to reduce harm amongst their peers, or it could be equipping community members. Interventions need to be collaborative, reviewed often, and targeted specifically where harm happens. Challenges? Educators need to be authentically committed to this work. Just paying lip service or being tokenistic will not work—students see through it straight away and it can damage the culture. So, true buy-in amongst educators and staff members is key to ensuring everyone is committed to safeguarding. Authentic engagement means listening to students, getting their feedback, and continually revising things in response. One Step to Get Started The first step is an obvious one: ask your school—why do we want to do this? What’s the purpose of this? Start by identifying and working with champions within the school who are enthusiastic about integrating student voices. Then, begin with small, manageable initiatives, such as pilot programs with specific grades, to gain early victories and build momentum for broader implementation. Stay Connected You can learn more about Jason’s work to safeguard students on The Student Voice website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Jason is sharing a page of case studies from The Student Voice with you for free to see how it works in action. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 189 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Jason Tate. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:06 - Jason Tait Great thanks for having me. It's really a real pleasure to see you and to talk about what we're going to go through. Thank you. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I'm really excited and I think you bring a really interesting perspective. Being for primarily United States-based audience, like an external to the US perspective, is really, I think, going to help a lot of folks listening. So I'm curious to know, before we actually dive into the main conversation here, what is important for listeners to know about you or just keep in mind about the topic in general before we dive in. 0:00:35 - Jason Tait Yeah, so I actually have quite a good connection with America and the States, although I'm from the UK myself. I work at an American international school, so I'm fairly familiar with the American education system and all the differences that means compared to the UK system. But because I'm based in the UK, we have a series of statutory requirements that we have to follow in and around the whole area of what the UK would call safeguarding, which essentially means making sure that schools keep young people and children safe, both in school but also deal with any online issues, and also I was sponsored for helping them to stay safe in the community and also at home. So there's a fairly extensive framework which is statutory. So it's an English education law that schools are required to do this and look after the children under their care, and all that through all their different lived life experiences. 0:01:28 - Lindsay Lyons I love that framing for today's conversation and thank you for defining that for us. I think that'll be really powerful to think about, especially in line with like this next question I usually ask them. Dr Bettina Love talks about freedom dreaming in the following way. She says it's dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so when I think about safeguarding and I think about, I think there are clear ties here and I'm curious to know, like, with that in mind, what's that? What's the dream that you hold or or, um, that you kind of aspire that students will experience in this? Yeah, sure. 0:02:02 - Jason Tait I think that's a really, really good connection with the work we do. So, um, specifically with the area safeguarding, my own sort of philosophy and view is is that if you're going to safeguard and look after anybody but in our case with education, it's obviously young people and children that you need to work, not you don't do stuff, you don't do things for them, you don't do things to them, but you do things with them. And if you're going to work with our young people and children and students to safeguard them, you need to listen to their voice. But listening is a process, not an outcome, and the outcome of the listening process is to understand their lived experiences. So schools, quite rightly, have sets of rules and regulations young people and children have to follow. So you've got to be on time to class, do your homework, be respectful, all those things which means a school runs as a decent organization. There's no anarchy, otherwise we'd be able to function as a school. But for children, they have a whole set of lived experiences which may or may not be impacted by those rules. So what is their home life like? Are they popular on social media? Have they been bullied? Have they been harassed? Are they experiencing discrimination and if they are experiencing all of those harms, or a variety of those harms, what are they doing differently to keep safe and to live their own life? And we need to understand that before we can help, support them and intervene in a meaningful way. Because the real danger is that adults will interpret a young person's behavior and get that interpretation wrong and then they get the intervention wrong as well. Instead of being a source of support and help, they can actually become a hindrance and also can add to the harm and certainly not build trust. Because all of this it's central to all of this any effective safeguarding framework. You need to be built on a culture of trust between the very strong, healthy, trustful relationships between the adults responsible for safeguarding the young people and the young people themselves. 0:04:10 - Lindsay Lyons There is so much here that is so good and I think a lot of times are not part of our default thinking as educators, at least not in my default thinking as an educator formerly trained. So I want to highlight a couple of things and I'll ask a mindset shift question in a moment connected to them. But I love that you mentioned the with them like that. I love listening as a process, not an outcome, and I love the idea of if you don't understand and you don't seek to understand you, you're actually probably not helping. You're actually doing the opposite, like that's. That's fascinating to me and I think about a lot of times we say things like student voice but we don't actually mean deep understanding and seeking to understand and work with in community and partnership. And so I'm curious to know is that a big mindset shift? Or how do you kind of like coach educators or folks in the space around that, taking on that mindset? Like where are they coming from? How do they get to this appreciation of? 0:05:12 - Jason Tait like we're doing this with students. So we have a very specific model that we use to help educators with that and we have a very clear guiding principle and one rule. So a guiding principle is that we seek. We will not understand a young person's life unless we understand the social rules that govern that young person's life. So we seek to understand the social rules that govern that person's life. So why say, if you take like online life and social media, why do they behave the way they do online? What are the rules that's governing their lives to help keep them safe online? They might take part in an online bullying because they see someone else doing it and they don't want to be the target of that harm. So they will join in with the harmer. But they're doing that not because they agree with the person carrying out the harm. They're doing that because they don't want to be the target themselves. So if you can understand that, then you can have a more effective intervention. And our rule and this ties in with teaching and learning is that we seek to understand and if you understand something, therefore you're learning. So if you go back to what all schools are about their teaching and learning approaches to teaching and learning. Safeguarding in this way is just like teaching and learning in terms of science, math, english, anything else you do in a school. We're looking to learn all the time about the young people we're looking after and if we learn then we'll understand. So, having that growth mindset, we're tying it back into what makes a good teacher. A good teacher wants to learn right. So hopefully teachers can make that connection with well safeguarding is just the same as me teaching English or math or science, whatever it is, history, whatever it is. I teach and our cyclical model which comes out of all of that is that schools provide brave spaces for young people to share information on their terms. So it's when the young person is ready to share, not when we need them to. It's when they're ready to share and then we seek to understand the information they've shared. Then we work with them to develop the intervention on whatever level. That is. So if, if you have a culture of bullying in grade seven, work with grade seven to overcome that culture of bullying. So it might not be working with one kid and one case of bullying. You might have a culture of harassment or a culture of discrimination. So work with the students who are involved in that Work with them to fix it. And then the final part of the cyclical model is that you go back and check to see if that's worked. So has your intervention been successful? And all the time, in all four stages of the model the cyclical model you're using the voice of the young person, so you're being really authentic about what you're doing. It's not tokenistic at all. It's saying to young people you are part of this community and without your voice and in every aspect of the process of supporting them, oh, that's such a great process and I love that it's cyclical right, Because you're constantly doing it. That's perpetual. It's always in motion. Yep, amazing. It's not linear. There's no start and end, because a school is an organic community. It's always growing and developing. That's why schools are great places to work. They change all the time. It can be the same place, but in a different school year on year because the new set of kids, new teaching, new issues, new new curriculum everything changes all the time, so they're organic and they're constantly growing. That's why your process needs to be constant makes so much sense. 0:08:46 - Lindsay Lyons I I also love how you reference a lot of lundy. I mean in indirectly. 0:08:51 - Jason Tait I feel like here yeah, sure, well, lundy's a big influence on the work we do, for sure. 0:08:55 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, Do you mind speaking to that just a little bit yeah absolutely For people who might be unfamiliar. 0:09:00 - Jason Tait Yeah. So going back to your early question about how you support teachers actually supporting your community with empowering the voice of the student, laura Lundy's work is I was lucky enough to talk with her and meet with her a few times and read her work obviously and her model is very, very it's very straightforward. It's very straightforward, very easy to understand but gives a clear pathway for institutions to develop a culture of student voice. And her big thing is participation. So it's rather that student voice, it's student participation in how you can involve young people in the community and view a school as a community and more than just a school, because I think all schools would recognize that you are a community of learners and Lundy's model really gives you a really nice framework in which you can do that and guide you in how you can do that and assess that and put that in place. Another good model which you may be familiar with is Hart's Ladder of Participation. So Hart's Ladder is really great. So I don't see the ladder as hierarchical. But where Hart's Ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing so young people share information. Where hearts ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing. So young people shed information and we often go back to hearts ladder and pick the rung on the ladder that we think will match the issue that we're facing. So that's a really that's a really nice guide to to deal with issues sort of case by case hearts. 0:10:26 - Lindsay Lyons I can give you that guidance, we feel on specific issues and cases I love the of heart's ladder as just kind of something you can pick a rung of, as opposed to a hierarchy. That's really wise. I like that a lot very cool and, and so I think you've done a lot of things with the student voice, with different different things in terms of what does it look like when we put some of the big ideas that you've talked about into practice, like, how do we literally do it? um, can you talk through a little bit about what schools can do to make this a possibility in their their communities so, um, let me give you a case study we're working on right now at my school. 0:11:05 - Jason Tait So we give our, so our tool. We provide the young people and children in our school with a map of their school, a map of the community, a generic map of a home which matches the socioeconomic background of the young people, and a discrimination reporting tool so they can share information on any of their lived experiences school, in the community in which they live, at home and in relation to any forms of discrimination, and so we've been running that since 2018 as a tool that the kids can use. Over the last couple of years, we've really picked up on a pattern of, because when you get the context of where harm happens, you can understand patterns right, so you'll deal with an individual case, but when you get a series of cases which have a similar context, then you have the ability to change the context to prevent future harm, and that's the really exciting stuff for us. So the case study we're working through right now is that we we've seen a pattern of um, we call it child-on-child relationship harm, so issues of bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination. The common theme is it takes place away from adult supervision, it takes place amongst groups of students and it can take place online and in person and it's very rarely one-on-one, it's very often in group situations. So what we've started to introduce is an active bystander program for our whole community. So to disrupt the context because adults aren't there, we need to empower young people to deal with it there and then. But they need the skill set to do it safely and the confidence to do it safely. But research has also shown that if you can have a successful active bystander program, it can really reduce instances of harassment, discrimination and bullying. So we spent the second half of the last school year and we'll really strengthen it going into the first semester of the coming school year and training our community to be active bystanders and so they will have a skill set to disrupt the context of child and child relationship harm, as it happens. And then we'll track the data to see. We'll go back and say go back to our young people, say, has this approach worked? Have we managed to support you in managing those relationship harm issues that you've you've shared with us, that you experience? In other words, have we changed the context to prevent future harm? So if we go back to that model, we've got the information through the brave space. We think we understand the issue. We've developed our intervention and provided training, and now we're halfway between the training piece and checking if we've been successful. 0:13:56 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. And I'm thinking about the default. My default response just the way that I have been experiencing schools and thinking about how people usually intervene in something like that was oh, we just add adults so that students are never alone. Right, we just add adult supervision. That's not it. We have to empower the students and support the students to be able to do it themselves. That's so good. 0:14:20 - Jason Tait But I think in this particular case that because the type of harm happens away from adult supervision, that solution seemed the right one for us. In different contexts, with different issues, adults may be part of the solution. So it's so. We work one of the schools that I work with. They have a mcdonald's restaurant on the corner of the street opposite the school. So they provide and there's harm happening in that restaurant, with the kids pouring out of school, going into the restaurant. So they provided training to the mcdonald's staff and safeguarding, so they they then report back to the school if any harms happen. So it's, it's working out, understanding where the context of where the harm happens, then develop your intervention from there. So, and because you have, then, because you then have community safeguarding, your community gets involved and that strengthens your culture because you're saying it's not just the teachers, it's our community. You know it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a town to change a generation that is brilliant, okay, I. 0:15:30 - Lindsay Lyons I love this idea of training community members and truly partnering. We talk a lot about being connected to community and stuff that's legitimately connected to the community. You are on the same page there. I love that, and I'm wondering about folks who are doing this work or who maybe are at an earlier stage of that cycle maybe they're, um, just starting to get information and have never been through that cycle of partnering with students to determine the action step like are there challenges to this work that you've seen? 0:16:04 - Jason Tait oh, yeah, 100, yeah, yeah, you have to be um, you have to want to do authentically so. So if you pay lip service or tokenistic, that will not work and kids will see through you straight away and that can actually damage your culture. So you have to be genuine about it and be prepared to listen, and maybe listen to things you don't want to hear, because kids will tell you if you. But then also you have to be prepared to act on what they've said, because it's almost, it's almost better not to ask if you're not, if you don't act on what they've said, because you've asked the question, you've done nothing. That's almost. That's. That's really negative, that's that's. That's the road you shouldn't go down. I'd suggest um, yeah, so you need to be authentic about it, um, and be prepared to listen and be prepared to be surprised, right? So there's things the kids will tell you. We learned. So we always ask kids what's going well as well. That's really important, and so we were shocked by what they thought was going well and there's good stuff. But we never. We just took it for granted, but it meant so much to them. So those little things, you can make a really big difference in a school community's life by just doing the little things, understanding them and do more of them. 0:17:21 - Lindsay Lyons So, asking the good, stuff as well as what's not going so well, is really important as well. I'm curious just to infuse listeners with a bit of joy. What are some of the things that people? 0:17:29 - Jason Tait said. One of the things we learned was um, this is crazy. So our we have a really lovely art department at our school and at recess and at lunch times they stay open and we'll have some light supervision. They'll be there but in the background and they do some art material. That's, the kids can go to hang out and do a bit of art if the weather's not nice outside, and stuff like that. The kids loved that and we thought that was okay, so okay. But they just like that was the best thing in their day where they could do art together, hang out, use a teacher there, but they could just do art, chat, talk and they just loved that. We never knew that, we never appreciated that, we never came close to understanding that. I was sure we just said, right, we'll do, we'll do more of that and just a simple thing like that, which doesn't mean much to us but meant the world to those kids yeah, it's, it's just. 0:18:20 - Lindsay Lyons I think that's a. That story is so emblematic of why it is so important to just ask the question of the students, to just listen to what they have to say, because they teach us so much more than what you were mentioning earlier the false interpretation yeah, for sure that kids are my best teacher. 0:18:38 - Jason Tait No doubt about that absolutely, absolutely okay. 0:18:41 - Lindsay Lyons So now I'm envisioning someone listening who is really excited about this idea but might not be certain about how to get started. Or, you know, maybe seeing that you know there's there's um, like a statutory element to being in the UK and there's like this kind of community support or expectation of this, whereas it might not exist as much in the US like what is kind of the very first thing you would encourage someone to do to get started and get the ball rolling here, or more than one thing if you think yeah sure. 0:19:11 - Jason Tait So I think the first it sounds like a really obvious question. But just work with your school and your school leaders and say why do we want to do this? Yeah, what's the purpose of this? And link it back to your mission and your school values so it becomes part of your mission, becomes part of your strategy, becomes part of your school. If you can identify the clear and everyone thinks yeah, student voice, you should listen to kids, that's obvious. Well, sit down and unpack what that actually means and how that can benefit your community. So if you recognize that you have relationship issues, if you have issues of bullying substance, misuse all the stuff that kids experience, like the risks that we know they go through. If you want to understand that, then student voice is a very good vehicle which gives you that level of understanding. And once you make that almost a philosophical, strategic commitment, then the rest can take care of itself. You can look at my tool, the student voice tool. You can look at Lundy's model for participation, hart's ladder. You can work out what it is that you do. A lot of schools do surveys and there's a place for surveys, but they're point in time right and kids' lives move on very quickly and the influence of their lives move on very quickly. So what's going to be your means for young people to be able to use their voice and what's the vehicles in which they can use their voice in your setting, and how can you develop that and work with the young people to develop it as well? Because if you can work with them to develop your student voice, they will see that you are serious about it and they will feel you're authentic about it. 0:21:04 - Lindsay Lyons So once you've got your systems and processes set up and your approach set up, they will buy into it and they will work with you on it don't want to use the term buy-in, but like buy-in from a teacher level, right, like the commitment or the authentic you were saying authentic authenticity, right, like of of the teachers. And so I'm wondering about a leader who has a staff that's kind of mixed. There are like some people are really excited, want to authentically partner with students, and some folks are like I am not really ready to hear the hard things, like I'm ready to listen but only to maybe some things and I'm not really prepared to hear the full truth that students are speaking or maybe to follow up on that. How would you advise a leader to kind of negotiate that dynamic in their staff? 0:22:03 - Jason Tait Yeah, I think that's a fairly common reaction to a lot of initiatives in schools and and you start with your champions. So start with the people who back that and start with the people who want to buy in with you. And maybe start with your juniors and seniors. Start with a couple of grades, work with them, get your early victories right. So when, when you have an issue, come in, deal with it really well. And feedback. So with all the student voice stuff that comes into our school an advisory, every thursday, I will feed back to the advisors and advisees and say this is what we're looking at this week, this is what's come in, this is what we're doing. Have a discussion about that, talk about it. So you're just really transparent, get the elephant out the room as far as possible without breaching confidentiality. But I'll be straight. So if we have an issue of a culture of, say, misogyny or sexual harassment, we'll say in these grades this is what's coming through, guys, what do we think we need to do about that? So it's all out in the open. You discuss it, you talk about it and then you start to develop as a community so those teachers that may not be buying into it can start to see right, okay, this is what's happening in the place where I work. Do I want to work at a place that has that? No, maybe I don't. How can? How can we fix that? How can we do something about that? So you bring people slowly along, but start with your champions, start all the people that buy into it, and then give yourself the gift of time and then plan and develop your action plan, your strategic plan and and review that constantly and look for your indicators of success and your timelines and just keep reviewing that as you go along. 0:23:55 - Lindsay Lyons I love that your tool and the idea of constantly having that information, that input from students, of here's what's going on, here's my lived experience, gives you the opportunity to share the information regularly. To say I think it was Mesereau who says, like you need a disorienting dilemma when we're trying to lead change. Right, we have this. Whoa. I thought I was living in this community and working in this community everything was peaceful, right. And then I just remember, um, in one of my classes I used to teach feminism to high school students and one of the boys was like, yeah, but like, sexism doesn't really happen here. And then all of the girls were like here. Let me tell you about these yeah, that's right. 0:24:25 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's true. But also you like, we're talking about the harmless kids experience. They will tell you I get too much homework for my ap classes. I don't like pizza on a friday, you know you, you get everything. So we talk about everything, right and soon. We've had to work hard, but we've got kids moving from complaining to advocacy and starting to appreciate the difference, because we will kick back and say stop complaining. It's a privileged environment. The pizza is great on a Thursday, so you get them to. But it's also a really good social media tool as well. So we will get kids who will say things that they shouldn't say. Well, not that they shouldn't say. They express themselves inappropriately, right, so you can hold them to account safely for that. It's a safe form of social media as well. So they'll learn how to use their voice. So when they go onto platforms and go into the real world, hopefully they don't get in trouble with their employer, because they've had the support from us on how to use their voice correctly. 0:25:26 - Lindsay Lyons So there's lots of educational benefits, as well as all the safety pieces we've talked about as well I love that so much when we think about student voice, as often people you know describe a student voice or leadership building in youth as like this future benefit. But it's like both right it's the future benefit and it's like because you're doing it now, you're enabling students to have that voice and participation in the moment they're in school and it benefits the later because they did it authentically when they were there. 0:25:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's a big part of our vision with this work is that if you can teach kids to use their voice appropriately and see the action is taken when they do, then hopefully they can take that learning into the society they live in and the community they live in so they can be a positive, contributing member of the community they go on to live. So the real, really important we feel obviously we're buyers, but really important educational value in the work we're doing as well. 0:26:21 - Lindsay Lyons That's amazing and, oh my gosh, there's been so much. I think listeners are going to get a ton out of this episode. As we move to close, I I ask one question just for fun. This can be related to our conversation and your work, or it could be something totally random, but because everyone that listens and tunes in really is a lifelong learner, I'm curious to know what's something that you have been personally learning about lately wow, like I say, I love to learn. 0:26:46 - Jason Tait There's so much that's going on right now. So we've just gone through a general election in the UK, so what I've been really learning about is our political system and different, what democracy means, what that looks like, again, how people can use their voice. Uh, is democracy simple? Is it straightforward? How that can be abused and does the real picture come back out, how to get clear information, clear understanding and how people may abuse or use that system. And is democracy a resilient enough process to provide the freedoms that we all enjoy? So that's what I'm really been thinking and reading about and reflecting on right now um, right there with you. 0:27:29 - Lindsay Lyons The united states is a kind of similar similar position right now interesting times oh yeah, and what powerful times to learn alongside students. I always think about students, like you said students teach us so much. Students can are going to teach us how to like get through this, because the same old way is not working. So it's like give us something new. Let's go. 0:27:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's right. I'm on board with you with that one for sure. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons And the last question I have for you is really, I think people are going to be very interested in the tool you have. It is. I have not heard of anything like this and I work with different survey organizations and people who do the point in time but not the ongoing system. So how do folks connect with you? Learn more about the student voice, all of those things? Yeah, sure. 0:28:16 - Jason Tait So just jump onto our website, the studentvoicecouk. You see all of our stuff there and you can sign up for demos. We've got lots of our case study page. We have lots of live videos about things, how our schools have used it. We've got tons of blogs about the work that we do. Um, we're very accessible. We do lots of video, lots of online work, with people around the world talking about it. So go to our website, check us out, have a look and then get in touch through the website. We'll happily talk to you and share all that information we can transparent about what we do excellent. 0:28:49 - Lindsay Lyons I will link to the page and also the case study page so I think people will get a really a nice vibe of what you do and what is possible for their communities by looking at that yeah, sure, yeah, absolutely, that'd be great jason, thank you so much for this conversation today. 0:29:02 - Jason Tait It was such a pleasure yeah, lindsey, it's been great talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been really kind of you, thank you.
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In this episode, we speak with Charle Peck, a former high school teacher turned mental health professional. She shares her professional insights and personal stories that sparked the need to dive deeper into mental health practices, and how she’s seen it transform students and schools.
Charle was a high school teacher for 18 years and saw how students struggled with their mental health. She was led to get a Master of Social Work degree to understand what was going on, jump-starting her career in mental health. Her teaching experience informs her current work, blending the teacher and mental health professional perspectives. Charle is the co-creator of Thriving School Community and the co-author of Improving School Mental Health: The Thriving Community Solution. The Big Dream Charle has a lot of hope for the future because she’s focusing on the solutions to the mental health problems we face in schools. Charle believes that by addressing the root causes of mental health challenges and integrating sustainable practices into daily routines, educators can create a balanced and supportive atmosphere for both teachers and students. Mindset Shifts Required To create an education system where mental health is front-and-center, Charle identifies a few mindset shifts that need to occur. The first is that we need to stop getting stuck in language—some states don’t allow words like “trauma” or “SEL,” and the focus on words takes away from what’s actually going on. So the mindset shift is focusing on what’s going on beneath the behavioral issues like absenteeism. Another mindset shift is focusing on practical solutions—what are solution-oriented approaches that fit into your daily classroom practice? Instead of adding more and more to educators' plates, the mindset shift is around integrating mental health practices into your daily routine. Charle shared some real-life stories of students she worked with and the lessons she learned, namely to humanize each person and understand where they’re coming from. It’s an important mindset shift: take time to see people where they are and help them from that place. Finally, Charle talks about the mindset shift of educators seeing this as a skill to learn. With the right tools, they can be equipped to support mental health in their classrooms. Action Steps Improving mental health in the school system can seem complicated, but there are actually some very practical steps educators can take to prioritize it. Charle recommends these action steps: Step 1: Ask yourself and other educators what you need to make your jobs better. Mental health starts with the educators, with the adults, before you can make an impact on the children. So check in with yourself and other colleagues to find solutions to problems and meet needs that improve your work environment. Step 2: Humanize others and understand their “story spiral.” There’s always more to the story—behind each bad behavior is someone’s home life, relationships, traumas, etc. So, humanize them, and take time to see what’s going on, getting to the route of a problem and not just focusing on the behavior. Step 3: Equip yourself with knowledge and skills. Mental health practices, tools, and strategies can all be learned and improved on. Be intentional about learning them for yourself and your students. Charle’s 9 Essential Skills Course is a great place to start. Challenges? One common challenge—perhaps the biggest one—is the feeling of overwhelm among teachers and leaders. Decision fatigue is a very real experience, and educators are overwhelmed with the decisions they face and how to make the right decision. Charle believes that impactful professional development sessions will help reduce overwhelm and decision fatigue. The other challenge educators face is how to help others make decisions quickly. Teachers need to be equipped with the tools and dialogue to use with students to help them make the right decisions for themselves. One Step to Get Started One practical first step for educators is to identify and reflect on what you need for yourself to make your job better and do better. What keeps coming up over and over again? What’s the emotional charge you get when you just think of something? Identify the problem and the unmet need underlying it. Then, bring it to your first professional development session at the beginning of the school year, discuss it with colleagues, and use your collective wisdom to find solutions to these problems. Stay Connected You can find out more about Charle and her work on her website, Thriving Educator. There, you can also access resources, a podcast, and self-paced courses like The 9 Essential Skills Course. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Charle is sharing a School Mental Health Audit with you for free. It helps you identify strengths and areas of growth in your school to better prioritize mental health. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 188 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Charlie Peck, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I am thrilled to have you today, thank you, Lindsay. 0:00:09 - Charle Peck I am so happy to be here. Truly, this is going to be such a great conversation with you and your audience. 0:00:14 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, and I am just so excited about the topic that we're talking about. Mental health is so important for everyone, and I just think a lot of people are looking for sustainable answers to how do we actually do this well, so I'm very excited to get your expertise on this. The first question I have, though, is like what should people know about you or kind of keep in mind in our conversation today, beyond the traditional bio sense of things? 0:00:40 - Charle Peck Yeah, that's important because I think what's unique that I keep hearing about my lens is that I was a teacher for 18 years in a high school classroom, which led me to this work and because my students were struggling so much with mental health. I didn't understand why. So I kept asking why, which led me to get a master of social work degree so that I could understand structurally what was going on, historically, what was going on the generational trauma and all those contributions from society, childhood, that were contributing to their struggles. So when I was one of those teachers sitting in a PD session and I heard mental health professionals speak to us, I was one of those people, one of those teachers rolling my eyes because I thought you don't have the teacher lens. So it's important that you understand I do have the teacher lens and the mental health professional lens. 0:01:29 - Lindsay Lyons That is so critical. I think they're just, in general, pd can really just gloss over the top of people's heads when they're like I just you don't know what it's like in my shoes and it's like, oh, I know I do, I'm speaking right to it. So that's, that's really incredible. I love that you framed that to start. And then I think, conceptually, regarding the content, I one of the big things I really love to ground the episodes in is the sense of equity and justice, and so Dr Bettina Love talks about this idea of freedom dreaming with this quote that I am in love with dreams grounded in the critique of injustice is how she describes freedom dreaming. And so, with that, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 0:02:09 - Charle Peck Well, I'm hopeful. I mean, a lot of us get stuck in the problem. Many of us get stuck in the problem and, trust me, I understand what those major issues are contributing to mental health in our education system. It's stemming from society, from education, and it's stemming from our families, and they're all meshing together. But I'm hopeful because I'm focusing on solutions for that, and so what that means to me is we've got to meet the needs of everybody, and I do believe that there's a way to do that, lindsay. So that's what I'm excited about. 0:02:38 - Lindsay Lyons Nice, oh, that's great. Okay, so I think with that there's a lot of things that maybe people have their minds wrapped around in terms of mental health that maybe needs a little unpacking, and so I'm wondering if there's any kind of key mindset shifts that you have noticed either teachers or leaders go through and you're like, ah, that's the thing that kind of unlocks the transformation. Is there kind of a mindset shift that you coach on or that you've seen work with folks? 0:03:08 - Charle Peck Yes, oh my gosh, there's actually so much there. So let me simplify in a couple of ways. Number one we need to stop getting stuck in language. So there are some states I can't use the word trauma, I can't use the word SEL, I can't. I mean equity, you know. I mean DEI. It's like a bad word in some states these days, and so I said listen, let's not get stuck in that language, let's just understand the importance behind it and how we're going to function better. So it's not getting stuck with all the semantics and all again the problems. It's how do we shift our mindset into focusing on solutions that will meet the needs of the people who have an unmet need? So it's showing up behaviorally, it's showing up in absenteeism. So we need to look at what those problems are and shift the mindset about what's going on underneath, and that's really no secret. I mean, we've been talking about that for a long time, but sometimes we need to be reminded about that, Lindsay. And so we need practical solutions for this, something that's just going to integrate into our daily practice, and that is the mind shift that usually helps me capture leaders and their educators I'm working with, because they're like oh yeah, so it's not one more thing that I have to do and I said, no, it's not. It's let's wrap our head around something that will integrate right into your daily practice to attack this problem that keeps showing up for you, and then they're ready to adapt it and then actually use it, and then remember how to use it. So that's the key. Those are a couple of things that I coach on all the time. 0:04:37 - Lindsay Lyons I love that you said that, because one of the things that I think people in in a lot of spaces, but in equity spaces particularly, it's like initiative fatigue where it's it is one more thing I'm already like my plate is full, I'm already doing too much, and so to just say, well, we're doing this thing, how do we do it better, makes it sustainable so that we don't have to. I mean it. Also really, I think the beauty of our jobs is like it works us out of a job when people can just do it really well, right, like we stick with them, we coach them, and it's like you got this, you don't need more PD because it's now part of how you do things, which I think is beautiful. Like that's the, that's like what we hope for as coaches. Right, it's like you can go do this thing and do it well forever now. So I think, thinking about those actions, I would love to know, like, what are those practical things that teachers can do? That Like if a leader is thinking okay, I want my teachers, I want my staff to have these practical strategies. Like, what can they do? What are the things? Tell us all the things, yeah. 0:05:34 - Charle Peck So it is based on a framework of nine skills, and those nine skills came out of. Well, what are the nine? Nine just happened to lead to a number in a matrix that we use, but it's like what keeps showing up with regards to mental health. What are the problems? So, if we identify the problem and understand why that's not working, then we can come up with a new solution. So that was the approach we took. So one of the problems is negative self-talk. Okay, oh my gosh, if you're a leader, how often do you hear negative self-talk? And, by the way, you might be that person stuck in negative thinking too. So one of the ways we attack that is what is your story? Spiral, what are you telling yourself about a situation that's based on a lie? Typically I mean typically these spirals we get into those narratives. You've heard the word narrative a lot. Same idea story, what story are you telling yourself does make you spiraling out of that control and saying and doing those things that you walk away regretting that you've done. So when we carry that around with us, that affects our function. So the approach I take, lindsay, is how are we functioning and how can we function better? What's keeping us from functioning at our best. So I bring it right down to the human level and that's what their skills are. So the story spiral is one, and then we help people unravel their story spiral and I'll tell you a quick story about that. To help and this is what I talk about in my sessions I always tell about a student named Madison who was that troubled kid right, and one day she got up out of my class, went to the bathroom, I think, didn't come, didn't ask my opinion, she didn't ask me to do that and she certainly didn't sign out and she was gone almost the whole period and then eventually came back. I tried to talk with her. Long story short, we had a tumultuous relationship, student-teacher relationship and it didn't feel good. I was kind of not nice to her and she certainly didn't work for me and do all the things she needed to do. It just wasn't good. So at the end of the semester, when it changed over, I went to our school counselor and I said Beth, can you please tell me where Madison is in her next class, because I want to go find her and make amends. And Beth said well, she passed away. Madison passed away, okay, and so I didn't get to make those amends with her and, more importantly, I didn't get to create a space that she could have done well in and had a positive experience in her short time left with us and this is a teenager. She had a terminal illness the whole time and I had no idea. So there's a lot of problems with that, about communication and all that confidentiality. But here's what I learned, and this is what led me to thinking about the story spiral and thinking about how can we reflect better upon our teaching practice as a result of something like this. Thank goodness I learned this early on and it was. There's always more to the story. If you think about the kids that are sitting in front of us, or leaders. If you're thinking about the staff who keeps coming back with the same, similar problems, what is it that's underlying that? You're missing something, and here's the key is that we may never know what that is. So we need to give grace to everybody and humanize them, and that's what changed my entire career, so that reframe was huge. I actually, in workshops, we use a story spiral. We have people identify their story spirals, or at least one of them, because we're walking around with a bunch of them and then we walk them through a process to unravel that story spiral, say they need to do it in the moment and that way they're not bobbled down with all of those stress hormones all day long. So there's others like power dynamics. It's really crippling us in our roles as leaders is when we feel like there's a power imbalance. By the way, teachers feel that, parents feel that, we all feel it. But when I work with principals specifically, we identify with that power imbalances and I help them realize that they've reached a limit, how they've reached their own limit, and not to expect other people to respect that limit, that they need to do that themselves so they can eradicate all of this expectation and disappointment that they feel. So there's just simple ways to get through it like that and it's actually all based in evidence. It's just a way to simplify it in practice. 0:09:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this. I have several connections. If it's okay with you, I just want to ask you. 0:09:57 - Charle Peck I know that was a lot too. It's a lot. 0:09:59 - Lindsay Lyons It's so good. I thought about the unmet needs first of all, like how easy is it to you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something or you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something, or right? Or you're reading a novel in high school, right? And to be able to like unpack what is this character Like? Why is this character acting this way? What is their unmet need Right? Like there's ways to do this in so many spaces and I don't think it's always necessarily like, like you said, it could just be the personal, like adults do this introspectively. It doesn't always have to be like there's this huge conflict with this child and like you know, like I have to do it right now. Like there's so many ways to sustainably practice this and familiarize students with the practice as well. As what is your story spiral? Oh, I just love the possibilities. Also, I love the phrase story spiral, very cool. I also was thinking about Dr Becky. I've been listening to her a lot because of Becky Kennedy, because of the toddler situation I'm in right now, and she's always saying MGI, most generous interpretation of like a situation right, like what is the most generous interpretation of this behavior, right, and it sounds like that's what you're saying, right. So like if I can reframe what's happening in the moment, like what possibly could be happening, or, like you said, if I don't know what's happening, what is the thing that I could possibly like generously ascribe to this behavior to then make me able to respond in a way that is caring and supportive? Does that feel like aligned to what you're coaching on? 0:11:27 - Charle Peck It's definitely aligned and I will say this because this is a problem that we all have too is well, I don't want that kid getting away with this, or I don't want that adult, that teacher, getting away with this, and so it's not. It's not about that. It's about let's humanize them, because that way we all soften our approach, and I don't mean we get soft and allow people to walk all over us or the system. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I have a background in trauma and the first thing I say is we don't let trauma be an excuse for behavior and decisions. Right, we do have to have some accountability there, so I'm not taking that away. It's important that we understand that. It's about leadership is about how do we grow people we're working with and let them flourish in the strengths that they have and not have all of these expectations of them to be great everywhere all the time. It's what are they good at? What do they need to do their job better? I mean, how many leaders ask their teachers what do you need to do your job better? When I ask teachers this, it's usually nothing huge. Now sometimes they're like well, I need a smart board and that's expensive or I need a 10 day vacation in the middle of the school year. Well, we can't do that. But often I will tell you it's supplies Like it. It's really simple things and they love that. They're just asked and considered it's so it can be so simple. It's really investing in human capital again. 0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, even just acknowledgement or, you know, a gratitude like thank you for doing this thing that you're doing, working hard, yeah, totally Like very free, very easy, not super time consuming things. 0:13:02 - Charle Peck That's exactly right. We just need the reminder and permission to do some of those things again. 0:13:07 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I love the phrase that you've been using with like humanize, and it makes me think a lot about the story you shared, and thank you for sharing that story. That is hard on all accounts for you, for the student, for you know the whole dynamics. I really appreciate you, your vulnerability and sharing that with us and with listeners, and so I'm thinking about the humanity that sometimes we do lose in the power dynamics in the. I'm overwhelmed with tasks and I'm just thinking about a to-do list of things in the pressures of. You know, my administrator is in my room and the thing that they are probably looking for is obedience from students, maybe not like sense of belonging or other things, and so I appreciate that you named the communication and all of the other pieces, but I love the humanizing portion as like the central piece of that. When we engage with individuals as if they are human beings, right, and have things going on. Like you said, everyone's got a ton of story spirals going on. I feel like if there's a takeaway from this episode, it is like at least remember the humanization of all people, right, that's. 0:14:12 - Charle Peck I just really appreciate that, Thank you, oh, I'm glad, and I'm glad you said that, because what's hard is when we get we get wrapped up in all of the things to do and we get stuck in our own insecurities. That's one of the things we address is our own insecurities. We're stuck in our own heads there and that keeps us again from engaging in the role the way we need to do it effectively. So if we could just realize that we're all trying to make these connections and try to create a culture of connectedness and support of each other Boy, imagine what kind of place that would be to thrive. I mean, imagine if we did that in every environment. When we try to do that at home, we need to do it in our schools. I believe we have an incredible responsibility to help raise our kids and help share the burden with parents, and that's where we're going to do that is in our school system. So not everyone agrees with me, but I'm challenging that. 0:15:11 - Lindsay Lyons I totally agree with you. I think about the number of times that my toddler says the teacher's name instead of my name. They're like no wait, mom. Or the number of times I've been a teacher and they've called me mom. It's just like interchangeable. 0:15:23 - Charle Peck Yes, yes. And imagine, if you're, if the parents in your community knew that you had their back and said listen, I'm going to help you with this. Not you're the problem, You're the reason they're behaving this way. So I mean we've got to look at the different environments that they're engaging in. How many times have you heard of that teacher that that kid really behaves well in that class but not in the other classes? So something in that environment is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You know that from school to school, you know how people respond to you, and so if we could just check ourselves and be humbled and then reflect on that a little differently than we're used to. 0:16:08 - Lindsay Lyons That's kind of what we do. I love that idea of being humble, being reflective, like this idea of curiosity. I mean I think of how many teachers have faced that exact sentiment like oh, it's not happening in this class, and have gotten defensive over that, like, oh well, I'm not doing anything wrong because we take such pride in our work, we work so hard. Right, that makes sense, sense. And if we approach it with all of those attributes that you just described and we're like, hmm, let's go over there, Like let me learn, let me be curious, I think it's a very different vibe for the student and ultimately, for the teachers too. 0:16:41 - Charle Peck It really is. They will appreciate that leadership, that style of leadership. And, oh my gosh, so many people are walking around just angry I mean angry holding on to so many things. A lot of that stems from childhood. That is now showing up in their role. I'm telling you, insecurity is a huge piece to this and we work with leaders and excuse me, and help them identify those insecurities that they have brought into their role with them and help kind of just take those away, help them process that. It's not a therapy session, it's a let's take a look and it actually doesn't take that much time to do. And it's practice over time where we build proficiency in doing that. And then we do that with our teachers, and then we do that with parents and build these bridges, and then we teach this to students. I mean, this stuff is all applicable to kids too. So that's the reason I know this and the reason I came up with this is and, by the way, Dr Cameron Caswell and I she's an adolescent psychologist she and I came up with the skills together, we wrote the book together, but I remember being a teacher and thinking, gosh, I'm not a therapist, I'm lacking tools, but as I taught in some of those reframes I did on my own and some of those things that I learned to do and then incorporated them made my teaching practice so much better. And in a leadership role I was like, wow, look at the adults who are just engaging with me in a different way. And so here's what I say. When those kids got to come to my class you know those kids who are placed in certain teachers' classrooms I was kind of that teacher. I had an elective class and they were put in my class, sometimes because they didn't really have any other place to belong, and I always said it's not because I was awesome, it's because I became skilled. And so I think our educators I know our educators just need some more skills to deal with this, to have that practice. I mean, when I'm working as a therapist, I'm thinking why is this so easy to teach kids and adults in a therapy session that they're now using in their lives? Why are we not equipping teachers better in teachers' colleges in their courses as pre-service teachers, and why are we not giving them the tools now so they can show up more confidently? That's what they're lacking. When they're having these problems with student behavior, it's because they don't know what to do. So we need to equip them with things that they can easily do. That infuses into their everyday practice. I know it, I've lived it myself. So again, that's a little bit of a rant with all of that, but there's just, it all connects and it's also possible. 0:19:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that approach of this is a skill thing, right, Like I just have decided to build up these skills and I had the ability to find how to do it. I love that frame and everyone is capable of then doing it, which allows us all to grow and flourish together. Which is like everyone got into teaching because they love people and children and have care in their hearts. So like we just need the skills and then we'll be all set. 0:19:38 - Charle Peck Yeah, I mean, think about when you need to take a test. If you haven't studied and prepared, then you're not going to do well on it, but when you are, wow, you walk in there like let's do this. I want teachers feeling good about that and I want administrators feeling good about that, and I want administrators feeling good about their teachers showing up to their classrooms that way. 0:19:54 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Oh, what a beautiful dream and what a beautiful, like you said practical way to go about that. So I'm curious I think we've talked through a lot of different challenges. I'm wondering is there one kind of big challenge that you've seen people face that's fairly common, and how have you helped, kind of coach them through it or kind of what happens, or what happens with that kind of challenge? 0:20:16 - Charle Peck Yes, there's always two. The very first one is overwhelm. Teachers are overwhelmed, leaders are overwhelmed, and one of the things I already mentioned is insecurity. But one piece to this and that negative self-talk is another piece. But one of the pieces is decision-making. We have so many decisions to make in a day. We all know this. This is not new, but it's how do you make decisions that are not mindless? How do you make decisions that still align with who you are as a human and how you want to be seen to the world, and how you can go to bed at night not ruminating on what you did in that day? So part of it is let's have PD, where we help teachers do that well, and I do a lot of leadership conferences too and a lot of leadership workshops. We do this with leaders too, and it is so helpful because it's like it takes that weight or kind of all those cobwebs that are just kind of sitting in your mind and held in your body, right, and it lets those just kind of be released to have clarity, and so now you have a way to respond to that effectively. So one of the things, for example, if you know that you always want to lead with kindness and honesty. There's a process you can go through to constantly make a decision that leans back to that, and then you can create those neural networks in your brain to keep leaning back and make it more reflexive and, rather than having to practice it so much, it can be a reflective or, I'm sorry, very reflexive response, so that you don't have to spend too much time doing it and all those decisions you have to make. And the second one I will mention. So that's about us. So I always look at like, let's manage our own mental health and wellness. Let's start there as adults. That's how we're going to make the biggest change and transformations in our schools. The second one is kind of unique, where, when you have to help kids or somebody else as a leader, how do you help someone else make a decision quickly? A lot of times this can be done in crisis situations too, but sometimes you just need simple tools to do this, and so the very first one I just explained was informed decisiveness, and I wanna just like give you a picture here. It's about thinking about what you want versus what you don't want, and so the decision you're going to make in that moment is it leaning towards what you want or don't want. So you can use this for yourself, but you can also help others make this decision. Okay, so I'll tell you about Mason real quick. When I was working in the crisis unit in an adolescent hospital and this is acute care, like this is really tough stuff kids are dealing with and the cops dropped Mason off and they said this guy, if he does not comply to you and your mental health team, then we're taking him back to juvie, like we're just going to take him there. And we're like, well, that's not good mental health practice, so we're going to help him with that. So I said Mason, he was very impulsive, as we know a lot of teenagers are. It's very impulsive, and so he would hit things if he was upset. So I said let's think about what you want. What do you want? And he said well, I want freedom, and what don't you want? Well, I don't want to go to juvie, of course. Okay. So I said the next time you feel like you want to do something, come to me. So sure enough, not too much, not too much time had passed he came to me and he said oh my gosh, charlie, I want to punch this kid in the face and I'm like, well, that's not going to help you. So, but I didn't say that out loud, I wanted him to figure it out. And I said well, what don't you want, mason? Well, I don't want to go to Juby. What do you want, mason? I want freedom. And I said If you punch him in the face, is that going to lead you to the direction you want to go? And of course he said no. So I said what do you need to do? He said I'm going to. I need to go into my room and use the stress ball, calm down, use my breathing exercises, whatever works for him. And I said great, I will meet you in group in five minutes. And he did. And he showed up and he didn't punch back in the face, the face, and it's so simple. We have to have a simple tool and simple dialogue that we can use it with young kids, adults and anyone who's in the midst of stress and strain, so that it will work and they will remember to do it. And that's exactly what this particular tool did. 0:24:24 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. I absolutely love that. I love it for a variety of reasons. One, because someone who is listening can just go implement that today, right, like something super easy to do. And also I just love to circle back to your first point too that it seems like very values aligned, right, that decision-making, that's values aligned. And I think about the decisions I've made that I didn't feel good about afterwards. And it was never like a values agnostic decision. It was always like, oh, I feel bad about that because it violated one of my core values, like those are the ones that stay in my head, that stay in my body, right, and so that's. I love that approach because I think that that preemptively avoids all that additional like stress and weight because we didn't think about the values in making the decision. 0:25:09 - Charle Peck That's exactly right, and a lot of times people don't take the time and space to think about their values and so they don't have alignment back to them because they haven't taken the time to do that. It actually doesn't take very long, and that's what I love about doing the workshop. So there's a workshop that I do about. It's called Managing your Own Mental Health and Wellness pretty simple for educators and leaders, and it pulls in a few of those skills All about me, right, it's all about me. And how do I, how do I rest with that now, so that when I show up when it's busy and crazy, that I can manage it, and part of that is identifying what those values are and how do I get alignment with my decisions there, and so it does so much, it does so much. So, yeah, that's just one of the pieces, yeah. 0:25:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, I love it. 0:25:52 - Charle Peck Oh my gosh. 0:25:54 - Lindsay Lyons Okay, I feel like everyone listening is going to be like all right, give me Charlie's number, Like let's do this thing. So we'll talk about how you can do that in just a moment. But one thing before we move to that close what is one thing that you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I feel like we've talked about a lot of things that they could do right now, in the next 10 minutes, but what's like kind of the one you want them to hold on to? 0:26:15 - Charle Peck I want them to identify the need for themselves that would help them make their job better and do better. So what is it that's keeping them over and over? There's a pattern there, there's a an emotional charge they get when they even just think about that thing. So what is the problem? And then, what is the unmet need underlying that for themselves? So, because they're leaders, I'm going to actually say two things. I want them to do that for themselves and I want them at the start, in August, or whenever they're going back for their first PD session, at the very beginning, I want them to ask their teachers what is it that you need to do your job better and you can even say under $10 or that doesn't cost anything, something like that. No-transcript no-transcript. It really is. 0:27:34 - Lindsay Lyons It's so simple and and I think it speaks to you know Mason's need for freedom, right, like it's just like everyone just wants the freedom and autonomy to be able to like get what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space? 0:27:50 - Charle Peck Yes, and, and your educators will want to be in your space when you do this more, and it doesn't take much at all to do so. Yeah, it's, it's pretty simple. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Okay, so my final two questions for you. One, super just for fun, does not have to relate to work, but, ken, what is something you've been learning about lately? 0:28:13 - Charle Peck Oh, my goodness, I have been throwing myself at a lot of different things. I keep throwing myself back at new practices with trauma and more neural connections of what's going on in our brain and body connection. A lot of it is refreshing, but there's a lot of new data out there. So that's kind of general. But to me and some people I know you can't use the word trauma, so just think of stress and how it shows up in your body. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons So I know that's not that exciting but that's what I keep going back to. I think it's super exciting. Stuff like that relates on just like the day-to-day level very relevant, so I love relevant. 0:28:41 - Charle Peck Yeah, it shows up everywhere, everywhere. 0:28:44 - Lindsay Lyons Totally, and so the last question that I think folks are probably waiting for is where can listeners learn more about you, connect with you? I think you have resources to share, so if you want to talk about those, feel free to use this time. 0:28:55 - Charle Peck Oh, I would love to share the resource because it's absolutely free, of course, and it's a document. It's a 15-page document. Don't be overwhelmed by that. You can section it off. It's for you, as an administrator, to use with your mental health team members, so that's, with your school counselor, your AP, your school-based social worker and that rockstar teacher that has a great voice and a pulse on your whole school. Bring them into that darn meeting. And what it does is it has you do checklists of like, what is your school climate like now? So, as you're starting the year, it doesn't matter where you are in the year you still need to look at this, but you can just do checklists. And what it's there for is not to solve all your problems, but it's helping you identify the areas of need, more importantly, what your areas of strengths are, because you're doing a lot of things right. And then it helps you whittle down, kind of like okay, what is it that I need to focus on next or first in order to create a shift that we need desperately? So that is, it's called the school mental health audit. And, again, use it with your team. You also get some posters in the path of possibilities A poster of that. A visual is there that you can just hang up on the walls too. 0:30:00 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and that's free for people, right? They can grab that for free, absolutely free. 0:30:04 - Charle Peck Yes. 0:30:05 - Lindsay Lyons Awesome. Did you want to talk at all about your course that folks might want to take as well? 0:30:13 - Charle Peck Yeah, I actually get a lot of people asking about this, because when they learn about it in the workshops, they're like how can I learn all the skills? So it's called the nine essential skills course. It's all self-paced. Some administrators are either handpicking people to take it because it's all self-paced. It's worth between nine and 12 credit hours. It's about how long it takes. There's a workbook, the slides are there. There's a video of me walking you through the slides. It's got all like some bonus items too. So if anyone wants to do that, just go to my website, thrivingeducatororg. That's thrivingeducatororg. Just click on courses and it's there. There's a few packages. People are asking me about coaching them through that course too, and that's an option as well. And some people and these are a lot of school counselors and APs actually want to learn how to facilitate this information to their staff. So there is a plan for that. They just have to ask me about it, because that's in production now. But yeah, just go to thrivingeducatororg. You can check out all that we do. We do speaking. There's courses, there's workshops, but click on the courses page. 0:31:15 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and I'll link to that in the blog post version of this episode for folks, and I have to say this has been so exciting. I am so grateful for your time today and just all the thoughts that are immediately applicable to people's daily lives, no matter what role they hold, so I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you so much, charlie. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much, lindsay.
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In this episode, we’re exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and visually houses all of the lesson goals in the context of the Essential Question and the course priority standards.
If you’re supporting teachers to develop their own standards-aligned units, this curriculum design approach may help! Why? This ASCD white paper summarizes McTighe & Wiggins’ Understanding by Design (UbD) framework for backwards planning. Simplified, it’s basically: What do you want students to achieve?; How will you know students have achieved these goals?; What learning experiences will best support them to get there? For more information on backwards planning, check out my blog post: Backwards Plan from the End of the School Year: The What. Hattie’s research shows giving students feedback—this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment is—has a large effect size at 0.70! So, intentionally building in regular points of clear feedback to students based on a skill(s) they’ve been working on is important. Another piece to consider is how we share feedback on assessments with students. Proficiency-based rubrics that focus on a handful of priority standards are my suggestion. Here’s why: Haystead and Marzano (2009) found teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time using proficiency-based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement. In these classes, students learned more, experienced less stress, and had better teacher-student relationships. This approach also decreased inequitable “achievement” gaps (Crescendo Ed Group). What? I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed a competency-based rubric, and drafted a unit Essential Question (EQ). The next step was to plan the assessments that would assess the rubric skills and help address the EQ. This is the visual I designed to show how all of the pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. 
Step 1: Start with the guard rails: EQ and Priority Skills.
I like selecting the priority standards first, since these are year-long and the EQ is unit-specific, but if an EQ generates excitement to plan, starting there is fine! For more on how to create a priority standards-based rubric, check out my podcast episode: Developing a Course-Long Rubric. For more on developing an engaging EQ, check out this podcast episode: Crafting a Compelling Driving Question. Step 2: Determine the final project. Ensure you can use the full rubric—all or nearly all priority skills—to assess students’ work. I like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here in terms of product (e.g., podcast, documentary, essay, presentation) and content sub-specialization (i.e., Which topic could they deeply dive into? or With which lens could they analyze the unit content?). For an example, check out my 5-minute YouTube video: Unit Planning Deep Dive: Standards-Aligned Projects. Step 3: Choose the length of the unit and cadence of formative assessments. Longer units enable more depth, so in the template linked below, I’ve included an 8-week and 10-week template. I recommend a more “formal” formative assessment happens about once a week in which students receive specific feedback on at least one line of the rubric. I like standard weekly activities, so Feedback Fridays could be a nice use of that cadence. It also sets standard expectations for students. Step 4: Fill in the formatives. What should students be able to do at the end of each week? What format will each assessment take? Each assessment should be able to be assessed using at least one line of the course-long priority standards rubric. Flag the skill (rubric line) in your planning, so you can make sure you’re building all skills over the course of the unit evenly or strategically (e.g., you may have skills that build on each other or appear in an arc like inquiry activities.) Step 5: Fill in the lessons. Determine what you will teach each day to build students’ content knowledge and skills over the unit, ensuring they are prepared for each assessment when they get there. I use quick phrases for big lesson ideas when outlining my unit in a template like this. Details can come later! Final Tip There is no one right way to plan. Find the planning strategy that works best for your teachers’ brains and go with that. As long as the key ideas of backwards planning and competency-based assessment are present and the unit is coherent and interesting, all is well! To help you start coaching your teachers to unit plan from assessments, I’m sharing my Assessment-Driven Unit Outline with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Hello everyone, welcome to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're going to talk through and share a planning, a unit planning approach, where you backwards plan from your assessments. I know I've shared many unit building approaches in this podcast so far. Just want to give you one more in case perhaps some of the previous approaches feel like there's too many steps or it doesn't work with my brain Always happy to share another one. So here we go. We're exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and then it's going to visually house all of the lesson goals in the context of the essential question and the course priority standards. So we really, truly have all the pieces there in this visual way that really leans into the backwards planning approach. So if you're supporting teachers to develop their own standards aligned unit, or if you are a teacher developing your own, this curriculum design approach may help. So let's look at the why first. Let's look at the research. So there is an ASCD white paper that summarizes Antigua Wiggins' understanding by design framework. You may have been calling this UBD for short. This is backwards planning and simplified. Basically, what it summarizes it to is what do you want students to achieve Right? What's the end goal? How will you know students have achieved these goals Right? How are you going to assess it? What learning experiences will best support them to get there? What are your lessons going to be? And you can read more on the on the white paper. I have linked to that in my blog post. Feel free, but I think these are the three big goals. So what does that mean? When we are planning, we need to make sure we have an end goal. So, like what are the skills they are developing? What can they do? How will we know what are the assessments in place and what learning experiences are going to help them build those skills so they can do the final assessment and feel successful and not overly challenged right? So what's the learning journey? What are the lesson level activities? I also want to bring in Hattie's research here. So John Hattie's research on effect sizes shows that giving students feedback and this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment, is has a large effect size at about 0.70. So this is considered very high in terms of effect sizes, meaning that intentionally building regular points of clear feedback, ie formative assessments to students based on those skills that they've been working on is a really clear stamp of check for understanding in terms of their development. You can kind of level set their understanding of where they're at with your assessment of where they're at and it informs, ultimately, their ability to self-assess, it informs their progress and their next step. It makes them feel like there is a path forward where they will be able to achieve all the things that you want them to and hope for them right. Another piece of information to consider is how we share that feedback on assessments with our students and so, in terms of what it literally is that we are doing with students, the paper that they receive, for example, proficiency-based rubrics that focus on just a handful right. I've heard them called the Fab Five of priority standards. That's my suggestion. So here's the research on that. Hayes and Marzano found that teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time Again five is great Using the proficiency-based rubrics, where we talk about levels of proficiency and lay it out for students very clearly in student understandable, accessible language. Right here is meeting the standards, exceeding the standards, approaching the standards, whatever the categories, are Folks who use that. Teachers who used that measurement of the same skills over time, using proficiency-based rubric, noted a 34% gain in student achievement in these classes, more than their peers in classrooms that did not use this right. So that far surpasses I mean by like a third more, like 130%, you know. Whatever that is huge. So in these classes students really were learning more, they had the information, they retained the information longer, but they also experienced less stress in the classroom, which I find really important, given that we are experiencing or observing very high reports of student stress, anxiety, depression, all of the things, particularly COVID and beyond, but even before. So it was markedly higher than years prior and that students in those classrooms where that type of feedback and assessment was happening had better teacher-student relationships. So again, I think that's probably contributing right to the decreased stress or decreased anxiety around things and feeling more successful. Is that relationships might be even a mediator. I'm not saying they are, I have not looked at that research angle but this approach, it really is equitable in nature because one of the things that the research also found is that it decreased the inequitable quote achievement gaps which were, you know, racialized, economized, like all the things, and so noting that this is truly an equitable move to think about, assessing in this way to think about backwards, planning in this way, with intentional assessment and an opportunity to share feedback with students. That builds their skills, decreases their stress, increases equity in your school and ultimately fosters really great student-teacher relationships. Okay, given all of that context, let's go ahead and look at, like, what are we actually talking about? For you know, maybe, what form might I give a teacher that I'm coaching to help them plan in this way? So I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed the competency-based rubric which we just spoke to in that Hazel and Marzano research and drafted their unit essential questions. So I do think that it's important that we first do those pieces and if you're looking for information or how to's on how to do this, check out my previous curriculum design series in the past podcast episodes of Time for Teachership. Okay, so once we have a clear understanding of what are my top five priority standards, build out that competency or proficiency-based rubric. What are the different levels of proficiency? What does that look like for each standard? I have kind of a one-pager that I can use for any assessment for the whole year. And then, when we look at the unit level, the big first step is to think what is that exciting, compelling, essential question where every lesson in that unit will tie back to and give students information on how to respond to that essential question. Once we have that and again there are past episodes on how to do that well the next step is to plan the assessment that would assess the rubric skills and help address the essential question. So you're thinking about what do they need to be able to demonstrate in terms of skills and what content do they need to be able to respond to that essential question? So we're thinking skills and content, which is usually how we plan. So I designed a visual that I will link in the blog post for this episode to really demonstrate how all these pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. So I will describe this to you if you are driving, if you are able to grab the blog post. This is linked at lindsaybathlionscom slash blog, slash 187. But we have along the top. We have a rectangle on top which says essential question and a rectangle on the bottom which says comprehensive priority skills rubric. So again, these two pieces are foundational At this point in the planning. Once you get the template I'm sharing with you today. Those should be done and we should know the essential question and we should know the priority skills as well as have a rubric with details of the proficiency. Now the middle really speaks to the rest. So, while the essential question is what content we're teaching, or related to what content we're teaching, and the comprehensive priority skills rubric is what skills we are teaching or assessing students on, in the middle you can imagine several kind of circles leading up to a big kind of star I'm not quite sure how to describe this as a visual star with many points. So that's kind of like a really big circle or really that's the summative All along the way. Those circles leading up to the big star are smaller formative assessments and this answers the question thinking about that UBD framework, how do you know that students know the content and the skills right on the top and the bottom rectangles? So what we're going to do is these are kind of thinking about the guardrails of the unit, right? We have our essential question, we have our priority skills and, again, these are going to be year-long priority skills. You can actually reuse this over and over. The essential question is going to be unit-specific, right? So if you would like more information on how to develop any of those. I've actually linked to those previous episodes and blog posts in this blog, so feel free to go ahead and grab the information there. Now the next step after we've figured out the guardrails, the EQ, the priority standards, we need to figure out what is that final summative assessment. So what I would first do is make sure whatever ideas you have whether you're kind of doing a brainstorm dump, talking with a group, looking at what maybe other folks do however, you're getting that inspiration. Your mental checklist here should be that you can use that full rubric of all, or nearly all, priority standards for the course, for the year, to be able to assess students' work. So I should see, for example, if I'm using a social studies rubric that's claim, evidence, reasoning, written expression or clear communication, some sort of like. Does your, are the words that you wrote down like organized and can I understand them right? Some people would call these conventions whatever. If those are my four for the year, I want to make sure that my task has something to do with developing an argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down. Argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down, so I have clear written expression. So I have actually covered all four skills and I can assess all four skills in this particular assessment. So make sure you can do that and I really like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here Gives you room for that co-creation, that student excitement, student ownership of the product. So the product can vary, but the prompt itself is going to be the same, right? So you might say the essential question is and I am just going off the top here of my head, so it's not a great one, but like I always use, like safety or freedom, so does the United States in 2024 enable residents to have more safety or more freedom? Right? And then so they would have to choose one side of that argument and then develop out their argument Now how they demonstrate. That could be a podcast, it could be a documentary where they're interviewing different people and their responses to that question. It could be bringing in clips, right. Whatever documentary consists of, it could be writing a traditional essay, it could be putting something into a PowerPoint, it could be a visual art collage or series where they explain in the captions exactly what their argument is. It could also be that they sub-specialize. So in that specific example, maybe they sub-specialize into like, okay, in 2024, when, at the beginning of the year or the end of the year, 2024 compared to another time point in history, compared to another country currently or in history, what about the people? Right, for whom? Right, who has more safety and more freedom? Right, if we're talking about incarcerated populations, like they're going to have a very different story than folks who are not experiencing incarceration. So I mean, I think just being able to invite students to sub-specialize or take a particular lens to the overall topic that all students are covering really gets them excited. And so when you develop the final project, I'm thinking more that you're developing the prompt and it might just be answer the essential question, and then you have some product options or you have students kind of create their own ideas for product options as well as keeping the essential question or the summative prompt broad enough that they can say I want to sub-specialize in, like different areas, and there's room for them to do that. If you would like some examples of how to plan your unit, that is, standards aligned, I do have a YouTube video that I will link to this episode's blog post. Okay, step number three. So just a reminder we have put on the guardrails of the EQ and the priority standards, we've determined the final project and now we need to figure out the formatives. So at this point we want to choose how long the unit is going to last how many weeks, for example and the cadence of formative assessment. So how often are you going to assess? I think longer units enable more depth here. So in the template that I will link in this blog post as your freebie, I've included an eight-week and a 10-week template option. You can certainly adjust from here, but I do like the depth that this involves and it enables you to kind of average around one unit per quarter, which is nice in terms of assessments, you will have one summative assessment per report card if you are a quarter-based school in terms of report card issuing. Now I recommend a more formal formative assessment happens, I would say, about once a week. I think that's a good blend of being able to truly kind of quote-unquote grade or assess or give feedback to students as the teacher, right, but then also have students get it more frequently than like every two weeks, right. They need to know where they're at and have that feedback more regularly. So I don't think this needs to be the entire rubric. I think you want to determine, as the teacher, or you want to coach people, to determine, if you're coaching teachers to build this out what feedback they're going to get. So if I am building up to a four-line rubric right, let's use that example again of claim evidence, reasoning and written expression then I might say one week I am making sure that students get feedback on their claim, and the next week I'm making sure they get feedback on their evidence reasoning, and then the fourth week maybe we're doing some written expression, some conventions work, whatever. So that might be a cadence that you use. You can certainly assess and give feedback more often, but I think this is kind of the target, knowing that teachers are very busy and have to grade a lot of things. So weekly activities are great. I like building it into my schedule as well in terms of the student lens, of when students get to actually engage with that feedback, perhaps take action based on that feedback within the class and not making it something they have to take it home to do or leave it up to them to decide when and where they're doing it. So I like to do something like feedback Fridays or, you know, workshop Fridays. I used to use Fridays, but you can use Wednesdays, you can do alliteration, whatever you think works best. But I think that weekly activities that are embedded, you're not teaching a new lesson, but we're really giving students the skill building opportunity to review their feedback and take action based on it. Perhaps conference with the teacher, that could be a nice use of that weekly cadence and it sets that standard expectation for our students so they know that space to talk with a teacher or to get feedback specifically on their work is happening. All right, step four we've kind of figured out the outline of the formatives but we want to fill it in. So what should students be able to do at the end of each week? So, again, thinking about that skill, thinking about the content they should know each week, building up to be assessed, using, as I said, one line of that course long priority standards rubric. And I want you to, or coach teachers to flag the skill which is the rubric line in the planning so you make sure you're building all of them over the course of the unit either evenly, like we talked about, with like one per week. So if we have four standards for the summative that we're assessing, you know one week is standard one, two, three, four or strategically, so you might have skills build on each other or appear in an arc, that kind of continue. So you might actually do something like this. Let's say we have week one, claim, week two, evidence, week three, reasoning, and then we're going to go back to claim evidence, reasoning again. So we've done six weeks and now in the seventh week we're just introducing writing conventions, right, and then we might even have like a okay, I'm going to do your evidence with reasoning, I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see your evidence with reasoning. I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see how your evidence and your analysis are connected, because they are very interconnected as standards, right, and so you can kind of like play with it and build students up, right. Alternatively, you could say okay, claim, write a claim, claim evidence. Okay, now claim evidence reasoning. You could do multiple standards each week. You could also have students practice each standard each week, but you're just giving feedback on one of those pieces or your teachers are just giving feedback on one of those pieces. So just kind of saying that there's many ways to do this, but we want to be intentional, that we do cover all of the standards we're eventually assessing and we do give students at least one time point during the unit where we're giving them feedback on it and letting them do something with that feedback to grow that skill. Okay, number five this is where you fill in the lessons. So you're going to determine at this point what you will teach each day to build students content, knowledge and skills over the unit. So this is where teachers are really planning out the preparation students will have coming into the assessment. I usually plan really lightly here, so I will use a quick phrase for a big lesson idea when outlining my unit in this template, for example, that I'm sharing with you. Details can always come later. So that means if I'm saying, okay, we need to really like, explore possible claims, or we are going to look at what makes a good claim, we're going to look at mentor texts or something. Then I would just write mentor texts in my outline at this point. I'm not going to find my mentor text right now. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of Googling and finding some great mentor text. That's going to take me way too long and it's a different set of skills than outlining and planning. So you want to keep it real light touch here. Key phrases, key ideas we will go back and fill in the details later. That's a completely different mindset that you want to be in. It's a completely different skill set. So if we're bouncing back and forth, this is going to take way longer and people are going to be frustrated when your teachers are filling this out. If you're a coach like you, don't want to breathe the frustration. You want to build the. Yes, this is possible, we can do this, and so really stay on that high level. Just a word or phrase to indicate the general skill or content that you're building there. As a final tip. So we went through all five steps here. There is no one right way to plan. There are so many options for you and so this is one way if you want to adapt this way or go back in the podcast library here and find a different way, find a way that I haven't talked about at all, totally something that will work for you. Whatever your brain wants you to do, I think go with that, right? So if you have some teachers who are really excited to plan in one way and some teachers who are excited in another, great, and then you just set the parameters for, for example, you have to have these components, but they can come in any order and you can build them out in any way and your visual presentation of all this on one page can be very different, right? So the key ideas are backwards planning. We wanna start at the end. We wanna go to the beginning Again. If you wanna start with the essential question or something instead of the priority standards, that's fine, but we do, as we're planning out the formative assessments and the lessons, we do need to have the summative in mind. We do need to have kind of an idea first. Even if it's not the format, it's like the question they're going to answer, right, which could again be the essential question, which is fine if you're starting there. For that reason, as long as that key idea of backwards planning is in place in some way, and as long as competency based assessment is present and the unit is overall pretty coherent and interesting, I think all is well, great, go for it. So we've talked through a lot of our steps. If you would like to actually get the template that I was kind of talking through that you may use, you can grab it for free at the blog post for this episode. It's called an Assessment Driven Unit Outline and it is located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 187. Until next time, everybody. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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In this episode, we speak with Biz Thompson to apply a step-by-step unit planning protocol to dream up a new book-based unit that will cultivate deep thinking.
Biz currently works as a middle school librarian in Framingham, Massachusetts. Previously a high school English teacher for eight years, Biz brings a teacher-oriented approach to her work and curriculum development. Unit Planning Step 1: Context/Spark In Biz’s experience, book-based curriculum design is best when it’s centered around identity. Both middle schoolers and high schoolers are finding out who they are and identity is where we inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts are chosen. So, selecting books that resonate with students’ identities and backgrounds is an important starting point. Unit Planning Step 2: Pursuits (from Dr. Muhammad’s HILL Model) Identity: The goal is to help students explore and understand their own identities and those of others. Middle and high school students are in a stage of discovering who they are, which makes it crucial to select texts that reflect diverse experiences and perspectives. For example, there are many students from South America where Biz works in Framingham. Though challenging, it’s important to find books that represent their experience but don’t pigeon-hole students or rely on harmful stereotypes. Criticality: Engaging students in discussions about power, equity, and the disruption of oppression involves choosing texts that challenge and expand their understanding of these concepts. Students can also give input on what texts are studied and how they should be studied. For example, Biz recounts a conversation in the classroom over the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While there are some problematic themes of white saviorism and harmful language, students still wanted to study the book—just using a critical lens to analyze it and draw important insights. Joy: Biz reflects on how it can be difficult to find joyful texts that are seen as carrying literary weight, as many are full of serious and heavy topics. Still, it’s important to integrate joyful elements into the curriculum by balancing identity and critical themes while also providing moments of joy or hope. Unit Planning Step 3: Project Question A central question for framing units is, "How can students' personal identities and background knowledge be integrated into their understanding of complex themes like justice and systemic issues?" Another framing question can be how can we as a school community and class heal together? The goal is not to sit in the oppression, but move through it and repair it with the students’ voices and perspectives leading the way. Unit Planning Step 4: Summative Project (Publishing Opportunity and Possible Formats) Book-based units are most effective when students are empowered and equipped as leaders, participating actively in their communities. Culminating projects and activities can be designed with this in mind, offering opportunities for civic action and community involvement. Biz reflects on the eighth grade curriculum that requires a civics project in Social Studies, so ELA (English Language Arts) teachers can collaborate to align the curricula. Their civics projects can apply what they are learning to a real-life context and integrate literary studies with practical civic action. Unit Planning Step 5: Unit Arc While studying challenging topics such as the Holocaust or the justice system, educators need to be aware of how these difficult themes and ideas impact the students in their class. Before diving into them directly, there needs to be a sense of safety and community to learn, grow, and dive into challenging discussions together. Take time at the start of the unit to do this! Thinking of a unit arc that centers the question of “how do we heal together?” means providing various entry points for students coming from different backgrounds. Language differences, expression, linguistic ability, and personal experiences means students come to the unit from all different ways of approaching a text. So, educators can offer multiple access points to understand and learn what the book is talking about, such as sharing by writing, verbally, or doing a gallery walk. Another perspective in considering your unit arc is to consider how to bring the text to life. One option is to integrate literature with community-based projects, such as inviting guest speakers or organizing discussions with local officials, which really enhances students' engagement and understanding of the text they’re engaging with. Stay Connected You can connect with Biz on the Cameron Library page of the Framingham website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Biz is sharing the link to Facing History & Ourselves which uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 186 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons biz. Welcome to the time for teachership podcast. Thank you, I am so excited to have you here. I am curious to know if there is um anything like right when we're jumping into the conversation, that you want to share with folks who might be listening or reading the blog post version of this conversation. That's like maybe the either impetus for our conversation or context for maybe some of the ideas you'll share books you'll share about today. Sure. 0:00:32 - Biz Thomspon So I'm a school librarian in Framingham, massachusetts. I was a high school English teacher for eight years before I transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian. So I come from like maybe more of the teacher lens than other librarians do and I learned about you from our fabulous Framingham team librarian, john Garrigan Amazing. 0:00:58 - Lindsay Lyons I'm so excited as a fellow like high school literacy and social studies teacher, I'm very excited. 0:01:02 - Biz Thomspon Yes. 0:01:05 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, so cool. Okay, so if we are going to take the approach of kind of brainstorming a unit or like something that maybe a high school or middle school or whoever ELA teacher might be able to actually do in their class, I would love to start with, maybe, what you would like in this, what you envision students to be like learning or pursuing through reading, through texts, through books and I often ground us in things like the three parts of Goldie Muhammad's framework. So she talks about, like identity how will my instruction help students learn something about themselves or others? She talks about criticality, so disrupting power and oppression, and like kind of navigating conversations with that. And or joy, just like how do we find joy in right? Like those are three very different things, so we can focus on anywhere. 0:01:56 - Biz Thomspon your brain takes you Sure yeah, I feel like it's really hard to find joy in the texts that we choose for middle schoolers and high schoolers. There's not a lot of joy out there. Is there In things that are considered to have literary merit. There isn't. It's usually dark themes. It's actually kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. Kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. What's been interesting in my time in Framingham is so I was working at the high school it was basically like we had a book room and there were books and then you would build the unit around the book, and so much of that is shifting and in the last curriculum redesign we did, our focus was on building background knowledge and not necessarily in the literacy or in the you know all those things that you just mentioned. But I find that I look to identity a lot when I'm thinking about books, because for middle schoolers and high schoolers they're finding out who they are and that's where we always inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts we're choosing, and so that kind of becomes hard in a place like Framingham where a lot of the students at my school not necessarily in every school are from South America. They're from Brazil and there really aren't a lot of texts that center around even South American children, families, so it's really hard to match identity perfectly with that. And I think we've also talked a lot about in our learning spaces that some of the even if we're looking at them like a Latin American text, if we can't get to South America that we're looking for texts that don't pigeonhole or focus on harmful stereotypes, which can be difficult to do. So there are some instructors who will look at a book about, you know, students crossing the border and say this is relevant and it is. But we're at a point where we also have students who just like go to school and have families and do the regular things that teenagers do without all of that too, and there's not as much representation in that space. I think. Um, I've also worked sometimes with my avid 10 year old who's in fifth grade and she goes to a Montessori school, and we'll run ideas back and forth too, so like they've been working on topics of like, inclusion and thinking about cognitive differences, physical differences and how to learn and create empathy there, and so we'll bounce titles back, which is kind of fun, but then it's always like the teachers in our area are like reading all the books and I think there also has to be good writing right. We can have joyful books, we can have, you know, we can have books that sort of capture identity, but if they're not well-written they're not coming from a soulful place. The kids know that and they don't. They don't care for it very much. 0:05:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that idea of becoming from a soulful place, being like the thing that's yeah accurate, like yes, amazing yes, we learned about holding Caulfields. 0:05:21 - Biz Thomspon We know who the ponies are, so that's so good, oh my gosh. 0:05:27 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, and I also just love who. So I also live in Framingham and just like the very like high Brazilian population, like wanting to name, but like you want to be able to like see yourself where and put yourself in that position of like I can identify with those main characters. And then, if you don't have texts that are translated to English, that are either written by Brazilian authors or, you know, centered in Brazil, or like having a Brazilian American identity, like it's like okay, right, how do we find something that's general, not oppressive and so connected, right? 0:06:01 - Biz Thomspon This is like such a multifaceted kind of thinking about identity that's so important, so I just appreciate you naming it, yeah, yeah and it's, and I think like, um, in some ways, publishing is so far ahead of where it was when I was a student, when so many of my colleagues were students, but sometimes, um, like educators will presume that there's something there that isn't there yet, right, even in non-fiction, like we need non-fiction books that don't have a lexile of, like high school for middle schoolers. Um, we need to look beyond. Well, I love, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are other people that they're important, um to us, right, uh, that we need to be writing about, and I feel like publishers look to the same people and they just publish like book after book about those people or those experiences, and we're not like branching out so much. 0:07:00 - Lindsay Lyons So true, so true. I'm curious to know is there a particular like question that you find interesting for students to grapple with around either identity or just like reading books in general, or like to your point about building background knowledge? Is there kind of a framing question that comes to mind? If we were to like brainstorm this out, yeah, I think like oh, there's a student. 0:07:25 - Biz Thomspon I think usually when we're designing units in particular, we do have sort of a central question. So I keep thinking of when we were redesigning the eighth grade curriculum so our eighth graders read the Memoir Night by. Elie Wiesel and they had also traditionally read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and we revisit To Kill a Mockingbird frequently because it's, you know, we have the white savior story there and there's some, you know, harmful language that sometimes students of color have not been so comfortable with and I think our teachers do a great job of acknowledging that and sort of working through it and talking about that. And it was interesting. We were thinking of pulling it one year and I teach like a flexible class and the students in there. I asked them like should we keep this book? Should we not? Like this is what the conversations are and most of them actually said it's great, we should read adults um version, uh, to sort of tell lots of sides of that story of like justice, right, um, and all of that's very heavy and um. So we were looking for a book to start the year that um captured identity and we landed on Don't Ask Me when I'm From by Jen DeLeon and she's from Framingham and when I read her book it really resonated as like honest to me, right, this was an amalgamation of her experiences as a Guatemalan American growing up in Framingham, of her experiences teaching students in Boston, and the book deals with, you know, metco and what that looks like and microaggressions and things like that, and so I think when the teachers are working through that unit they're looking for students to make those personal connections and build their background knowledge and learn a little bit about Netco. You know they talk about sort of like microaggression, about code switching, things like that, and it also, I think, maybe gives vocabulary that they might not have for those experiences that they're probably having all the time in the world and I think it's a way for the kids to get to know each other and to understand what their spaces are. And there are some activities that students do. So in the book, the characters there's sort of like a mean girls moment where they have this like full school like assembly to deal with some of the racial incidents that have been happening. And there's been all this documentation about, like, building the wall on the border right, so the students decide to subvert it by creating a wall, but then everyone puts sort of like their own kind of experience in school what they want people to know. And some of our teachers have started doing that sometimes when they read the book and it's really eyeopening to see that, like it tends to be the moment when students say the quiet part out loud, they share the thing that like people might presume about them but isn't true. It's a sort of defy those stereotypes and I think there's a lot of power in that. And then, and when we first decided, kids were like oh, this is great. And now, because it's in school, they're kind of like oh, this is like, just okay, I'm like it's not, like I don't know. This is as close to you as we're getting. I forget what your original question was, but but that's sort of mind when we're thinking about how do we frame units and how do we add, weave identity, and then all that good stuff. 0:11:31 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love all of the pieces of that, all of the books that cover different aspects of identity and like to embed that kind of like disruption and building the background knowledge, like you're kind of like taking us through all the nuances of all the pieces which I love, yeah, the initial question was just kind of like is there a question that frames all of it like an essential question? 0:11:48 - Biz Thomspon yeah, I think from the educator standpoint, not necessarily from the student standpoint. The question we were asking ourselves is we are, when we are going into material like the holocaust, like the justice system, and students are also learning civics now at the same time so they're learning about the legal system, about how our government works how can we get them there from a place that is closer to where they are right? Because I think teachers were finding that when they just had to jump into the holoca, reading like Telltale Heart or whatever there wasn still feel very strongly about the content of the book and it's awful Like it's really hard to read and you need to have a community in place and you need to have some safety with each other in order to do that. In order to do that, and so I think we were trying to center it in their own identity and, kind of like, build towards. Okay, then we're going to move on to these really tough, hard topics together. 0:13:06 - Lindsay Lyons Two things I want to lift up from that. One is kind of right, there's kind of this base building of the foundational trust and community that has to happen as part of the unit or prior to the unit, because otherwise you're not going to get what you need out of it, right, students will have a harmful experience or something right. And then the other one I'm thinking I know you shared the teacher lens, right as like get them together as close as they are as possible. I was thinking the student lens of that or like the essential question of that that student facing might be. Like how do we like heal together? Because, oh yeah, right, it's almost like you're showing, I'm just thinking like right, like with the Holocaust, with like there's harm in there, just mercy, it's all about like the harm of the structures and the systems, the school assembly, or like the wall piece that you were saying from don't ask me where I'm from Like there's, there's all these confrontations of harm. And then it's like, how do these communities we're learning about? But also, how do we as a school community, as a class, like heal together? Because ultimately we don't want to sit in the oppression, we want to like move through it and repair, yeah, with our voice, with our own voices, not somebody else's. 0:14:09 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, yes. 0:14:10 - Lindsay Lyons I love the element of student leadership and youth leadership in that, so I love that. I'm almost wondering is there something that either you did when you did the curriculum revamp or that you're thinking now as we're talking through? That would be like a kind of culminating project or activity, that students are kind of putting all these pieces together into some sort of like civic action or like community piece. 0:14:34 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, well there is something kind of naturally embedded, not in their English language arts class but in their social studies class. So every eighth grader is tasked with completing a civics project. I think what would be great actually was if there was space for the ELA teachers and the social studies teachers to align and kind of look at what they've studied so far in ELA to try and focus there. And I think the civics project was rolled out in the 2020 school year, so they're still figuring out how to do it. So I don't want to fall. I had to teach civics then too, so I get it. But I think if, like down the the road, if there were collaboration time, that would be a great way to um, put those two things together. There have been been in what I've taught in eighth grade enrichment class, so students who are sort of like above grade level, where we've worked on some community advocacy, like I've asked them, like, when you look around, what do you think needs to be better? And then we try to find the points of contact or find and students have had like meetings with the superintendent and things like that, and it's not always related to like exactly what they're reading, but it is related to building that voice and, and it's funny like, sometimes they'll be like well, we need to change the time of school and then we'll go down and they're like, actually that's kind of impossible, but that's learning Right, you know, like, and it's in their hands. It's probably hard for me, but sometimes I try to take a step back. It's very hard for me to. Sometimes I try to take a step back and I haven't had a chance to do that in a while, but I look forward to doing it again. 0:16:19 - Lindsay Lyons I love all the whole process of that right Like so to be able to identify the issues and draw those parallels to what they might be reading. I love the interdisciplinary nature of social studies. The piece being like that project is such a nice organic way of like you're already doing this. What can you learn from? Or, yeah, um, the texts. And then, yeah, I, I love the goal of building voice that you named, and also just that that it is hard, that it's not easy, and that to really develop youth leadership, we have to just confront those challenges and and get familiar with them, and we also have to have it sounds like you do at Framingham have the audience that's authentic from the adult perspective, like we're willing to meet with you. Share the restrictions, talk through and kind of problem solve together. So I do think that's like I'm just thinking of foundational. If you're teaching something like this, right, these are that kind of foundational community wide things to just make sure, because you don't want the students to go into the superintendent and the superintendent's like I don't have time for this or anything yeah, and I think too. 0:17:16 - Biz Thomspon I think, as you know, when I have the occasion to sit in with teachers and they're developing assessments and things, I tried to and as a high school teacher I wasn't very good at doing this but just I find when students are each other's audiences, the quality of the work is better than when they think they're just submitting something to a teacher. If it's public, if it's an audience of your peers, I think that automatically sort of brings a level of persistence that might not be there. If you're like, oh, the same adult is going to read this again and I'll just admit it and they'll tell me how I did, and that's the end yeah, the authentic audience and project so incredible. 0:18:03 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, like to have um an assignment, feel like there's some real weight behind it and, yeah, yeah, change can happen. 0:18:11 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, that's really good so you remember to like put a period at the end of your sentence or whatever. 0:18:16 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, yes, oh my gosh, I, I like, I'm loving all of these pieces. I'm curious to know if there's any like ELA teacher activities that you particularly enjoy to have students almost like on a smaller level, like when engaging with text, be each other's audience or be each other's like partners, and like I don't know if it was like literature circles or Socratic seminars. I'm trying to think of some of the protocols of like. How do we get students to engage and kind of learn from each other versus like the teacher directed? Yeah, that. 0:18:45 - Biz Thomspon I I used to more often sometimes when classes, so the seventh graders used to do like dystopian literature circles and I would get to facilitate some of them. And some teachers have like amazing, and they do it at my daughter's school to, where you know role assignments, you know, so someone's the historian and you know, and it's so great when you have kids who are really like well prepared to sit back and just watch them. There we had he's not here anymore, but we had a great teacher, andrew ahern, who his lit circles were something to behold, like sometimes I'd just be sitting there and like be like these kids are they really? They just got that on their own like this is amazing. They were reading ghost by jason reynolds, which I love, and I was like well, I actually never thought about that, you know like 11 year old, um, but I think there's for our students, there's a lot of skill that is required to get to that place and I think, um, just situations and framing have have made it so that we're really focusing on building those skills back. So I think we've sort of like we did these things and now we kind of have to build those skills back, whether it's language skills or self-monitoring or whatever. Um, some kids are ready for that and others need some more help, um, but when they get there it's like so amazing to watch. And, um, my daughter's school does a lit circle at the end of the year where they invite parents in to participate with them and again, it's so great because, like, the kids are smarter than us for sure, you know. And it's interesting, like at my daughter's school, what was the book we read? Interesting, like, uh, at my daughter's school, oh, what was the book we read? Um, we read a book I can't think of the name but I'll email you but about a student who was sort of non-verbal but very, very white and, um, she struggles to sort of get what she needs in school. And my husband and I were explaining that when we were in school we never would have seen a student like that. They would have been like closed off in a separate part of the school and the younger kids were like, well, why didn't you make friends? We were like that's a great, we should have, but there wasn't any infrastructure where we would cross paths. And isn't it great that now you understand that that's the right thing to do, right, and it's so hard to get. Like you know, as kids get older it's harder to get parents to come in. But I would love to do that and in fact I'm going to start back up again, after the pandemic, our staff book club. So sometimes we read YA. I have to send out a Google form to get it sent out. But sometimes we historically read middle grade and YA and then my integrate adult books, because then they get you know, we, we have those conversations with each other and then can extend them to the kids if they see the book on our desk or whatever. I went in a lot of directions. 0:21:44 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my God, no, not like. Let's talk about the staff book. There goes, oh yeah, like, so many, so many cool things about this. I just love the idea of like. I mean I'm just thinking of like a unit arc, that right where we're talking about like, how do we, if we're guided by the question of like, how do we heal together? Right, I'm sure there are so many entry points for students to your point of like people are coming in in different ways and I'm sure they're linguistically, there's like different, like streets of expression and in terms of English and like. I just think there's so many opportunities to either, you know, verbalize and translate, because there are other peers that maybe have the Portuguese background and like a higher English proficiency. At the time I taught in a high school with students with like 30 different languages and they were all using English. So it's like having the having people who are in the same class, who speak the same home language as you or first language, is really helpful and so you know, I'm thinking being able to access that or like, if you're written or verbal, literacy is like one of those is higher. Just giving multiple access points for whether you're sharing verbally or in writing, like a gallery walk or something. I think there's probably so much opportunity for people to grapple with that question even before getting to the text. Oh yeah, and then being able to see like how do the people, how do the characters, how do the people in the, the stories, novels and the non-fiction like, how are they grappling with this question, be such a nice like motivating launching point, as like a hook right, and then having maybe the, the base be some sort of central text about like I don't know, I'm envisioning like UN declaration of rights or like something right, that's like central to justice yeah, um, one of the eighth grade ELA teachers looks at that with her students when they're reading um, to kill a mockingbird yeah for sure that's beautiful. 0:23:29 - Biz Thomspon I actually know with For sure, actually, no, with night, I think they look at that. I mean, we've done, we've really tried, especially, I think, because I helped with the curriculum planning for that group and the teachers have stayed the same. We've been able to do some some pretty neat things with trying to bring that text to life, text to life. So, um, one of our eighth grade teachers, miss latine, has a, a relative who works for um, it was like a the aclu or something, and she had him come and talk to the class. Um, after uh, this was a few years or maybe two years ago um, after the students read To Kill a Mockingbird and Just Mercy, we invited the Framingham police to come in and do round circle discussions with the students, which was actually like wonderful, we were very scared about how that was going to go and students asked really pointed questions. Like one student came in and the chief of police is wonderful, he's really the best and he said you know, like, where do you stand on Black Lives Matter? Like first question, right off the bat and the chief was like I am in absolute solidarity. I almost quit my job after I saw the George Floyd which, and hearing that from the students, was just like so eye opening, I think, because you know, especially in the public, like you know, kids have these and it's fair. They have these perceptions of the police and just mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system. Mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system and some of the teachers were like well, this is one you know, like we have to, we have to round out the discussion. And so we just had these classroom based discussions and the kids would ask, you know, even just like questions like how fun is it to ride in a patrol car? But it was good, like relationship building and community building, like relationship building and community building. And fortunately the Framingham PD, especially the people at the top who come here, have like one, the Lieutenant, I think, is like a trained social worker, and there are a bunch of people who like went through Framingham public school to like, no, all our staff when they come in, who it's sort of like you're looking at yourself Like I was this kid too. We've had. We have a Holocaust survivor come and speak to the students after their reading night. So you know, we we've really been trying to do these things and of course, that's not always so student centered Right, but trying to round out the experience. But I I think that's what we need to get back to more often is like more deep thinking, more critical thinking, more connection building between disciplines and ideas and within, like the arc of your ELA year. Um, because I think sometimes we get lost in the like multiple choice questions and it's always more engaging if you're using your brain with other students, with the outside world, and making those connections oh my gosh, yeah, and I I'm hearing so much community building and like community tapping into community expertise and like the guest speakers and things. 0:26:43 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. I'm I'm kind of wondering one of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of wondering. One of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of like you didn't dreaming episodes is like what is, what is the thing that you think will help? Like a teacher who went and like teaches this right, this unit, like this, like how did, how do you see that being, or how was it for you being? You know the, the best kind of teacher version of yourself in that moment, right, like, or like thinking about the kind of fulfillment it brings you to be able to kind of facilitate those connections. And I'm just thinking of that kind of. I guess the question is maybe about the value of this, not to just students but to educators as well who are engaging in this work. 0:27:24 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, so our two eighth grade ELA teachers are just like really exemplars. So one of them works for Facing History. He's been on the board and he just does such a brilliant job of like scaffolding and building and pulling out like pieces of nonfiction and you know, and really walking along with students as they're sort of learning about the Holocaust, building background knowledge. My roommate here, and with like a very like sensitive lens, if that makes sense, he's really an expert in that regard and um, we also collaborate. All three of us collaborate very well together and, um, his counterpart, emily latine, is like she could rip up the greatest lesson in like 15 minutes. It would be greater than anything I had ever taught. Like she gets the, gets the, all the accommodations, all the, you know adjustments for language capacity, visuals, like the most beautiful slides, like perfectly organized and sensical like worksheets to accompany you know'll do um like round tables where students are walking around and looking at images and right, you know silent conversations just between the two of them. They are able to capture like all the humanity that's necessary, all the background knowledge building and the sort of like making everything as accessible as possible, and I think they're really the magic. Then they come to me and I just step in and say like, well, we could add this. You know, I'm like the car salesman. They really do the groundwork and like a super beautiful way, and they will also be the first to acknowledge when something is isn't working and see how, what they can do to make it work better. And I think that's always the key. I mean, this is nothing nobody knows, but there's nothing wrong with saying like this isn't working anymore. We need to take a new approach, or I found this thing that now is better than what we did before, and I think openness to that is also super important. 0:29:44 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I love that you get to collaborate with awesome colleagues, and I also. The PSA embedded in that message is like talk to your librarian for those ideas of like right, where do we go with this? This text is getting old. 0:29:56 - Biz Thomspon Give me some ideas, yeah yeah, yeah, and that's the thing is that you know everyone's so busy. I understand that as a classroom teacher, but I often advertise them. Like I didn't have time to read books when I was an ELA teacher I didn't. I could read like a few. I was grading papers, I was doing all this crazy stuff like I didn't have time to read. And so I look at school library journals. So even if I haven't read it, like I know what's out there. I know what's good and not good for our students too. Right, like, because sometimes what critics think is good is like not at all what the kids here care about. Right. So I often advertise like you need nonfiction to support that lesson? I'll let me do it. You don't have to spend your time doing it. You need someone in the community to come. I'll do that. I'll definitely. If you have a good library, use them because I love it. Like I'm such a nerd. People are like I don't want to bother you. I'm like, no, this is my favorite thing to do. 0:30:59 - Lindsay Lyons You're not bothering me at all. I love this. I so love it and actually, yeah, if people want to like get in touch with you, connect with you if they don't have relationships with their library librarian if they ask you. 0:31:10 - Biz Thomspon I don't want to. 0:31:10 - Lindsay Lyons I don't want to be the job if people are curious to know, like some of, uh, the things you're working on. Is there a place that they could reach out to you or just see the work that the middle school is doing? 0:31:19 - Biz Thomspon so what's hard is that the school district decided to change our whole, the whole district's web presence this weekend, so but we can link later to the yeah so um, there is a link to my library page but it's sort of like the corporate school district stuff, but my email is there. Um, and you know also, I think, other credit too. To go back to John, john Garrigan and I started at the same time and a lot of people, like my roommate there, was just saying like, how does how does he? Because he comes in to our schools like once a month or whatever, and sets up a table and the kids know him. And she was like how does he get that to happen? But it's so natural, like it's just so we work together so nicely that even he I'll go to him and be like, okay, what's like? What manga do I need? What do you think about this? So you know also, your public librarians can be very, very helpful. If you don't have school librarians in your school, you know, get to know your public librarians, because they can be super helpful too, and especially as a community resource, because they also know everybody. 0:32:27 - Lindsay Lyons I love that because I actually didn't even know until I was on the Framingham library page. I was like a patron of Framingham yeah. 0:32:33 - Biz Thomspon I did not know that there was a teen, like person, like a specialist who specializes in teen and there's a children's specialist right so the children's specialist will go to the elementary schools and help them, like with summer reading, or they'll do activities or like they're really wonderful yeah. 0:32:52 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. You are a wealth of information and knowledge. Thank you so much for talking with us today, and I'm so excited for listeners to learn all of this from you when the episode airs. So, thank you, I'm just, I'm trying. 0:33:09 - Biz Thomspon I'm by no means a model. I'm just showing up. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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In this episode, we speak with Laura Brenner, Chief Program Officer at Discovering Justice, a non profit in Boston, MA. She discusses her journey from an elementary school educator to a civic education leader, elaborating on the "Children Discovering Justice" curriculum, a collaborative initiative aimed at fostering classroom democracy and empowering young minds to actively engage in their communities.
Even before taking on her role with Discovering Justice, Laura has extensive experience in this space. She has spent the last 15 years working towards equity through public education—teaching students, coaching teachers, and developing curriculum. Laura began her career teaching elementary school in Boston, and has gone on to pursue both a Masters in Teaching and Masters in School Leadership as she pursues work outside the classroom. The Big Dream Laura’s big dream for education is to see all schools as places that equip students with the knowledge and skills to be engaged in their communities. She envisions a world where students, through inquiry and engaging practices, feel connected to their classroom community, school, and broader society. Laura believes this is possible by empowering young people to dismantle systems of oppression, embrace classroom democracy, and foster a joy of learning. Mindset Shifts Required A significant mindset shift that Laura highlights is recognizing that all educators are civics educators. She emphasizes that civics is not confined to a single subject but is embedded in everyday teaching practices. Whether it's teaching graphing using voting data or resolving playground disagreements, these activities all contribute to civic education. We need to start thinking of ourselves as civics teachers, especially early elementary educators, so it becomes something we all have a stake in. Action Steps To teach civics in our day-to-day classroom activities and begin a discussion around justice with students, educators must take brave actions. Here are three steps to put it into practice: Step 1: Prioritize time for civics education. It’s important that administrators and educators intentionally include instructional minutes for civics and social studies, the most marginalized subject. Studies have shown a correlation between social studies learning with student engagement, social-emotional learning, and literacy achievement! Step 2: Integrate civic skills throughout the day. In addition to intentional curriculum and teaching time, educators can also use daily practices to instill civic skills and language throughout the day. For example, you can create a classroom culture where you talk about taking different perspectives or practicing empathy. Step 3: Start a civics-based curriculum in your classroom. Educators can begin with Module Zero of the "Children Discovering Justice" curriculum, which focuses on foundational skills like identity, community, perspective-taking, and respectful listening. Challenges? One challenge Laura addresses is the misconception that discussing politics or civics in the classroom is inappropriate. There’s a fear from many educators and administrators around the topics, but avoiding them can only increase that fear. Instead, it’s important to foster inquiry-based learning, teaching students how to think critically and form their own ideas and opinions. Another challenge is the overloaded plates of educators. Laura asserts that civics education is not an additional burden but rather the foundation of all teaching, crucial for preparing students to be engaged community members. One Step to Get Started One practical step for educators to take is to equip themselves with tools and resources to incorporate civics language, concepts, and vocabulary into their classroom. Educators can start with incorporating just one lesson from Module Zero of the "Children Discovering Justice.” This initial step can help educators see the value and practicality of integrating civics education into their classrooms, setting the stage for a more comprehensive implementation. Instead of adding more to their plate, this is their “plate”—the foundation of everything we do as educators. Stay Connected You can connect with Laura by email, and learn more about her work with Discovering Justice by following them on Linkedin, Instagram, or their website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Laura is sharing the Children Discovering Justice K-3 civics curriculum with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 185 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Okay, laura Brenner, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Laura Brenner Thank you, thanks for having me. 0:00:09 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I am really excited about our conversation because your job and what you do is like just makes my heart sing. So I'm really really excited to get into it and I think one of the big initial questions that I asked just kind of off the bat is a nice framing question. We will have folks who have just heard kind of your bio at the front end of the episode and so just wondering now, like is there anything else that's important for listeners to know about you, your work, anything you want them to keep in mind as we jump into our conversation? 0:00:40 - Laura Brenner Yeah, I think you know I have a really exciting job now being able to be at the intersection of civic education and nonprofits and schools and districts, and so you know the role I have now is chief program officer at Discovering Justice. But certainly at my core I'm an elementary educator and I think my lens for the work has just shifted a bit once I left the classroom. So now I get to work with educators and instructional leaders in schools and districts all across Massachusetts and it's allowed for our curriculum that we've developed to be what it is because it has so many different perspectives integrated into it, making sure we can meet the needs of students and teachers across the state. And I would just add that, like I'll be talking about this curriculum today called Children Discovering Justice, and I have the privilege of being able to talk about it a lot at professional development and, you know, at different meetings. But the collaboration that has gone into this curriculum, I think, is just a. It's a huge testament to the expertise and the passion of educators and administrators who've had a hand in it. So there's so, so many people from our staff at Discovering Justice. We have a curriculum developer, victoria Suri, who's really taken this curriculum to the next level, to consultants. We've worked with One in California, katie Henry's Meisners. These are all educators and district leaders who've really helped to conceptualize the units, teachers who've helped to give feedback. So it's such a collaborative joint effort and I think that's helpful to just consider as we start the conversation. 0:02:23 - Lindsay Lyons That is a beautiful framing. Thank you for that, and I and I think you spoke a little bit to this the idea of with all of that collaboration comes the ability to then make sure that all of students' needs and interests and passions and identities are all kind of reflected and appreciated. And so I'm I'm wondering this may or may not connect with what you had been thinking you were speaking to for the freedom dreaming question, but I love asking this question of right, like Dr Bettina Love talking about freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and certainly that's so critical to what you do. So wondering if you can share what is that big dream that you hold for education with that in mind, yeah, I mean absolutely. 0:03:03 - Laura Brenner I love that idea as well and often try to put that to teachers and some of the PLCs that I run is getting them to think about. What does a classroom look like, feel like, sound like, when students are empowered to do all of those things to speak freely, to be leaders, to analyze oppression, dismantle systems of oppression? I think for me it looks like kind of on a simpler, broader level, all schools being places that equip all students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be engaged in their communities, and I think that speaks to what you mentioned in terms be engaged in their communities. And I think that speaks to what you mentioned in terms of bringing in their identities and making sure that they are reflected in the units that they're seeing and the conversations that they're having, that it connects to their lives and interests. And then I think you know on a deeper level that every day in schools, students are, through inquiry, through engaging practices, through culturally responsive pedagogy, through the joy of learning, are just feeling connected, feeling connected to each other in that classroom community, or a classroom democracy, as I often call it, to their school, broader school community and democracy, and that they're taking those feelings and skills and enthusiasm and joy beyond the walls of the classroom and school as well, and applying that to you know, help heal some of our communities and leaders of generations who didn't have access to that type of learning and be able to bring that to their lives and ultimately affect a more just democracy at large. 0:05:03 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, there is so much that I love in the response. I mean from just the phrase classroom democracy, which I've never heard I love that To just that idea of helping heal communities right, that actually young people can and do often, you know, go out into the world and go into their communities, like today, and heal and heal things that are have not been healed, and I just think that's a huge framing around. I mean, one of the next questions they usually ask is around mindset shifts, and I think for me that has been a huge one in the last few years is thinking about do we, how do we both kind of study oppression and injustice and disrupt it and heal it and and not just kind of linger in the oppression but to enable students to be healers and kind of co-create that healing in spaces and community? And so I think for me that's been a mindset shift, certainly with this work, and I'm wondering if there are any that you've either noticed or coached folks on when doing kind of this curricular work and building those class democracies and teaching about justice. 0:06:06 - Laura Brenner If there's anything that you think listeners should know, yeah, yeah, I mean it's so interesting the idea of healing democracy and healing communities and whose responsibility is that. And I remember struggling as a new educator with this idea of it's on the youth to do do that or that. You know there's so much pressure today on students to really fix a broken world on so many levels. But you know, through my experiences working with students and in communities again through the lens of being a classroom teacher myself and then an instructional leader and a nonprofit leader and just being in classrooms every week now across the state, like I do see that it is whether we want it to be that way or not. It is where we're at. We need everyone to have a stake and everyone, to you know, be involved and have a voice. And I think that's part of the Children Discovering Justice curriculum is helping to facilitate the conversations around how can I use my voice to advocate for justice. But I think you know the other part of that is teachers' responsibility, and one of the mindset shifts that I will often highlight in my professional development to teachers and administrators is that all educators are civics educators and I know certainly when I was an elementary school teacher I didn't think of myself as a civics teacher. If people asked you know what subjects do you teach? I would definitely say math and reading. Maybe, depending on the semester, I would say science, potentially social studies, but I would never say civics teacher. But you know, thinking back now the lens that I have now, thinking back to my time in the classroom when my second graders were learning about sequential writing or details in their writing and they were showcasing that by teaching skills to their peers. So I would have a student write step-by-step instructions on how to shoot a basket or make a paper crane, like whatever skill they thought that they had to teach their classmates, that was civics. When my fourth graders were learning about graphing and math and they were graphing recent voting data in their community, that was civics. When my fifth graders were solving disagreements and coming to a compromise or hearing each other's perspectives after a blow up on the playground, that was civics. And I think as educators, we need to start thinking of ourselves as civics teachers, especially early elementary educators, because it's so much of what we do in every part of the day, no matter what subject we're in, we're teaching these skills and dispositions of civics. So I think that's a huge mindset shift for myself to just name it as that and I think, to lift up the expertise that naturally exists in elementary spaces, that elementary teachers have been doing forever but maybe haven't been calling it that. And then just that we all have a stake in this work, kind of circling back to what you know, what I originally said about, kind of our responsibility to to heal, and that in order for our democracy to be more fair, more just, for our policymakers to to be more representative of our community like we, we have to start with with civics and in and again seeing ourselves as educators of that work. 0:09:58 - Lindsay Lyons I love that idea that all teachers are civics teachers. This is so beautiful and you're right, like so much of it is just the way we do things, the way we do teaching, the way we do school, like it is built in, and just to name it is so powerful. I really, really like that, and I think so many people may be thinking you know, okay. So what does it look like to teach civics? Well, what does it look like to discuss justice with students, especially young students, right, and so I'm wondering about, like, the literal, brave actions that are required for this work, and either I don't know if you want to take this from kind of a broad lens or from like, what does the curriculum enable teachers to do with students? However you want to take it, I'd love to hear, like, what does it look like in practice? 0:10:41 - Laura Brenner Yeah. So, you know, I think the first brave action that comes to mind that has to be taken, that I see a lot more district leaders now doing, is prioritizing time. And that's a scary and sensitive and hard topic, like instructional minutes and scheduling and time, and you know it's. I think it's gotten even harder through the years. But I think that is a brave and necessary action. To make that you know dream a reality is prioritizing instructional minutes for social studies and civics. Social studies is the most marginalized subject. It's not tested until at least in Massachusetts, the eighth grade MCAS, a civics MCAS which was piloted last spring, and of course the communities that tend to focus mostly on tested subjects reading and math tend to be lower income communities that serve black and brown students and families, and those are the students that are often getting the least amount of civics and social studies. So I think prioritizing time and minutes in the schedule for it and then, you know, a brave action by educators is, even if time isn't given to you like to make the time to teach social studies and civics, knowing that not only is it important but it is so correlated to all these areas of success for our students. It's correlated, it's positively correlated to attendance, to engagement, to, you know, social emotional learning, to literacy achievement. They're the you know I always reference, especially the district leaders, the Fordham study a few years ago that shows more time, more instructional time in ELA does not enhance reading scores but social studies does enhance reading scores and that's primarily true for lower income students, multilingual learners and girls. Those are the three subgroups who it has the most dramatic effect on. So I think just prioritizing it, naming it as a priority, investing in, you know, quality curriculum, quality professional development for teachers to be able to further dig into civics as a pedagogy, and whether it's using, you know, our Children Discovering Justice curriculum or just integrating and embedding civic skills and language throughout the day. So you know naming the skills that you're practicing and deepening for students as an elementary educator, like perspective taking or empathy or debate. I think both of those things. It's the concrete you know time and minutes and it's the ongoing classroom culture and routines that you know time and minutes. And it's the ongoing classroom culture and routines that you know you're teaching and practicing and calling out to students on a day-to-day level. 0:13:43 - Lindsay Lyons I was just in a professional development workshop where a teacher named I said something about the election is a great opportunity to discuss, like what's happening in the world and current events and how do we frame that, and the response was we can't teach politics in school. And I was like, oh, we absolutely can like talk about politics and civic engagement and like there's a difference between political and partisan, and I think there's just a very big kind of narrative fear, avoidance, whatever around things now that are even more expansive than like who you're voting for right, and so I am imagining that that's a piece of a challenge. Like maybe teacher's face or admin face or communication with families comes up, whatever it is. I'm wondering, is that a challenge? How do you kind of coach folks through that? Or are there other challenges that maybe I'm not thinking of that might come to mind that we want to like prepare leaders or teachers for? 0:14:45 - Laura Brenner Yeah, I mean it's certainly a fear that I hear a lot from educators or from school administrators, from families even, and I think, like a lot of fears the more we away from you know a day post-election or pre-election, like we were. It's coming down to that idea of inquiry-based learning. We're teaching students how to think and not what to think, with the skills to be able to articulate their points with evidence, that we want them to have media literacy and to be able to critique the sources that they're getting inundated with, whether it's through social media or online or their family. We want them to be able to debate respectfully, agree to disagree, you know, hear and respect other perspectives. Like those things are the most important part of our work in the classroom and those are, I mean, we can see them lacking in our broader world. We can see them those skills lacking in adults that I'm sure we can all you know name in our lives. Where else will students learn that Like they? It has to happen in the classroom and we have to give space and time for that. Now, it doesn't happen in every grade level with a conversation about what reproductive right should look like. It might happen in our first grade lesson on voting. Students are voting for what pet they would want as a class pet or a favorite ice cream flavor, like they're just starting to understand the idea that they have choices and a voice and opinions that can be different than those in their classroom space then, can be different than those that they eat lunch with or play with at recess. That that's okay and actually valued, to have different perspectives, that we have reasons for our perspectives that can be shared with evidence that we can change our ideas. You know we'll do. You know we'll have the conversation of students might go to one side of the room or the other to vote with their bodies on something and then see if anyone can be convinced to move to another side and just again name that and lift up that skill of being able to change your mind when you learn more information. So those are the conversations and the activities that we have to have and be doing in the classroom and yeah, it just looks different in every grade level. 0:17:28 - Lindsay Lyons Do you mind speaking to us? I love all of these activities and just kind of that approach of it's going to look different at each grade level, content wise and the skills just kind of keep building. Do you mind taking us through, like what are some, either questions that kind of frame, some of these units throughout the grades or any sort of like particular lessons or activities that you personally love? That's part of the curriculum. 0:17:53 - Laura Brenner Yeah. So I would say our module zero in all the grades is probably my now favorite module and it's something that we didn't create originally. We started with module one, which was about justice justice in our lives and students thinking about what we call little J justice, so justice on the playground in their classrooms, and then eventually, through the modules, they end up in module four, which is the civic action module, where they start to explore that big J justice, so some type of systems level change. We push them to be thinking even as young as kindergarten about root cause by asking you know, why might this challenge exist, why might this problem exist? Module zero was something that we added through teacher feedback, which, again, I'll name as another kind of brave action required for this work is listening to teachers. I mean, much of my time is spent in classrooms, in PLCs, in, you know, collaborative work sessions and professional development, where teachers are sharing their feedback, whether it's on large scale or, you know, a small critique on an activity in a lesson and we're applying that the next day or week because it's a living curriculum. It's on Google Drive, you know we're constantly updating and revising. So you know, I think, just listening to teachers in that. But that's how module zero came to be, with teacher feedback on like we'd love something more foundational that we can use at the beginning of the year in September and October to just build those skills. So we have six lessons in that module on identity, community perspective taking, agreeing, disagreeing, listening and asking questions. So I think probably the perspective taking is my favorite one, just because I've seen, again as early as kindergarten, students really grabbing onto that vocabulary and applying it and integrating it into their daily life. I remember I was doing my principal internship actually at a school that a teacher was piloting our original CDJ curriculum a few years ago and she was having a student who was having a challenging time at recess, got into an argument with a peer. I took him into my office to kind of deescalate and he was just so mad and frustrated and he looked at me and said, through his like tears and bunched up face, he's like I just have a different perspective. And again, this is like a JK student. So you know that's the language is something that students are thinking like. They're thinking in that way anyways and I think giving them that language helps to empower them to then go the next step of you know understanding and applying what perspective taking means and how. You know having different perspectives can be challenging but helps our community or democracy actually be a better place. And again, some activities around agreeing, disagreeing. You know going to one side of the room or the other ways to just visually show students that we all have different perspectives is, I think, a great way to highlight that in early education. 0:21:24 - Lindsay Lyons I love all of this. I love that story. I just yes, this is so good and the power of, I think, particularly if so, I taught high school and so particularly for teachers or administrators who maybe taught higher grades like not knowing what is possible for the younger grades, it's so powerful to hear that story of, yes, this totally works with kindergartners. It looks different but it is. It's the same kind of values and practices and it's highly possible and valuable, and so I just really appreciate you naming that for even maybe even a principal of a high school who's like okay, let me advocate for the elementary schools in my district to have this so that when they get to high school you know like we are equipped with all of these skills and we don't have to kind of teach or patch things that haven't been used or practiced prior to coming into that space. 0:22:14 - Laura Brenner So I think this is kind of everybody's business that young children are getting this kind of education Absolutely, and my hope is that the more students that are doing this in an early age we're going to see the result and the effect of that when they're in middle school and when they're in high school They'll come in with this vocabulary, with the dispositions to really value their voice in their community, to believe that they have a say, to know some pathways to get their voice heard and that it won't be there won't be so many gaps when students do maybe have more formal access to that as they're older. 0:22:53 - Lindsay Lyons I hope there's a research study in progress at some point, because that would be super cool. I would love that. That sounds amazing. So one thing that I think sometimes we get these big conversations on this podcast and we're like, okay, here's this big goal of implementing this whole curriculum. For example, I'm wondering what is one thing that a leader or teacher could do as soon as they end the episode to just kind of get them started with either looking into the curriculum or doing a particular practice in their classroom, to kind of build the foundation. What do you suggest is like a good starting step here? 0:23:31 - Laura Brenner suggest is like a good starting step here. Yeah, I think you know we see implementation on a really wide spectrum and encourage that. I think you know part of being educators ourselves everyone who's had a hand in developing this curriculum has come from the classroom and I think that's very evident when you look at the curriculum and unfortunately a rare thing when we see curriculums. So you know there are many teachers out there who don't necessarily teach the lessons of children discovering justice but they're just grabbing resources or materials. You know a lot of pull out educators who might take the civil discourse sentence stems and use that in some of their group discussions. Or use our virtual read aloud library and just put a book on during snack time. Or, you know, might take our vocabulary word wall and and teach some of the words during their phonics block, even as a way to just integrate some of those civics vocabulary and concepts without having a specific social studies or civics block. So I think, looking at those additional materials, you can find them at the bottom of the teacher guide or if you click into individual lessons, you can find them at the bottom in additional materials. So I think that's a good starting place and then I would encourage folks to give one lesson a try in that module zero, especially in the fall, you know, september, october, even November, just reminding students what it means to be a community, to listen respectfully, to value all of our perspectives. Even trying one lesson, I think, will break some of that maybe fear or barriers that this is too either challenging to teach or that it's too much on our plate to teach. I think that, you know, can be some pushback we get sometimes of like, of course, our plates are so beyond full. As educators, as elementary educators, you know we're teaching every subject. But what I'll often say to that is like this is the plate, it's not something added to it really tried to make the resources as flexible as possible to integrate it smoothly into what you're already doing. But the work that this is like that is why I think most of us are educators is not that we necessarily like want our students to become mathematicians or to become, you know, the best authors, like that's great if they will do those things. Like we want them to follow their passions. But before all of that like at the foundation is that they're prepared, just prepared to be engaged people in their community, to be connected to where they live and who they live with. You know, we're in a growing interconnected world on every level, and just that we're preparing students to be successful in that, whatever they, you know, choose to do. So it is the plate, it is the work, it is why we're here. 0:26:43 - Lindsay Lyons I love that that it is the plate. Yes, that is such a common thought and, like you said rightly so, we have so much going on. It is the plate. Yes, that is such a common thought and, like you said rightly so, we have so much going on. It is the plate, though. That is great. I'm going to use that. If that's okay with you, I'll credit you. I think one of the things, too, that listeners might be thinking is, or readers of the blog might be thinking is, where do I access that curriculum? So we will link that. Thank you so much for sharing that with folks, and so we'll link that access to the curriculum in the blog post for this episode. So anyone driving and feeling like I need to remember to come back to this you can doing in their own lives and their either work lives, personal lives. I think we always, as educators, are kind of lifelong learners, and so this question can be work related or it can be completely separate just for fun. But what have you been learning about lately as a human? 0:27:40 - Laura Brenner Yeah, such a good question. And yes, I think the educators are ones that are constantly craving education themselves. That's, educators are ones that are, you know, constantly craving education themselves. And so, as tempted as I am to answer it in a work-related way with, like, here's all the books I've been reading and the research I've been diving into on civic action and elementary level, you know, I think a lot of us are at a point in our careers and in our worlds and lives where we're trying harder to focus on balance and how, you know, we can do that, we can sustainably do this work. And so something I've been learning about lately on that on that note is really just grounding, trying to do something every day that grounds myself. It's so easy, you know, even when you leave the classroom, it's so easy to get caught up in this work, feeling so so urgent that you know every second, every five minutes matters in it. But even taking 30 seconds, I'm trying to do 30 seconds every day where I just put my bare feet on the ground outside in the grass and just do three deep breaths in and out. So that is something I've been learning lately and trying really hard to implement in practice. 0:28:59 - Lindsay Lyons That is really, really good. Thank you for adjusting that in such a thoughtful way. That is going to like honor, where everyone is as they're engaging with this conversation, so thank you. And then I think folks are going to want to where everyone is as they're engaging with this conversation, so thank you. And then I think folks are gonna wanna follow up with you and get the curriculum, all of the things. But I know you're constantly doing really innovative work, so how can folks either learn more about you, connect with you, follow the work of Discovering Justice Generally? Where are the places? 0:29:26 - Laura Brenner Yeah, so I love that you're sharing the curriculum. Again, it's a free resource, totally open source on Google Drive. We're constantly adding to it, updating it. We're going to be creating some election focused modules to come out this October, so to be more focused specifically on the 2024 presidential election, so you'll be able to access those resources. On our website, discoveringjusticeorg, you can sign up either for our organization's newsletter or, if you go to programs, children Discovering Justice, you can sign up for the Children Discovering Justice specific newsletter and that will really focus on any updates to the curriculum. You know we're translating it now, so we're going to have it in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English and, like I said, those election modules will come out. So follow us on that. And then you know, certainly we have social media at Discovering Justice and folks are welcome to send me an email lbrenner at discoveringjusticeorg or connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more and just to collaborate. Again, this circling back to the beginning the product that is Children Discovering Justice is just. It is a shared child of so many amazing, amazing educators, administrators, staff who have just poured so much of their expertise and their time and their passion and joy for learning into this work, and so the more people that have their hands, their eyes on the curriculum, whose voice goes into it, I think, the better it is for that. So we welcome all the connections and all the eyes and ears and conversations. 0:31:11 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing, laura. Thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure, thank you. Thank you for having me, lindsay. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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We’re already over a month into this school year and season of the podcast—half a decade of episodes, here we come!—and want to share some of the updates for this season. Better late than never!
Mid-way through last season, I started experimenting with monthly mini series related to key topics I coach on and honestly just love learning about. I’ve tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. I’d also love feedback if you have topics for mini series I should add or suggestions for shifting when topics appear on the pod. With that, let’s explore the lineup for this season! Updated Topical “Mini Series”
For a personalized professional learning experience on one of the topics discussed in this episode, I’m sharing 4 playlists with you for free:
And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 184 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to season five. A little late we actually started a month ago but welcome to season five of Time for Teachership. I am so excited for episode 184. And although we're a bit late on the season premiere episode, as we've already premiered, we're back to school. We're in already a month, at least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, and I just really want to name in this fifth season of the podcast half a decade of episodes. Here we go. I'm so excited I want to share some of the updates for this particular season. Better late than never. So midway through last season I started experimenting with monthly mini series. I started experimenting with monthly mini series and each mini series is related to key topic areas that I coach on and, honestly, I just personally love learning about and have lots of thoughts that I want to share and lots of things that I want to learn from guests on the show. So you might have noticed that that's been going on. I've tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame. Educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. So, of course, at different time points throughout the year you're thinking about different things and different topics feel salient in different parts of the year more so than others. Now, I know that's not a perfect science and different folks are in different parts of their school year and different topics resonate with different people kind of across the board. So I'd actually love some feedback if you have topics for miniseries that I should add or suggestions for shifting when those topics appear on the podcast. With that, let's explore the lineup and the hopes and dreams for this particular season or the remainder of this particular season. Here we go. Updated topical miniseries will include one on systems transformation. Now in this series we'll learn about developing professional learning structures, developing equitable systems of competency-based assessment as one potential structure to build out, and advancing racial justice with an intersectional lens. So thinking about all three of these these are kind of all niche topics that kind of intersect around, as always, equity, and thinking about the system-wide transformation of maybe an entire school or an entire district, an overhaul of and co-creation of, an entire policy in a particular area, right. So there's a lot going on here, including a lot of adaptive leadership around justice, around change and leading change. Right, there's a lot of moving pieces in this part and so really excited to kind of keep bringing in specific topics within the umbrella of how to lead change and transform systems. In the last month you heard our mini series on systems transformation or you read the blog post on systems transformation. So you've gotten some insight too into kind of how broad and almost cerebral and like theoretical and also kind of the intimate like ways of being with one another, being in one another's community and how to engage with folks. So it's kind of big and it's kind of narrow and it's kind of atopical and it could be topical. So there's a wide range here that I'm really excited to explore with folks. The second mini series topic is curriculum design, and so we've had this one from the get-go. In this series we'll really learn about situating curricular thinking and planning within justice-based frameworks. So there is some theory. But it's also like how do we do this thing right? How do we make it really hyper-practical, how do we co-create units using a step-by-step process, for example, and thinking about how we explore those curriculum design possibilities. I'd love to, as educators are willing to share, share kind of success stories of what folks have created in terms of units that they have implemented in their class and want to share with others and or thinking about like a development on the show, as we've done before in our unit, dreaming series of ideas that we kind of co-construct and we can witness the process in the podcast episode of that creation. Also in this section, really excited about kind of leaders stories of facilitating teacher co-developed curricula. So if you are a school or district leader or a department chair thinking about how do we approach fueling, fostering, dreaming up this beautiful curriculum when you're leading a team or when you're leading folks who may create the same curriculum that you end up with and everyone ends up teaching the same thing, or you're leading a staff or a team that is going to actually develop a bunch of different curricula and what are kind of the key components or process steps of developing that so excited to hear both from educators and leaders in this space. Miniseries topic number three leadership. There are so many theories of leadership and so many aspects of leadership that I think honestly all of these pieces tie to leadership. But this mini-series specifically is thinking about shared leadership approaches. So in school sometimes we call this distributive leadership. I think shared is nice because it typically encompasses students and communities more than our distributive, which is typically teachers. So all of the things, all of the stakeholders involved in shared leadership and that kind of co-creation of change as opposed to top-down change that we ask everyone to quote, buy into and so kind of mindset shifts around this practical pieces, around this theory, around this, as well as adaptive leadership. And again, these pieces really touch all of the other topics. But adaptive leadership, really thinking about how we apply that theory of adaptive leadership and leading change and leading longstanding change where there's no clear solution and we actually need shared leadership approaches to co-develop the solution. So these really go hand in hand, which is why they're categorized together in this mini episode. So, when we're leading justice-oriented change in our educational communities, how do we kind of take the theory into practice in the effort of leading change in any aspect? Right, we talked about leading change in the systems, transformation, which is really transforming maybe one particular area, and leadership. It's kind of like how do I build these skills globally, build these structures globally in my educational community? So I'm ready for anything. So I've kind of built the system so that it is nimble and agile and whatever. The word adaptive, I suppose right, and we are ready for anything that comes our way because the system is already in place. I see that kind of as like a preemptive we don't know exactly what we're focused on yet. We're focused on building the structure, so we're ready, All right. Number four this mini series, is a culture of discussion, and I think about this one as really the foundational layer of a lot of things that you would do either in your class or your staff community. So in this series we're learning about creating a positive and not toxic positivity, positive but truly positive, values driven and appropriately challenging culture. This could again relate to class culture, which is typically how I conceive of it from my teacher brain first, but also, of course, relevant to that staff level culture or even again, if you're a department lead or chair your team level culture. So, creating that values aligned, appropriately challenging, right, Everyone's kind of in their zone of proximal development environments, where tasks are building my skills, Right, really feeling like I'm in that flow from chicks in the highs theory. I'm in that flow state. We've talked on the podcast before with Angela Watson about this idea of flow state. That was a great episode, Check it out. We want everyone to be there, staff and students alike. So that requires that positive foundation of values, alignment, and that all the tasks are appropriately challenging, not too much, but also not overly scaffolded, because then they're going to be easy and boring and we're just going to tune out right. So what this does ultimately is, when we lay this foundation of belonging and values and appropriate challenge, we are laying the foundation for things like generative discussions, which could include discussions of hard things that are often kind of high emotion topics. I've been calling them Things like political conversations, particularly in the midst of an election year excuse me, presidential election year which only happens every four years, right? So this is big, this is in the news, this is kind of in everyone's conversation. Kids are going to pick up on this. Staff are certainly going to be aware of this, so we want to be able to invite conversation. One of the things that I was recently talking to a social studies group about is you know, I've heard folks talk before about the distinction between politics or political classrooms and partisan classrooms. So someone shared that you know we shouldn't be talking politics in class and I said well, actually, especially in social studies, we should be. We can be a political classroom. Part of our standards are to talk about politics and political structure and have political discourse and be civically engaged, Like this is part of our standards, particularly in Massachusetts, very embedded in those standards now, and that's certainly one of the things in the framework Partisan, I believe, is what this teacher was talking about. Where it's. We're not telling students what to think, we're not saying you need to vote for this candidate because da, da, da, da, da right. And so I think we often avoid right thinking about adaptive and justice-based things. Right, we often avoid conversations that may bring up high emotions or we're not so sure or we're uncomfortable. What we really want to do is create foundations for generative discussions where our hearts and our heads are kind of full right, Our minds are, like, appropriately challenged, we're using evidence-based conversation, we are fueling change, opening up possibilities for justice, and we're not kind of entrenched in our positions, we are open to understanding and seeking to understand one another. Right, and we are creating and deepening those relations in our community, whether it's staff to staff, staff to student or student to student. So, again, this culture of discussion miniseries is all about laying that foundation that's going to enable us to get to those generative discussions of things like politics, current events, figuring out how we live together with one another in this shared community, all while navigating things that come up like high emotions, like that kind of fear of saying the wrong thing, like the fear of being harmed, like the navigating high emotions. All the pieces right. So we want to make sure that foundation is in place before we go there, and we do want to be able to go there. So this mini series is really taking you on the journey. Sometimes we'll start with the foundation pieces belonging, values driven stuff and then sometimes we'll talk about appropriate challenge and appropriate scaffolds and not hyper scaffolding, and sometimes we'll get to that kind of top tier, where we ultimately want to go, which is like what are those discussions looking like? What are the protocols for them? How do we literally engage and how do we support that engagement? How do we structure it so that it is something that we value and deepens our community and our capacity and not restrict it or harm it? Okay, and now our fifth one. This is a new one this year. This is our fifth mini series. Topic I love social studies curriculum. I'm always talking about social studies curriculum, but I also always want to speak expansively or share expansively about various topics, kind of the how to create curriculum, regardless of the grade or subject you teach, and I also really love social studies. So we have in Massachusetts the Department of Education, called DESE, here has partnered with organizations to create a Massachusetts aligned curriculum for social studies in elementary and middle school and that continues to be built out and I am very grateful to be part of the coaching work to prepare teachers to implement this and work with teachers to figure out like what this looks like and feels like and is implemented like with the students in the classroom. So really grateful to all the brilliant folks I get to work with on this project. And this curriculum is called Investigating History, so let's talk about what this might look like. In this series we'll dig into the Massachusetts created open source so anyone can access it social studies curriculum. It currently spans grades five through seven for the public. It is being piloted in grades three through four and we'll explore things that are relevant beyond folks in Massachusetts and beyond folks who are using this specific curriculum, because, again, I want it to be relevant for anyone who is listening and so, even if you don't teach social studies, I do feel like, again, the pedagogy behind it is really important. So I'm hoping in this series to partner up and have guests on the show who have implemented the curriculum with students. So these would be the teachers who are piloting and, for grade three and four, piloting and teaching the full curriculum for grades five through seven, maybe some students. If we're excited to get those students on and talk about what it's like to experience this curriculum. We could talk with folks from the state, from Massachusetts, from DUSY, and think about what they are thinking and observing. We could bring on folks from Tufts that they have a really cool research project over there around democracy in classrooms and they're doing a huge research study on this curriculum and its impact on students. I think that would be so fun to explore. We could also bring on curriculum writers. I mean, my hopes are high, so very excited. But again, I think relevant for social studies and wherever you teach, with whatever curriculum you teach. And again, just back to the pedagogy roots, what I'm really excited to do, because this is an inquiry-based curriculum, we can explore the inquiry routines, of which there are three, and core principles, or what they call key instructional principles, of which there are four that really form the foundation of the curriculum and are good for any curriculum and I hope to talk to all those folks and we'll keep you posted on that. We'll look for that in probably the spring. So that is the preview for season five for the remainder of the year. Get excited, I'm going to link in terms of freebies for this episode. I'm gonna link all the things that might be relevant to you related to each of particularly the first four miniseries I discussed. So in the blog post for this episode, which you can get at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184, I'm going to give you a personalized professional learning experience based on whichever topic you are most interested in learning about. So I'll be sharing four playlists with you for free on that blog post. Those include my systems transformation playlist, curriculum playlist, leadership playlist and culture of challenge and discussion playlist. So again, grab those at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184. And I'm looking forward to connecting with you in the next episode. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below: In this episode, Soraya Ramos discusses the dream—and the challenges—of creating equitable learning environments. For more than a decade Soraya has worked to promote and support anti-racist teaching and learning practices through her roles as a teacher and as an assessment designer. Soraya served as a Senior Associate at the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE). There she worked in partnership with schools and districts in New England and nationally to design high quality performance assessments systems that promote equity and engagement and co-led a consortium of districts in Massachusetts in their pursuit of designing an alternative assessment and accountability system. Soraya is currently an Assessment Design Partner at Envision Learning Partners where she partners with districts across the nation to design and implement high quality systems of assessment ranging from student-led conferences to portfolio defenses. Soraya believes that lasting assessment systems need to be in alignment with a community’s vision and coherent to a district and school’s priorities. Soraya holds an Ed.M. in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Chicana/o Studies and Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Our conversation covered the importance of human-centered design in education and fostering relational trust and empathetic listening. Soraya shares her dreams for education alongside practical examples and success stories to create a more equitable future for our young learners. The Big Dream Soraya’s big dream for education is that all children—all young learners—get to access high-quality learning experiences that help them feel like they can shine and tap into their innate brilliance and genius. She underscores the importance of allowing kids to just be kids—to learn, to fumble, and get back up without pressure and high stakes. How can we allow all kids to feel like they can play and have fun? Mindset Shifts Required To achieve Soraya’s dream of allowing kids to be kids and experience an equitable learning environment, some important mindset shifts need to take place. Soraya’s still experiencing her own shifts and is particularly inspired by the work at the National Equity Project around liberatory design. The arc of this work is that it’s all human-centered—keeping people at the center of everything we do as educators. With this in mind, a crucial mindset shift is to build relational trust and invest in relationships with intention and empathetic listening. Instead of seeing yourself as the knowledge holder, try to listen and respect where someone is coming from. Other key mindset shifts include understanding that self-awareness is an ongoing practice, and embracing complexity—the messiness of adaptive leadership—is key to creating better systems. Action Steps In a more practical sense, there are a few key action steps for educators seeking to create equitable education systems. Soraya believes that it all comes down to creating a school culture—an energy—that is positive, inclusive, and equitable. This can be done through a few key action steps: Step 1: Build reciprocity with your colleagues and education partners. It’s not about having transactional, tit-for-tat relationships, but being reciprocal in the way you interact with and help each other. This cultivates strong, meaningful relationships that prioritize support and accountability. Step 2: Recognize oppression by always being aware of the ways power comes in. If you’re going to partner with other people, recognize and call out power dynamics that are present. This can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have, but is so important for building more equitable systems. Step 3: Embrace an abundance mindset. We’re often convinced or conditioned to think there aren’t enough resources. And while we may not have access to them right now, there are resources available to us. It may not always be financial, but there is an abundance of other resources that come from our unique communities—we need to work together to access them, not compete with others to divide scarce resources. Challenges? Soraya sees one of the biggest challenges as navigating the political landscape in education. Unfortunately, understanding these dynamics and agendas can introduce a not-so-flattering side of humans, our motivations and behaviors. So, understanding how to operate in these spaces can be challenging. Educators need to navigate tricky dynamics where power is involved, sometimes honesty isn’t rewarded, and you have to know when to observe and when to speak up. One Step to Get Started Big changes often start with an internal shift. Soraya recommends starting by asking yourself, "What kind of world do I want to live in, and how can I contribute to creating that world?" Then, reflect on your energy, motivations, and the values you wish to embody. Use this guiding question to align your actions and interactions in your next meeting or collaboration, aiming to foster a positive and inclusive atmosphere. Stay Connected You can connect with Soraya on LinkedIn. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Soraya is sharing a High-Quality Performance Assessment Overview with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 183 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Soraya Ramos. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so excited you're here. 0:00:08 - Soraya Ramos Hi Lindsay, Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons I'm really excited for we were talking about, before we hit record like all of the ways that our paths have like almost intersected and I think our work aligns very closely as well. So really excited for our listeners to hear from you today, and I just want to know if there's anything that folks should keep in mind as they are engaging with this podcast episode today. 0:00:31 - Soraya Ramos I thought about this one and I think one of the main things for me that I try to remember is that I'm always a learner and that I'm always learning and that I don't always have it or need to know everything or need to have the answer. So I think that, being really forgiving to myself and gracious, I like I'm always learning, we're always learning and it's just part of like life. We're always evolving, making mistakes and then learning from them and coming back from it. So I want to, like you know, hold whatever I say now at this point in time might, might evolve in the next years or decades of my life. So I'm really excited to capture where I'm at right now with you. 0:01:09 - Lindsay Lyons I absolutely love that framing because just this morning I was looking back from like four years ago. I wrote a blog post and I'm like hmm, wouldn't, have done it the same way Would have changed that Like that's so true. I love the snapshot in time idea. 0:01:20 - Soraya Ramos It's true, it's true. I think it's what we want to do with kids too, right, we're always. They're always evolving and physically growing and like we, see the difference. 0:01:32 - Lindsay Lyons So, um, I'm glad that that you, that it resonates with you as well, deeply, yes, thank you for that framing, and I think it'll also be, um, really nice for listeners to hear it, just because I think in our days we can often be unforgiving of ourselves, and so it's a, it's a nice reminder. We're in it together, we're all learning. I love it, and so I guess kind of to think about the continuation of this, like the place we're all trying to go as we learn. I like to ground this or all episodes really and Dr Bettina loves the words around freedom dreaming, where she says you know their dreams, rounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know what is that big dream that? 0:02:09 - Soraya Ramos you hold for education. I love her work. I will say that this question got me thinking of like what my freedom dreaming was. Maybe 10 years ago is slightly different, but still similar to the core. But one thing that came to mind around what is that dream that I have for kids, for my younger self, for the kids that come after me, is that all children, all young learners, get to access high quality learning experiences that help them feel like they can shine and that they can tap into their brilliance and their their genius that's so good. 0:02:49 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and it really I love that there's like aspects of you know, goldie Muhammad's work in there and just like that the genius is part of all kids, right, this is not something that we as educators give to them, but like this is there and we're just like helping to cultivate and helping to shine and like I love that framing absolutely, and I think you're right. 0:03:08 - Soraya Ramos Like it's like where did I get all this from? I'm like I've learned from people who have, who have taught me right, or that I've learned in my roles in the past, and, um, I think one of the things that that would add to that is like how do we allow kids to just be kids, to learn to fumble and then get back up without them feeling like there's some kids have higher stakes than others and I'm just curious of like how do we just have them all feel like they can play and have fun? 0:03:39 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. That's, that's so, so good. Thank you for that. And and I think so, sometimes we maybe lose sight of the things, the reasons that we kind of get into education and that knowing that kids have this genius, they have this light, they have they, they should be able to be kids all this stuff and we get into like the nitty gritty and all the things on our plate right. And so I'm wondering if there are specific mindset shifts that folks kind of go through to be able to do the work that you do, for instance, around kind of equitable assessment and all of those pieces. Are there things that we may be no going in lose sight of along the way and need to really kind of reframe our thinking around that you've noticed either people be successful with or that you would just advise folks just entering the work to think about? 0:04:31 - Soraya Ramos My own mindsets have. I've had to go through my own and I'm still going through those shifts now and like really believing in those. I will say some of those mindset shifts that have inspired me in the last few years have come from the work at the National Equity Project around liberatory design, and I think they were able to provide a language to what I already felt to be true and some of those mindsets it's all about. I think the arc of it all is that it's human centered, that we're centering anything, any experience the design of a summer school program, the design of an assessment system on the state level or even a local level is that we're really truly centering humans and putting them at the center. So I would say one of the things that the Libertarian Design Framework says is one of the mindsets is building relational trust is how do we invest in relationships with intention and especially across difference, and we have to honor people's stories and practice empathetic listening. So if I'm going into your home, into your community, what is my role is to to be there as humble as I can, to listen to your expertise, because that is your lived experience. So I think that that's a really powerful piece that I always try to hold is that we're not the I am not the knowledge holder. I am here to listen and I am in your home, your home, and that is in my culture. There's something really important about I respect where, when I'm, when I'm here and you're in your space. So that's one build a relational trust. I think a second one for me is practicing self-awareness, is understanding like what mirror is in front of me, who am I and how do these experiences that I grew up with influence the way I see things, the way I'm understanding an issue, and our perspectives impact our practice. So I think that practice of awareness is constant and so necessary for me, because sometimes I feel like, oh, i'm'm the hero in this story and I'm gonna, and I'm gonna save, and I'm gonna save these kids, or like when I was, you know, entering teaching um, but it wasn't. It wasn't that no one needs saving um. So self-practicing self-awareness. And then I would say I have a lot that I could share, but I'm going to keep it short. But the one I really feel like that I haven't mentioned is embracing complexity, that the equity challenges are really complex and they're messy and they stay open for possibility. And one thing that I have the cards in front me and one thing that it says here in the card is that powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it, and so I think that's where sometimes we put pressure on our leaders to have the answer, that one right way. We actually respect people who speak with a lot of confidence in that one solution when it's actually a lot more complex. And how do we do this together to figure it out with the humans that we're trying to serve at the center? So those are, I think, some of the top, but I could keep going, but I'll stop there. So I would say building relational trust, practicing self-awareness and embracing complexity. 0:08:07 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, all of those are so good. And also just tying it to that liberatory design piece, I think is really important and food for thought for folks who are listening now and are like, oh, I haven't heard of that or I want to dig deeper into that. Like there's richness there to dig into. And I love the idea of the last piece really reminds me of both the complexity piece around, like adaptive leadership and recognizing that it is really messy, and also I think you're speaking to the like a shared leadership element as well of right like the leaders are not necessarily the people who have admin titles right, they're the people in the community and the students, right, and the people at the center who who, as you said, have a lived experience and are really informing the change. And to uh, think through how to navigate so many voices when we're talking about all the students and all the families is messy but so worth it, and so I appreciate that framing and that grounding in those, in those three specifically. 0:09:03 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, thank you, thanks for summarizing that in in such a in those three specifically. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for summarizing that in such a nice way. 0:09:09 - Lindsay Lyons I just love connecting it to like. Sometimes I'll use these like leadership reasons. My background is in leadership education and so I think through like things I've said in the podcast before. 0:09:17 - Soraya Ramos I'm like, right, here's the through line, right it's true, there's like these mindsets yeah, it could keep going on, because I'm also a leadership nerd and I'm like learning all these things. And how do we create a culture? Right, how does our leadership impact the culture that we're trying to build here? And I think these elements, these mindset shifts, have to be in there. Um, because we have to live it so that it can. It's almost contagious, it's part of the space that you come into. Yeah. 0:09:45 - Lindsay Lyons I like the idea of contagious. That's good, that's really good. So I guess, thinking about that right, like what does that maybe look like? Feel like what's you know the actions that we, we take to kind of cultivate that and and and live that out and make that contagious and I mean I think about the work that you've done with equitable assessment and like systems of assessment, I mean that's, that's really big work. So thinking about maybe a leader or a community who is like oh, this is such a cool idea and it feels big, it feels messy, it feels like like how, how, really, how do I get started and what does that potentially look like? Could you describe for us a little bit about those like brave actions required to get there? 0:10:29 - Soraya Ramos That's a really good question and I think that it's. I'm always in pursuit of figuring that out. This is a tangent which we can include or not in the podcast. But recently I started working the second, the second job with my mom and it's called. It's a delivery service and we're shoppers at a store and we're shoppers at the same store every single time. And so I started doing it as like a side gig on the weekends and just trying it out with my mom. And what I realized is like every single time that I went into the store and you let me know if I could, if I could tell you, but it's one, it's one of my favorite. So I go in there and I'm like I know people have such a good experience at Target and it's like a very much like a good experience, and so, but going in there as a shopper, I noticed that there was a pattern. I'm like why are the workers so disgruntled and unhappy? Is it just that one location? Is it just that one person? That one day, and I started noticing a pattern in the ones in my area where it's like no, I think there's something going on in the culture of this company. What is going on that? Are we treating our, how are people being treated while they work here? And it's almost and again it was very contagious and like my experience as a consumer versus a like kind of a shopper right beside these employees was a lot different and not as joyful either. So I think that also communicates into schools. Right, like, culture is everywhere. When we go into a place of business, when we go into a place of education and I know that this is something that you know many educators in the field have already said like the first, the first signal of what a culture is at a school is when you step in the front door and you and you experience what it feels like to be in that space. It's, it's like an energy thing. I don't know much about energy, but I could feel it. And right, it's like um. When you, for example, and no one really greets you, um, or when they do, it's it's kind of like what do you need? Um versus good morning, how are you Welcome to our school? You know, here's our protocol, sign in. And it's a different um experience when you go into these spaces. So I would just say, like, what is the culture in this, in this space? And so I would say how do you make the? I think your question was how do we start? What are the brave actions that we need to make sure is we really need to be the, the creators of that, of creators of that energy, right, like, if a school is off that morning, like how can I go in there and try to? I'm not gonna change it, but I can say just remind them like hey, I'm new to this space, what do you wanna show for your school and your community? But one of the things that the brave actions that needs to happen is the way that I work with other people, whether it's building an assessment system at a state level or building an assessment task with a teacher is what kind of, what kind of relationship are we building around my responsibilities, your like and our accountability to each other? I think the reciprocity is a word that I've used a lot in the work I've done with in the past few years is it's not transactional but it's reciprocal. Is, you know, if we do these for these things for each other, without keeping tab on what it is right, like tip for tat? And so one of the brave actions is really holding that reciprocity part. The other part is recognizing oppression, like always being aware that power can always come in, and being able to like balance that out and calling it out. I think there's something really important about calling it out. If we're gonna partner with each other, let's talk about what the power dynamic is or isn't. So I would say that's super brave action to mention it, because it's an uncomfortable and fearful conversation, especially if you're working with teachers all the way up to superintendents or state commissioners. So that's the brave action. So I'm thinking about another one. I think one is knowing the culture and like reading that Working from a place of reciprocity the one that's really challenging and it goes against maybe the way that our country works is and our system works is we need to come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. I think when we're trying to build systems or create solutions for education, we think that there aren't enough, like we're actually in some way conditioned or convinced in some ways, like some of us may be able to note why, but that there's always enough resources. This is really hard for me to actually understand it right, because in my own life it's like well, I grew up with very scarce resources, financial resources. So I think like understanding, like there are resources out there. We may not have access to them right now, but we know that they're out there. That's the thing. They just may not be right in front of us, and so I think, knowing that no one's here to steal my job, we're not trying to do the work of another organization in competition with them. It's we're all playing in the same sandbox and in service of the same communities, people, learners, etc. So those are just a few that come to mind, and I'm sure there's more profound other actions, but those are actually super hard. It's like the power, the power piece. How do I work with others in ways that are loving and actually honest and authentic, without my secret agenda, and while also knowing that, like, the resources are real, there's some. There's a perceived notion that there's scarcity out there, but there really is an abundance, and maybe the abundance comes from a different type of resource, not not the financial one. Maybe it, the abundance, is the community that we work in and that's our superpower. So that is where I'll leave it, cause I think that was a lot, but and I'm sure I'm sorry that it's a little bit scattered, but it was my best attempt to try to put them into words- it was perfect. 0:17:02 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this, and I think I mean even just the abundance versus scarcity. I love what you said at the very end of you know, maybe the resource is just something that's not financial Absolutely. Source is just something that's not financial Absolutely. I mean we even from. So the last few years I taught, I worked at a school with 100% students who were learning English at the high school level, and so a lot of times in like multilingual learner education spaces, people like, oh, you know that the scarcity mindset of we need to build English language proficiencies right, and it's like, look at the abundance of linguistic knowledge and proficiency in other languages. I mean some of these kids are trilingual. Like what on earth? This is nuts. Like that is incredible. And we just don't think of the abundance frame, we think only in scarcity. And so I love that you mentioned like it can be financial but it can be otherwise, that we think about these things and what a huge mindset shift to be able to to get to that side of abundance. 0:18:03 - Soraya Ramos And I love that example that you're mentioning, because that's where we miss it. We're conditioned to believe that these other metrics are actually more important than the richness in the culture, in the, in the multilingualness, in like the community, that that they come from, their worlds or realities is. It's like that's where that, that there's richness, there, that we I think the last part I'll say is like I don't know where this fits in the questions you asked me, but there's a, an element of critical consciousness that it's like almost seeing behind the like someone's pulling the curtain, that like these assessments are important but I could see through them that they are problematic, that they can cause harm, that they're imperfect, that they're a measure, but not the measure of our kids and our and our young people. So I think that's where I'm, my role is like how do we get people to see, recognize oppression? Right, but like within? That is like how does this assessment work within that Like it's not the ultimate truth? And, like you said, let's not ignore these beautiful like humans that we get to work with every day, and then their multilingualness and get them to shine. 0:19:15 - Lindsay Lyons I just want to double down on that phrase. Like a measure, not the measure, right, yes, and not the ultimate truth. Yeah, we put so much stock into things that we can measure and put numbers or letters on and it's like no, I'm a human child, like this is a person, totally yes, I mean, I'm curious, you've done such powerful work with so many communities. I'm wondering if there's maybe a success story or kind of quote unquote case study that we can use to just illuminate the possible, like what are the great things happening out there and what can we celebrate? 0:19:50 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate that question and it's the success stories. I feel like you don't see it in the moment. I feel like when you work in schools or in education, sometimes it takes years for you to see your impact as a teacher, for example, and then the kids come back, you know, and they let you know like this is the impact you had, or it could take more than five, ten years to see it. But I think in in I've been really fortunate to have this position as like third party kind of uh roles in my in education now. Uh, where I get to support school districts and I have this different viewpoint, a lay of the land where I can, I can kind of see who the players are and what the strategy is and the vision and et cetera. One of the things that I have not done this alone and I think I've been put into really wonderful teams where I've been able to co-construct these different ways of how to assess kids, how to think about assessment in a more human centered way. Um, you might have I believe that some of the previous speakers on this podcast um Ms Rita Harvey and Charlie Brown, they were. They're some of my uh, they're. We started our journey together as assessment design partners. Uh, in new England, and we had, I believe, a lot of really wonderful case studies that we got to see from the teacher level. So we got to travel to different districts across New England and design assessments, performance assessments, with teachers at an individual school, while also working with their superintendents to build a arc of learning around their pd. So that year, for example, what I I think this is um, we're getting to that that success story is what makes it successful is that you had buy-in from the, from the, from the teacher role all the way up to a superintendent role, and the board as well is how do we get everyone on board about around this one thing and that one thing for one district in particular was how do we get everyone on board around performance assessments? And so year one was what is performance assessments? What are we doing? Why don't we bring in students that have worked with our coaches hence me and my other colleagues to come in and share their experiences with a standardized test versus a performance assessment? And so they got. We have this all happened in one particular district in Attleboro Public Schools, and so that was one of the things is we have support from all folks we get to coach in individual schools and they all have design teams. So the admin at the school had already pre-selected some people that they felt were going to be champions of this work. So that was a huge element, while at the same time, we are facilitating meetings with a consortium of superintendents who are all trying to work towards the same goal, which is how do we build an alternative assessment system that we can apply for a waiver for in the state of Massachusetts? So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. We have assistant superintendents supporting us with designing an arc of learning for all teachers in the district around performance assessments year one, and we also have board meetings where that could be like our performance assessment per se, where teachers and students can come in and demonstrate their work. So I would just say like those are some of the levers that this district was able to pull and were super successful because after year two, performance assessments didn't go away. Performance assessments, we went deeper. We said rubrics 101. So part of a performance assessment is a rubric right, like how do we know that you've met? How do you know that you've met the target? So rubrics was like. We noticed that there was. Maybe we needed more literacy around that. How do we build everyone's capacity? So, yeah, every year the learning arc. So everyone was doing the same thing. During those teacher learning days we had multiple opportunities for them to come and present to the consortium and to their boards. So I would just say like those are some of like a really effective leadership moves and decisions that were created in this particular district in Attleboro that we were really proud of. They were so committed and people were not confused around initiatives. It felt like they all knew what we were doing and we were able to reach all teachers within three years around performance assessment. Unfortunately, things were paused because of the pandemic, but the fact that we have such good momentum and people were just like champions and it was like this groundswell of support I remember that's a word that Charlie would mention a lot. We need to get the groundswell of support and I think that was a really powerful thing, instead of it coming down as a requirement. 0:25:01 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, another kind of tied to that shared leadership piece. Right, it doesn't come from the top, it has to be that ground salt. That's so good. There is so much here that I appreciate you have just kind of laid out. I'm thinking of a leader listening who's like how long does it take and what happens each year? You've just laid out what is possible and I just really appreciate that clarity for someone who's kind of new to it. I also want to speak to if someone's unfamiliar with that consortium in Massachusetts, like New York has one as well. But just the idea of schools coming together to say like we can do better than standardized assessment, is this really great way to not do it alone? And so I'm wondering if there is. I don't know if this is speaking to the next question I was going to ask or not, but just thinking about the challenges of the work Sometimes I wonder if it's like oh, we're on our own and kind of this island of we think it would be a great idea to do this, but we don't have a consortium to tap into or something like that. Is there any kind of school model that you've worked with there where it's like they're not part of a larger organization, but they're just choosing to do it because they know it's what's fast and they're going to move forward. 0:26:07 - Soraya Ramos Absolutely. I think there's folks that are connected to a wider net and others are doing it within their own district. I think that it's really helpful when you are part of a group, a consortium, or whether it's a learning group or anything else. I know that there's some here in California as well, where you just get to learn around practice with each other. It's like what are you all doing? Oh, this is how we're choosing to implement graduate profiles right now is a really is a really big thing, and it actually is very trendy to have a graduate profile, or you know these learner outcomes of what we want kids to learn and competencies we want them to have by the time they graduate. But how do you know? And how do you know that? How do if you're doing it right, right, like? A lot of people are like, okay, great, we have really cool posters, now what? So that's where people turn to these communities, where they're like this is how we're learning how to bring this poster to life and it's super beneficial. I'm part of this. I'm really glad that I'm part of this group called Scaling Student Success, and then we get to learn from each other around best practices of how to bring graduate profiles to life and everyone's at a different stage, so there's different groupings of districts. So it is a really cool opt-in opportunity that I've seen on the West Coast. But what about folks that aren't connected outside right Like? We know that this is best practice period and I think that's why they bring some of these districts, bring in third party technical providers, and that's where people like myself come in third party technical providers and that's where people like myself come in and envision learning partners who we may not be creating the space for everyone to come in as a consortium or a learning space, but we are the communicators of oh, you have also shortages with subs. This is actually a trend that's happening across the country and people are actually some of the people are actually very surprised when we tell them that they're like really, I thought we were the only district, oh no, I'm like this is going on across the country. Um, you are not the only one. And how do we get creative so um around like pds, right, if you can't have everyone out on the same time? Like, how do we, how do we create this more flexible uh plan? So I don't know if I kind of lost track of your question, lindsay, but that was perfect. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons I guess are there any other like either challenges that folks have faced and you wanted to talk through, or is there just anything else that you wanted to share before we move to wrap up? 0:28:42 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, okay, so I don't. I'm like I was like thinking, I'm like how honest can I be? And and I think I've realized how naive I've been in most of my career as an, as an educator, and in the best way, like my, my naivete is more of like I don't think people would be capable of doing this or, you know, like we're all in it for the kids and and and it's a very naive way of thinking and and um, one of the things that I realized at a different level of is through, uh, bowman and deal, the, these folks have these, these four frameworks of what it means to be a leader, and one of the frameworks that they say that leaders have to learn how to navigate is the political, is the, and that's like they call it, the jungle, where it's like people have different agendas and people have different ideas of what they want from a project or from a collaboration or whatever it is. And I think that for me has been this language, this world, where I have to think about understanding humans in a different way that the political realm introduces a not so flattering side of of humans and our motivations and and our behaviors, and also attached to people's wellness, right, like if, like they are reflections of who they are internally is kind of what they project at work. So one of the things for me is like how do I read situations, what is being said that isn't being said out loud, and how do I move accordingly? Because sometimes being honest is not the way for me Speaking. Sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, especially when you have power involved. And so that, for me, is something I'm still learning is how do we navigate the political realm and understand humans and not letting it get too personal, like taking it personally is understanding, like what people are and aren't capable of, and knowing who to trust. I think that for me right now is how do I learn to build trust and who to trust in, especially when we're doing this kind of work in education? 0:30:55 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's such an important challenge to name because I think a lot of folks I've certainly been there felt that and I love that you trace the arc of similarly me but going and being like everyone's awesome and for the right reasons. And there is no political agenda, there is, and so I think it reminds me of Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky talk about in their adaptive leadership. Stuff is like naming the stuff, like having an activity as a leader where you kind of sit in the meeting and like, okay, observe what's not being said, like observe where the avoidance is happening, where a joke's being made to deflect, like that kind of thing, Right. And and so it's like that's a cool tool for for folks listening to this episode, like just try it, like try that out and just kind of notice, or invite folks to notice like what is not being said, right, what is being avoided. And I think that's a nice opportunity to kind of, like you said, it might not be that in the moment we shout it out, but it's a nice like jot it on a post-it note, hand it in at the end of the meeting, right, We'll like we'll get there because we should, Absolutely, I agree, yeah, and so I think just to close this out, this is a wonderful conversation. I don't want it to end but I recognize everyone has things to do and I'm sure you have a busy schedule. So what is one thing as we kind of wrap up that listeners have been listening tons of ideas shared but they want to kind of take one next step as they end the episode, kind of going into their day or getting ready for next week or whatever that they can kind of world do. 0:32:33 - Soraya Ramos I want to live in, how do I want it to feel, how do I want it to sound for for myself, for kids, for young people, etc. And how can I be the creator of that? How can I contribute to a world like that? So I think that self-awareness piece goes back to that is, if I'm walking into this meeting, how do I want to walk in, what do I want to contribute in terms of my own energy, my motivations? How is this contributing to the world that I do or don't want? And I think being that is a start and something that can feel like it's a forced, but like how can I be that light, or how can I be that positivity or that understanding mind in the workplace where I don't have to get to the point where I'm disrespecting people and I'm still living by my values? So I think it really begins with the self and the world that you want. So then, how are you going to start being that in that next meeting, in that next, in whatever collaboration you're in? So it's really difficult because we have difficult days, but like, how do I, how do I still stay with, with dignity, right, like dignity and respect is for me really important. So knowing what people's values are and making sure that they're actually living aligned to those values, and catching yourself when you don't, because we're also imperfect, so the misalignment will happen. But just knowing that, like what am I contributing to this world and how can I, you know, be self aware. 0:34:09 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for multiple reasons. One just for the leader lens, but also, like this could be a guiding question for schools, like how do teachers engage with that question? How do students live out that question Right? Like how can we just be in community with one another in alignment with our responses to that question? So good. And so I think the final two questions I have for you one is super fun just could relate to education, but could totally not. So, whatever direction you want to take it, you mentioned, like we're all kind of learning. We're on a lifelong path of learning all the things about life. What is something that you have been learning about lately? 0:34:44 - Soraya Ramos Oh, have been learning about lately. Oh, I have not been learning any hobbies recently, but I think what I'm learning is just my role. As I get, as I'm getting older, my roles are changing in my life and who I take care of, and and and being a caretaker this past month. And for me it's just understanding that, like life will always be lifing, it's always going to be doing what it wants to do. But at the end of the day is, how am I centering myself to and my needs first, so that we're all, not we're all, so that I'm strong enough to care for others when I, when I can and I need to? So I think that's one thing that I'm really learning how to practice, whether it's an acupuncture appointment, whether it's that massage that I've been like thinking about months ago, a walk has been huge. I think learning how to slow down is the biggest lesson for me, because I used to be a runner and it felt like if I didn't do 10 miles, I didn't do anything like it, like it had to feel hard for it to feel like it mattered. And now I'm like a walk and being patient and being in silence, like that's actually hard for me too. So maybe those are some of the lessons that are coming Like. Life is always evolving, my role and my responsibilities are with that too, so how do I always remember myself though? And it could be, and a walk is enough, sufficiency, yeah. 0:36:14 - Lindsay Lyons Everything you said deeply resonates. Thank you for that, and I think, finally, folks are going to just want to get in touch with you or follow your work, so what's the best place to get in touch or see what you're doing? 0:36:25 - Soraya Ramos I am on LinkedIn, so that would be one way. I'm trying to be better at staying on it every single day, but that could be that is one way to reach me as well on LinkedIn, and I would say that's the best way. Like is more reliable way to reach me, so I'm happy to connect with anyone who's out there who'd like to just kind of be thought partners or like if folks are going through similar things that that I shared some of the things on this podcast. I would love to just even having like a mirror or a window into like what are? you experiencing OK, how did you resolve it? Or et cetera. So I would love to get in touch with folks if they're they're willing to. 0:37:02 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Sorry. I thank you so much. This was such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate your time thank you, lindsay. 0:37:08 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate you having us and me and my other colleagues that have also come up in the episode, but thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation. I really appreciate you absolutely.
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9/23/2024 182. Let Go of Fear: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education with Dr. Cheryl E. MatiasRead Now
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This transformative episode is with Dr. Cheryl E. Matias, a passionate professor, motherscholar, race consultant, and academic coach. In this interview, she emphasizes the importance of overcoming fear and shifting mindsets to truly address white supremacy in educational practices.
Dr. Matias advocates for educators to engage deeply with systemic issues beyond superficial checklists, integrating their professional efforts with personal life, and ensuring open, humane discussions about racial issues. A committed educator, activist, and researcher, Dr. Matias is deeply motivated by both her passion for racial justice and, more significantly, being a motherscholar of three and giving her own children the education they deserve. The Big Dream Dr. Cheryl Matias's big dream for education is to let go of our fears—fearing what we do not know, fearing conversations, and fearing being labeled. In letting go of these things that hold us back, Dr. Matias envisions an educational system where we’re no longer guided by fear. Instead, we can reclaim education by fostering courageous conversations that challenge white supremacy and cultivate a deeper understanding of racial justice. Mindset Shifts Required In Dr. Matias’ view, changing our mindsets is the key way to overcome fears. To move beyond our fears, it’s important to shift the mindset and rethink how we talk about race in the education system by addressing embedded white supremacy. As part of this mindset shift, Dr. Matias calls for a move away from viewing racism as merely intentional malicious acts and discourse to recognizing the "unintended consequences" and the collective force of white supremacy in our education system and society. Action Steps Step 1: Stop relying on checklists and thinking there is one right path to “getting it.” Instead, it's important to rely on educating yourself by diving deeper into the issue at hand. If you haven’t studied whiteness or the emotionalities of whiteness in education, that’s a place for educators to start. Educate yourself—don’t just wait to check the boxes someone else offers you. Step 2: Advocate for scholarly experts to come into the schools and share their research. It’s important to be judicious about who you bring in, as there are many experts doing diversity work now. Dr. Matias advises advocating for those who have some practical in-school experience so they know the dynamics and wrestle of ideological liberation, but working within the constraints of school mandates. Step 3: Teach others what you’ve learned. If educators truly believe education is transformational, then we should be ready to teach the most racist of all students. That means beginning the conversation in your own home and having those hard conversations, with boundaries and humanizing it—if you’re not ready to do that, you’re not ready to teach others. Challenges? One of the main challenges in this work is the fact that there isn’t a checklist on how to approach these things. There’s no set path with your students, your partner, your family—you have to have trust and boundaries, learning healthy communication practices. There’s an emotional journey here, and we all have some barriers, fears, and discomfort associated with addressing racial issues. Dr. Matias encourages us to stop looking for a utopia that does not exist but embrace the full range of human emotions that will come up in doing this work. One Step to Get Started To jumpstart your journey in racial justice advocacy, Dr. Matias recommends a simple yet powerful action: Read a book! If you need a place to start, she suggests her own book, Feeling White, to understand how racialized emotions impact racial justice work. And don’t do it on your own—engage in communal learning by reading together with a colleague or friend, fostering deeper conversations and shared growth. Stay Connected You can stay connected with Dr. Matias on her website, on Facebook, or by email To help you implement today’s takeaways, Dr. Matias shared her video presentation on critical whiteness studies with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 182 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Cheryl E Matias, how are you? Welcome to the podcast. 0:00:08 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. I hope you're doing well as well. 0:00:13 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, thank you. I am so thrilled to talk to you today. There is just so much of your work that is brilliant and amazing and listeners, if you don't know it, go get it immediately. 0:00:22 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias But you're going to learn today. 0:00:24 - Lindsay Lyons I'm going to learn today. Thank you for being with us. I think the first question is really you know what is important for folks to know about you, or just to keep in mind in general as we have this conversation today. 0:00:35 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, thanks, you know what. It's funny. I was kind of confused about the question at the beginning. But you know, I think people know me as a racial justice scholar doing work as a professor in education. But I think people forget some of the important things that I was a classroom teacher both in LA Unified in South Central Los Angeles and in the New York Department of Education in Bed-Stuy, brooklyn. So I've taught in both of the biggest counties or the biggest school districts in the nation. That's important. But I think the more important thing about me is people ask like, why would you do this? Of course I'm passionate. I grew up in LA and I, you know, I was a teacher and I saw so many black and brown students not giving their props. And so I, you know, I think the biggest thing that motivates me is I'm a mother scholar of three. I have twins who are now going into their senior year in high school and I have a little one I call my post-tenure baby. So as much as I am so committed as an activist, as an educator, as a researcher, my deepest motivations have always been to give my own children the education they so deserve. 0:01:47 - Lindsay Lyons That is such a beautiful grounding for our conversation and just for our work in the space. I think it's so deeply personal and I thank you for sharing that with folks. I'm curious to know what the kind of big dream you alluded to it, but what kind of the big dream for the grand scheme of education is. I always love grounding this in Dr Bettina Love's work how she discusses freedom. Dreaming, I think, is really inspiring and also grounds us in that justice work right Dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So what is that big dream that you hold for the field? 0:02:22 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Thank you for asking. First, I'm very pleased to hear that you're grounding the work and how Bettina frames everything. I think she is such an inspiration in how we conceptualize the work and I like to even draw further from her with her ideas of like Black joy and Black love. So I think one of the biggest dreams I have for education is to reclaim that by particularly letting go of fear Fearing that which we do not know, fearing conversations, fearing being labeled something fearing. We need to let go of fear because fear shouldn't be deciding the type of avenues that we have in our lives personally, nor should it be what we are guiding our decision-making and policies for education. 0:03:16 - Lindsay Lyons That is so good. I, literally an hour ago, I was just with facilitators who are talking about, we're talking about and planning events for thinking about history, education, and one of the values that we landed on was courage, and we need to have courage to do this well and just to be human beings in community with one another, and so I love this idea of letting go of fear. So many times I think there are things that come out of that fear that are so disruptive and we don't identify fear as the root. So I really appreciate you naming this, thank you. I think a lot of this work around racial justice is really sometimes the biggest shift for me has been a shift in mindset that gets me to the point of like, okay, now I see things differently, this is a new lens, this is a whatever. I'm just in a different headspace and now I can proceed. I can like be better in this space, I can be a better community member, I can be a more courageous. You know that it just comes easier when we have that like mindset shift, and I'm curious if you know of folks who a mindset shift, where you've seen folks really kind of move forward with more thoughtfulness, purpose, whatever it is after having made it, if that question makes sense. 0:04:32 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Yeah, it does. I mean, I think that's the most important aspect moving beyond fear right Is changing your mind shift. Let's take, for example, something that you're fearful in personal life. For me, at one point I was super afraid of dogs and I couldn't be around them. But I had to shift my mind, my mind frame, and say and put myself amidst dogs my sister's dogs, actually dogs got a whole weekend before my kids and just really said no, I am going, I'm not afraid, I am going to enjoy this, I'm going to embrace this as a part of my journey of becoming a better person. In the same vein, we really need to think about mind shifts as a way of rethinking how we think about race. Now, we know we all grew up whether you're a person of color, whether you're white, we all grew up with the same Kumbaya story of Dr Martin Luther King, that we all bleed the same blood. It doesn't matter about race. And then you know, post Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor, of course the world saw what they like to coin a global racial awakening, right. But you know, the truth is we're not post-racial, we're not seeing race. We need to rethink how we see race and racism Because if we really think about it. Racism is not the problem in education. Racial bias is not the problem tripped out. What the biggest problem is is how white supremacy gets instituted in the fabric and the everyday of our practices, and it does so by the ideologies of whiteness. We need to tackle the actual disease and not the symptom, and that's what I've always said. In patriarchy, right, we talk. It's absolutely important that we understand how glass ceilings, rape culture and sexism impact women In this. At the same token, we also need to understand how male privilege, toxic masculinity and all of that, you know, impacts how women are, how women engage and navigate this society. So, in the same vein, we need to also think about how white supremacy held up by individual acts of whiteness, your ideas of whiteness, emotions even of whiteness, which I've written extensively about. We need to understand how those individual acts become a collective force to uphold white supremacist ideology. And so I think that shift needs to happen and we need to move away from American history X, you know, and Edward Norton's great display of a neo-Nazi. We need to shift what we understand about being culpable of racist acts and racist discourse and racist behavior. It's not a person who's obviously always trying to be malicious, but it could be. These quote-unquote unintended consequences right. So remove intention and let's move ourselves through our fear and start to understand a new way of understanding race, white supremacy and whiteness in society. 0:07:49 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, that's just so well said, thank you. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciated how, in the introduction to the other elephant in the classroom, you and Paul Gorski talk about how it's both the systemic structure pieces and the individual acts, right, and that sometimes talking about the structural pieces removes the individual like. That was just a really big moment for me to be like right, that's exactly what is happening in discourse now, particularly amongst white liberals, right, and that idea of white liberalism coming into discourse. And so I just am so amazed by all of your work and I think it is truly helpful for the mindset shifts just in the way that you talk and write about it. 0:08:34 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias So thank you for that grounding, really thankful that you pointed that out, because that's what we're seeing a lot, and I remember writing that because I am so thankful that there's more people interested in racial justice. Whether you are a black indigenous person of color or white racially identified, you know, the thing is we need to always keep in mind that when we talk about these larger isms, we still have to honor that we are still part and parcel of different systems and so you don't want the situation that Eduardo Bonilla Silva wrote, where it's like there's racism without racist. We have to be culpable of certain actions that we hold. So when we talk about larger system things and I know we've been pushing that with the critical race theory, to understand race in a larger systemic, and that's wonderful, I'm glad people are grasping but then they moved away from taking their own onus and agency like, well, I'm not, or they start to put these factions on white people themselves and I'm like, hey, hold up now. So in the same token, with any other ism for men, for heteroaggressivism, we need to still take onus of that privilege that might unintentionally harm others. So thank you for pointing that out, lindsay. 0:09:49 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely, and I think, for maybe a school leader who is listening to this conversation and thinking about their own thoughts, mindsets and those of their staff, I'm curious to know what your thoughts are in terms of the brave know the brave actions required, as folks are in these instructional spaces, in these school communities and responsible for both themselves and leading and working in community with you know staff. I don't know if you want to speak to either the teacher lens of that or the leader lens or both, but I'm curious to know what those actions look like as we engage in this meaningful work or labor for justice. 0:10:28 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Absolutely, and everyone plays a role, whether they're in the academia, you know, doing the scholarship and the research, whether they're the K-12 teachers on the ground doing, you know, working with our babes, or they're the, or they're administrators, you know, trying to, you know, balance this fine line of wanting to do justice work but still having to, you know, you know, cater to the needs of the district. So I think some of the greatest advice I would take is it's so important one to stop looking for checklists, because when we rely too, too surface-like, on checklists, then we think, oh, I got it, I'm done, you know. But I think the More important thing is we really need to investigate more deeply the real issue here. If we're talking about racism, that's one aspect, but I told you that that was the symptom of white supremacist thought. So if they have not studied whiteness or even the emotionalities of whiteness in education, they need to delve deeper, because once we have a thorough understanding of the problem can we engage in different types of policies, actions that will change and pedagogies that will really change the context. So stop relying on checklists, start relying on hey, we're educators, rely on educating yourself, you know. So that would be a number one action. Number two is advocate as you're starting to read and learn yourself as a student, because we're lifelong learners. We always say that, so believe in it. I think it's important that we think of, we advocate for these people who are doing the research to come into the schools, and we should be judicious, because I know there's a lot of people doing diversity work, but maybe, if we're talking about K-12 teachers or administrators, we might want to actually have people who've been in that role. You get wonderful scholars who do this work and their work is amazing. Don't get me wrong, I honor it. At the same time, if you want advocacy about getting some stuff done and getting some like you were saying, book clubs earlier, or getting scholars to come, you want to make sure that they too have been k-12 teachers or they too have been school principals, so they understand the dynamics and having to wrestle with the dynamics of ideological liberation to the, the constraining. I mean I taught during open court, you know. So you know having to balance that with school mandated stuff. So that's another thing. And I think the third thing that is so important so you did the individual, you did the advocacy for your community is, you know, to start teaching others. Right. We're great, we're educators. Guess what we truly believe? Education is transformational. Then we should be ready to teach the most racist of all students. And it starts at home. I always ask my students why is it that you don't talk about race and whiteness at the dinner table when Uncle Joe comes over? And I said if you can't have that conversation with Uncle Joe and make boundaries and still make it humanizing, then you're not ready to teach that to others. And so I think those three let me stop at that because if it gets overwhelming, because we have so much to do as teachers but I think those are three one, educate yourself. Two, it's a matter of advocating now for the knowledge that needs to be brought in. And three, doing what we do best teach others those are so good. 0:14:16 - Lindsay Lyons and I also love how you really brought it to the personal family dinner example, because I think sometimes we block off. This is my work at school and this is who I am at home, and this is about being a full human in all of the spaces and doing the work in all of the spaces. And I think it's very easy for white liberalism to like come to the table, come to the dinner table, right, and be be part of that there in that silence and avoidance. So I just appreciate that specificity because I think that probably hits home for a lot of folks. So thank you. 0:14:49 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Absolutely. I actually had a student once. Oh no, she was a professor and she wanted to learn. She had asked me to help her, coach her, in becoming a better professor on racial justice. But it turned out for the whole year she was doing a lot more work on cultivating a more humanizing relationship with her father and her family members in the Midwest. And I said that is the most important thing, because it's not about us versus them, because if you literally start to think like that, you're adopting ism, ism type of men, binary thinking, and that's what racism, that's what white supremacy, that's what heterosexism, that's what I know. Uh, all of that does it creates us in binaries. So it's about how you can continue to have humanizing relationships with people with boundaries and with love. So it's not a matter of shutting Uncle Joe's out, it's a matter of saying no. I hear you when I study this and I need you to honor my perspective in this. 0:15:53 - Lindsay Lyons And what a great space if there's already love present, right? As opposed to creating love from scratch in a brand new group of students every year, right? What a great place to practice that. 0:16:02 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Exactly exactly, and education goes not only to our K-12 students or our college students. You're an educator. You educate the people around you. Absolutely, I am imagining folks who are listening, might be thinking about. You know, oh, this moment that I tried this thing, or I, you know, I invited Uncle Joe in and it didn't go well. Or you know, whatever, what are the challenges that you see come up for folks. And then how do like in any relationship with K-12 students? No checklist, right? You don't have a checklist to deal with your spouse or partner. You don't have a checklist to deal with your parents. You don't have a checklist to deal with your cousins, your aunties and uncles, and so you have to trust on human behavior and boundaries and healthy communicate. That's it right. So you can expect and I always tell this, I do this, but you'd like a little pedagogical tool on K-12 teachers or school leaders who want to do this exercise. I would say okay, and I tell them to write it out because I don't want them taking a picture after I write it on the board. I say okay, tell me why you don't talk to Uncle Joe at the dinner table about race. Tell me why and have him list all the reasons. They'll tell you everything like oh, he's going to say that was yesteryear. He'll get angry. He'll start screaming at me. Everything. He'll dismiss everything I said. He'll make me start crying, he'll make me, you know. Just write it all down. And I think it's really important to say okay, now when I'm learning anew and I'm discomforted and I feel fearful and I feel I'm being attacked or whatever, say, don't act like Uncle Joe and just know that those are the actual emotional mechanisms and hence why I study white emotionalities in my book, feeling White. But these are the actual things and emotional journey you will go through and it's not to say it's bad. You know people always think they just want sunshine and rainbows and unicorns, but you know, part of human life is feeling the yin and the yang of it all. So when you actually stick at the table and you, you may not come out perfect on the first time, but it's a matter like. Any parent would know this, any teacher would know this, any person who has always been a good friend, daughter, spouse. It's about the longevity. You know. It's about the ride, not the end goal. And so at this point, as you engage in this type of work, stop looking for utopia that does not exist. In fact, critical race theory. I know I'm going to bust your bubble. Derrick Bell straight up said there's gonna be a permanence of racism. It will mutate in the most awfully grotesque way, right, but it's an amazing awfully and grow like how did it turn to that now? But, um, at the same time, it's about the longevity. It's about how we continue to fight as humanity, how we continue to advocate for a more humane society, because that's what this is. It's not partisan politics, it is literally a human rights issue. So when we engage in these conversations, be ready to feel the full range of human emotions and how beautiful welcome that. Embrace it and say, yeah, this still makes me passionate that I get really anxious or mad and then pull yourself back and say, but I'm not giving up. 0:19:35 - Lindsay Lyons That's so beautiful and I I think about the folks who are even working with you know, like preschoolers my kid is two and a half at this moment but, like you know, thinking about how we nurture emotions and allow kids. You know, I've heard many people say at all age levels oh, kids aren't ready for this conversation. Okay, kids are ready for the conversation. Number one I think we could agree. And then two, like the nurturing of being able to have conversations and feel emotions can be normalized at any age and that's so much of just our daily work as humans and as educators that I love that you brought it there, because I think that's part of it. Right, we need to be emotionally healthy people and like that is a like building that will constantly happen in conjunction with our anti-racist advocacy and humanity and all the things. Is that? Am I on the point there? 0:20:29 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Yes, absolutely. People think this is about hatred and cancellation. It's not. No, don't get it twisted. We started most racial justice. People have done this because they wanted a greater understanding of love. And those of you that are really interested in doing like critical race parenting, which is another work that I do I actually published a popular press. Anyone can act to say it, um, but it's called um and you can google my name, cheryl matias, and mommy is being brown bad and it's on my own children and, um, it's an article that you can download and just kind of understand how to you do these conversations with children, because by 18 months they've already internalized dominant messages about race, gender. I mean, I have boy, girl, twins and at 18 months everyone gave me pink and blue and I would put the sippy cups on the table and my son would take the blue and give the pink one to his sister and vice versa. So if we're acting as if, oh, our kids are too young to study race, they already know, just like we have to talk about sex drugs to our kids. What messages do you want your child to have about a certain topic? So talk to them about race. 0:21:48 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you. I think there's kind of a lifelong work to this, to all of this right. This is lifelong, as you said, and so I'm curious to know what's a good, like momentum builder, what's a good one next step that someone could take if they're listening to this on the drive into work, for example, and they're about to start the school day, or they're listening to it on the way home and about to like go be with family, like what's that one first step that you would encourage someone to do to kind of keep it going or kind of jumpstart some action? 0:22:21 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Well, you know what? Read a book. Read a book, right, we're a bunch of nerds. So how about that? How about you read a book with someone? Pick up, pick up my book feeling white. How's that? You know, if you want to understand how racialized emotions really impact, how we do racial justice work, because you're feeling so anxious, let's find out where that comes from, feeling white. If you want to know how whiteness impacts people of color in the education, from k all the way to 20 to college, you know, like, like, oh, I'm a good person. You can pick up my book Surviving Beckys and that's just all stories. There's no citations on that book and there's even discussion questions. You've got all genres, from horror, sci-fi it's all just stories. And then you can see the messages behind each story. It's all just stories, and then you can see the messages behind each story. So pick up a book. Come on, guys, we're educators. Start there and don't do this journey on your own. Say you know what cousin, you know what? Uncle Joe, you know what? Maybe a former student who has become your mentor? 0:23:28 - Lindsay Lyons Let's read this together. That is a great call to action. Yes, let's do this together. I love it, and so I will link to. For anyone listening, driving, doing dishes, whatever, I will link to those books in the blog post, so no need to pause what you're doing and write them down. I'll link them. As a close, I think I love that we've been talking about lifelong learning, and so I'm curious. This question is purely for fun. It can relate to what we talked about or something different. What is something that you personally have been learning about lately? 0:23:57 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, gosh One. I think I constantly learn. Those of you that don't know me I'm a salsa and bachata dancer. I am constantly learning. I have been to Cuba, puerto Rico, I've been to the Dominican Republic to perfect my bachata, my moves, my salsa. That's one thing I'm always perfecting too. On being a mother, for goodness sakes, I think I got it down and then I'm like my kids just school me and call me sus, you know. So you know, no cap right. So I'm literally trying all the time to be a better mother, because, as the work that I've done mother, scholar work, to be a better mother it makes you a better scholar, and make a scholar makes you a better mother. So that's another aspect I'm always trying to learn. And the third is I'm actually coming back to my faith, which I've had, I think, a lot of justice workers. We pushed away from our faith, thinking, oh, it's too rigid. But if we push away from our faith, we're never in the spaces to make change. We're never in the spaces to make change. And so I'm just learning how to come back into my faith, be a service to God and, you know, just not make it seem like those people who are these type of Catholic Christians or whatever the case may be. They're the enemy, but showing them nope. You know what Jesus was, the first social justice worker. So I think it's a lifelong learning. I can list thousands. And does it make me overwhelmed and anxious at times? Absolutely. But I'm going to do an epistemological shift that I just told you, a mindset reframe. How exciting that I don't know it all and I'm still ready to learn. 0:25:56 - Lindsay Lyons That is so good. Okay, we're gonna quote that. That's great. That is so good. I think people are gonna want to grab your book, get in touch with you, follow you wherever you exist, in the online spaces or in-person spaces. Where should folks connect with you, if that's okay? 0:26:12 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias I do have a website at CherylMatiascom, but I don't check that email as much. I'm sorry, guys, it's just too much, it's too many hats. But you can always connect with me on Facebook. I have a professional Facebook. I know people try to connect with me on Insta, but that's personal family, so don't take it personally. But Facebook I'm old, I'll do Facebook. You can Google me and I'm at the University of San Diego now. I'm no longer at University of Colorado, no longer at University of Kentucky for those 15 years, but I'm back home in California University of San Diego. But I'm back home in California University of San Diego. You can email me anytime and I definitely appreciate the calls. I think I just met with someone who read my book just about a couple months ago and we just, you know, sat and drank tea and talk shop for a little bit, you know. So I really appreciate the feedback. I even had someone who reached out from South Africa saying it feels like, after reading Feeling White, I had coffee with you, like you're my girlfriend and I'm like, well, I am now. So I think it's important, just like, google me, email me at my university, email at San Diego and follow me on Facebook. Amazing, dr Martinez. Thank you so, so much for being on Facebook Amazing, Dr Martinez. 0:27:31 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast today. I appreciate your time. 0:27:35 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me here and hopefully it reaches the ears that needs to be heard or be encouraged or supported.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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